Christmas Every Day

1095 Death of a saintly bishop

The Norman Conquest of England which began in 1066 was supported by the papacy partly out of a desire to reform the English Church which was seen as backward and corrupt by the reform movement in Rome. All of the Anglo-Saxon bishops except one were replaced by continental clerics such as Lanfranc, the new Italian Archbishop of Canterbury. The single bishop left in place was Wulstan, aka Wulfstan, (1008-95) of Worcester. Robert Chambers explains why:

St. Wulstan was the last saint of the Anglo-Saxon Church, the link between the old English Church and hierarchy and the Norman. He was a monk, indeed, and an ascetic; still, his vocation lay not in the school or cloister, but among the people of the market-place and the village, and he rather dwelt on the great broad truths of the Gospel than followed them into their results. Though a thane’s son, a series of unexpected circumstances brought him into the religious profession, and he became prior of a monastery at Worcester. Born at Long Itchington, in Warwickshire, and educated at the monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough, the latter one of the richest houses and the most famous schools in England, he was thoughtful above his years, and voluntarily submitted to exercises and self-denials from which other children were excused. To Wulstan, the holy monk, the proud Earl Harold once went thirty miles out of his way, to make his confession to him, and beg his prayers. He was a man of kind yet blunt and homely speech, and delighted in his devotional duties; the common people looked upon him as their friend, and he used. to sit at the church door listening to complaints, redressing wrongs, helping those who were in trouble, and giving advice, spiritual and temporal.

Every Sunday and great festival he preached to the people: his words seemed to be the voice of thunder, and he drew together vast crowds, wherever he had to dedicate a church. As an example of his practical preaching, it is related that, in reproving the greediness which was a common fault of that day, Wulstan confessed that a savory roast goose which was preparing for his dinner, had once so taken up his thoughts, that he could not attend to the service he was performing, but that he had punished himself for it, and given up the use of meat in consequence.

At length, in 1062, two Roman cardinals came to Worcester, with Aldred the late bishop, now Archbishop of York; they spent the whole Lent at the Cathedral monastery, where Wulstan was prior, and they were so impressed with his austere and hardworking way of life, that partly by their recommendation, as well as the popular voice at Worcester, Wulstan was elected to the vacant bishopric. He heard of this with sorrow and vexation, declaring that he would rather lose his head than be made a bishop; but he yielded to the stern rebuke of an aged hermit, and received the pastoral staff from the hands of Edward the Confessor. The Normans, when they came, thought him, like his church, old-fashioned and homely; but they admired his unworldly and active life, which was not that of study and thoughtful retirement, but of ministering to the common people, supplying the deficiencies of the parochial clergy, and preaching. He rode on horse-back, with his retinue of clerks and monks, through his diocese, repeating the Psalter, the Litanies, and the office for the dead; his chamberlain always had a purse ready, and ‘no one ever begged of Wulstan in vain.’ In these progresses he came into personal contact with all his flock, high and low—with the rude crowds, beggars and serfs, craftsmen and labourers, as well as with priests and nobles. But everything gave way to his confirming children — from sunrise to sunset he would go without tasting food, blessing batch after hatch of the little ones.

Wulstan was a great church builder: he took care that on each of his own manors there should be a church, and he urged other lords to follow his example. He rebuilt the cathedral of his see, and restored the old ruined church of Westbury. When his new cathedral was ready for use, the old one built by St. Oswald was to be demolished; Wulstan stood in the churchyard looking on sadly and silently, but at last burst into tears at this destruction, as he said, of the work of saints, who knew not how to build fine churches, but knew how to sacrifice themselves to God, whatever roof might be over them.

It cannot be said of Wulstan that he was much of a respecter of persons. He had rebuked and warned the headstrong Harold, and he was not less bold before his more imperious successor. At a council in Winchester, he bluntly called upon William to restore to the see some lands which he had seized. He had to fight a stouter battle with Lanfranc, who, ambitious of deposing him for incapacity and ignorance, in a synod held before the king, called upon the bishop to deliver up his pastoral staff and ring; when, according to the legend, Wulstan drove the staff into the stone of the tomb of the Confessor, where it remained fast imbedded, notwithstanding the efforts of the Bishop of Rochester, Lanfranc, and the king himself, to remove it, which, however, Wulstan easily did, and thenceforth was reconciled to Lanfranc; and they subsequently cooperated in destroying a slave trade which had long been carried on by merchants of Bristol with Ireland.

Wulstan outlived William and Lanfranc. He passed his last Lent with more than usual solemnity, on his last Maundy washing the feet and clothes of the poor, bestowing alms and ministering the cup of ‘charity;’ then supplying them, as they sat at his table, with shoes and victuals; and finally reconciling penitents, and washing the feet of his brethren of the convent. On Easter-day, he again feasted with the poor.

At Whitsuntide following, being taken ill, he prepared for death, but he lingered till the first day of the new year, when he finally took to his bed. He was laid so as to have a view of the altar of a chapel, and thus he followed the psalms which were sung. On the 19th of January 1095, at midnight, he died in the eighty-seventh year of his age, and the thirty-third of his episcopate. Contrary to the usual custom, the body was laid out, arranged in the episcopal vestments and crosier, before the high altar, that the people of Worcester might look once more on their good bishop. His stone coffin is, to this day, shewn in the presbytery of the cathedral, the crypt and early Norman portions of which are the work of Wnlstan.

If your interest in Wulstan has not been exhausted, I direct you to the splendid A Clerk of Oxford site where you will find more on the saint: https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2015/01/st-wulfstan-of-worcester-sole-survivor.html

The festival of St. Peter’s Chair, was once annually celebrated at Rome on this day, but was removed from the General Calendar by Pope Paul VI – only dissident anti-Vatican II Catholics keep the feast now. Lady Morgan in her 1821 book of travels, Italy, described the festivities as they occurred in the 19^th century.

The splendidly dressed troops that line the nave of the cathedral, the variety and richness of vestments which clothe the various church and lay dignitaries, abbots, priests, canons, prelates, cardinals, doctors, dragoons, senators, and grenadiers, which march. in procession, complete, as they proceed up the vast space of this wondrous temple, a spectacle nowhere to be equalled within the pale of European civilization. In the midst of swords and crosiers, of halberds and crucifixes, surrounded by banners, and bending under the glittering tiara of threefold power, appears the aged, feeble, and worn-out pope, borne aloft on men’s shoulders, in a chair of crimson and gold, and environed by slaves, (for such they look,) who waft, from plumes of ostrich feathers mounted on ivory wands, a cooling gale, to refresh his exhausted frame, too frail for the weight of such honours. All fall prostrate, as he passes up the church to a small choir and throne, temporarily erected beneath the chair of St. Peter. A solemn service is then performed, hosannas arise, and royal votarists and diplomatic devotees parade the church, with guards of honour and running footmen, while English gentlemen and ladies mob and scramble, and crowd and bribe, and fight their way to the best places they can obtain.

At the extremity of the great nave behind the altar, and mounted upon a tribune designed or ornamented by Michael Angelo [it was actually Bernini], stands a sort of throne, composed of precious materials, and supported by four gigantic figures. A glory of seraphim, with groups of angels, sheds a brilliant light upon its splendours. This throne enshrines the real, plain, worm-eaten, wooden chair, on which St. Peter, the prince of the apostles, is said to have pontificated; more precious than all the bronze, gold, and gems, with which it is hidden, not only from impious, but from holy eyes, and which once only, in the flight of ages, was profaned by mortal inspection.

The throne itself, underneath all that zany baroque decoration, is said to have been given to Pope John VIII in 875; when it was inspected in the 1970s scientists pronounced it to be no older than the sixth century. This is how the chair looked when photographed by itself in 1867.

1556

Accession of Philip II of Spain.

“I will not be the king of heretics”, proclaimed Philip Habsburg (1527-98), in his time King of Spain, Portugal, England and Ireland (briefly), the Netherlands, southern Italy, North and South America, trading ports in Africa, India and East Asia and the Philippine Islands. Ruler of a vastly wealthy empire, he spent his country into bankruptcy trying to exterminate Protestantism in Europe and drive Muslim navies out of the Mediterranean.

Born the son of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who confronted Martin Luther, Philip was raised in Spain as a devoted Catholic. He was highly intelligent, cautious and suspicious, growing to manhood during the European religious wars when he did his utmost to confront Protestantism in all his realms and among his neighbours as well. After his first marriage to a Portuguese princess ended in her death, Philip was persuaded in 1554 to marry a cousin, Mary I of England, despite her being a decade older than he. The marriage produced no children, engendered a good deal of anti-Spanish sentiment and cost England its last remaining continental possession, Calais. When Mary died in 1558 Philip’s authority in England ended; his courtship of Mary’s sister Elizabeth was deftly avoided by the new queen.

In 1555 Charles V retired and divided his holdings between his brother Ferdinand and Philip. Ferdinand received the Holy Roman Empire and promptly agreed to a religious truce with German Protestants; Philip received the rest of Charles’s lands and vowed to wipe out Protestantism wherever he found it. This resulted in expensive wars in France where he sided with the Catholic League against the Valois kings, against England ( a war fought largely at sea), and against the Dutch Calvinist rebels and their German supporters. In the Mediterranean Philip’s navies battled Islamic pirate lords along the Barbary coast and their Turkish masters, Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors.

Philip failed to halt Protestantism in either England, against which he launched three great armadas, or the Netherlands where war raged for 80 years. He was a proponent of state-sponsored assassination and offered bounties for the death of his heretic enemies. His policy in France was not a total failure; though the Catholic League was defeated, the Protestant victor Henry of Navarre felt obliged to convert to Catholicism. Philip’s war on Islam was as unrelenting. At home he forced the descendants of Moorish converts to leave Spain, rendering the country purer in religion but poorer economically. In the Mediterranean, he lost some North African holdings but contributed to significant Turkish losses at Malta (1565) and Lepanto (1571). All this was accomplished at enormous financial cost to Spain which began a century of decline after Philip’s death.

1700

The death of a Canadian saint.

The colony of New France was in a perilous state in the middle of the seventeenth century. A number of private corporations had failed to establish a secure position in the St Lawrence valley; few colonists were attracted to the harsh landscape; infant mortality was high; and attacks by native tribes discouraged settlement. To this tenuous toehold came Frenchwoman Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1653.

Marguerite had been recruited to the colony by Paul Chomedey de Maissoneuve, the Governor of Ville-Marie (later Montreal) who brought her, 15 girls searching for husbands, and 100 settler-soldiers to hold the little fort. It was Marguerite’s job to care for the marriageable women, find suitable mates for them and instruct children. A cloistered community of nuns was unsuitable for the situation so Marguerite developed a community of secular sisters, a dangerous innovation in the eyes of some church leaders. She built the town’s first church, set up a school in a stable and recruited women to form the Congregation Notre-Dame which would teach the children of colonists and natives across the colony. She journeyed to France several times on recruitment missions and efforts to keep her community from being forced to accept a lifestyle of seclusion. Marguerite was successful in all these efforts and when she died in 1700 she had the reputation of a saint. She was officially canonized in 1982 by Pope John Paul II.