Christmas Every Day

Pope Saint Pius V

Throughout the almost two millennia of papal history, 80 pontiffs have been regarded as saints. Some were venerated for their piety or godliness, some for their martyrdom. In the case of Pius V (1502-1572), born Antonio Ghislieri in northern Italy, one can attribute his canonization to his firmness of purpose in defending Roman Catholicism against Protestantism and Islam.

Ghisleri joined the Order of Preachers in his teens and went on to acquire a reputation as a theologian and reformer. He rose high in the ranks of the Inquisition. In his role as Dominican prior and then bishop he acted harshly against those he deemed to be corrupt clergy, cracking down on nepotism, absenteeism, theological novelty and moral laxity. During his six years as pope he took actions that would have long-lasting consequences.

The Council of Trent had mandated changes to the Mass which Pius was anxious to enforce. In 1570 he ordered a standardized version of the liturgy which came to be known as the Tridentine Mass that would endure for almost 400 years until the Vatican II Council of the 1960s. Politically, he was active in opposing the French government’s attempts to compromise with native Protestants — the Massacre of St Bartholomew which occurred shortly after his death would have been applauded by Pius V. He was instrumental in organizing and funding the Holy League to oppose Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean and the naval victory at Lepanto owed much to his impetus in uniting Catholic Europe. He was less successful — in fact, he was downright disastrous — in his policies against Protestant England. His support for the Rebellion of the Earls and his bull “Regans in Excelsis” which excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I hardened the heart of the English government against Catholics.

1667

John Milton sells Paradise Lost

John Milton (1608-74) was one of the greatest of English poets and controversialists, writing at a time of social upheaval and Civil War. Born into a prosperous family of the middle-class, Milton had an excellent education, both at Cambridge, through his voluminous readings, and in his European travels. His poetic career began early and while still at university he was writing works that have endured, such as “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and his epitaph for Shakespeare.

In the late 1630s England was drifting toward civil war, a country divided by religious differences and quarrels over the powers of monarchy and parliament. Milton found himself on the side of Puritanism and political liberty. He attacked the role of bishops in the Church of England, advocated divorce and wrote a classic defence of free speech in his 1644 tract Areopagitica. After the triumph of parliamentary armies and the execution of King Charles I, Milton wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, defending popular power and regicide. The Puritan government made him “Secretary for Foreign Tongues”, responsible for disseminating propaganda favourable to the new regime. He kept up his radical political tracts even after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 which brought him briefly to jail for having been such a firm supporter of the English republic.

By 1658 Milton was going blind but this did not step him from composing poetry, which he would dictate to a scribe (as depicted above by Eugene Delacroix). In his blindness Milton’s greatest work was the epic Paradise Lost, a description of the rebellion of Lucifer and the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. In over 10,000 lines of blank verse he fulfills the promise made in the opening lines: “Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,/With loss of Eden, till one greater Man/Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat. . .” It is a profound meditation on the allure of evil (many critics have said that the real hero of the poem is Lucifer), the dilemma of free will and the grace of God. In 1667 Milton sold the poem to a publisher for £5 with a further £5 to be paid if the print runs sold out.

1610

Death of a Jesuit conspirator

During the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I, the open practice of Catholic worship was forbidden but its adherents were not seriously troubled by the state. The queen professed a desire not to “open a window into men’s hearts”; outward obedience to the Protestant settlement would keep Catholic families safe from persecution. This policy changed after 1569 when many Catholics were moved to rebellion, urged on by the papal decree “Regnans In Excelsis” and by Jesuit theorists who argued that it was a godly deed to assassinate a heretic queen. A number of murder plots were hatched by English Catholics who hoped that by killing Elizabeth a Catholic monarch could ascend the throne.

The chief theologian of assassination and rebellion in the English context was the Jesuit Robert Persons (1546-1610), an Oxford academic who fled England and joined the Society of Jesus. In 1580 he accompanied the soon-to-be-martyred Jesuit Edmund Campion in a secret mission to his home country. When Campion was arrested Persons slipped back to the Continent and spent the rest of his career trying to provoke and justify a Catholic invasion of England and Ireland. Among his more famous works were De persecutione Anglicana (1582), Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) and A Conference About the Next Succession (1594).

The efforts of Persons and Cardinal William Allen, the chief English Catholic in exile, were largely bent toward persuading King Philip II to launch the Spanish Armada against England in 1588. This invasion failed spectacularly and helped convince English Protestants that their Catholic countrymen were not to be trusted. Both Persons and Allen died in Rome without ever returning home.

1945

The execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Over the west door of Westminster Abbey is a series of ten sculptures: the Gallery of 20th Century Martyrs. They include  Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who gave his life to save a fellow prisoner in Auschwitz; Manche Masemola, a young South African girl murdered by her parents for converting to Christianity; Janani Luwum, the Ugandan Archbishop, assassinated on the orders of Idi Amin; Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, killed by the Bolsheviks; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Archbishop Oscar Romero; Esther John, a Pakistani nurse knifed to death for converting from Islam; Lucian Tapiedi, a New Guinea Anglican murdered by Japanese troops in World War II; and Wang Zhiming, a Chinese evangelist killed during the Cultural Revolution. In the middle of these statues stands one depicting Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a German Protestant clergyman and theologian. He studied in Berlin and New York, receiving two doctorates before his ordination in 1931. He was teaching systematic theology at the University of Berlin when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Bonhoeffer revealed himself as a bold opponent of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler. He attacked the Führer on the radio and helped to establish the Confessing Church, an underground movement to counteract the official Nazi-oriented Church. The Nazis arrested his colleague Martin Niemoller, persecuted the Confessing Church and banned Bonhoeffer from living in the capital. For a time, he pastored in German-speaking churches in London and then ran clandestine ministerial training efforts back in Germany. When the war broke out he was studying in New York City. Friends congratulated him on being in a safe haven but the author of The Cost of Discipleship thought differently, saying: “Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security.” He returned to his homeland where he continued to be harassed by the authorities.

Hitler’s control of the German military was not a complete one; pockets of opposition to him lingered among the army, particularly among Christian officers. One such circle arranged for him to join the Abwehr, the army intelligence branch. As an agent he carried out secret anti-Nazi activities, helped German Jews escape and made contact with voices in the Allied countries. In 1943 he, his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Hans von Donhanyi were arrested. Along with other plotters he was executed in the final weeks of the war.

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

St Isidore of Seville

Spain, in the seventh century, had been hit hard by the barbarian invasions that had ravaged western Europe. It had been swamped by the Vandal tribe, then the Alans and the Suevi, and finally by the Visigoths who drove out their Germanic rivals and established a kingdom in much of the Iberian peninsula. The destruction caused by these incursions and the primitive disunity into which the West had fallen had resulted in a loss of knowledge and higher culture. Isidore (560-636) set out to preserve what civilization remained in Spain.

He was born into a prominent family that produced bishops for the Catholic Church at a time when the ruling class of Visigoths were converting from Arianism but when the heresy still had a hold on many inhabitants. The Gothic habit of killing their kings for opposing the wishes of the nobility added further weakness and confusion. (These murders were so frequent that in the Middle Ages the term morbus Gothicus or “Gothic disease” became a jocular term for political assassination.) In this situation of shaky monarchy and religious division Catholic bishops became an important source of authority. As Bishop of Seville Isidore worked for improved clerical education, national unity and the spread of learning.

Isidore’s most memorable accomplishment was the compilation of the “Etymologiae”, the first Christian encyclopedia, an attempt to summarize and preserve all classical knowledge available to him. The rules of logic, the origins of words, descriptions of the animal kingdom, road-building techniques, geography, agriculture, war, textiles: all that and more found a place in his twenty volumes. He also wrote histories, theological works on the Trinity, apologetics, monastic regulation and allegorical biographies. His vast learning earned him the title of Doctor of the Church. Unfortunately, because of scribal errors, because so many works of science and philosophy had been lost and because of the disintegration of the Roman empire that kept Spain relatively isolated, much of what Isidore thought was true was not.

Recently a project has been launched to make Isidore the patron saint of the Internet, a fitting title because of the universal scope of his knowledge and the fact that so many of his assertions were unreliable.