Christmas Every Day

1626 Ethiopia becomes officially Roman Catholic

One of the oldest Christian churches in the world is that of Ethiopia. The country maintained its Coptic variety of Christianity over the centuries despite repeated attacks from surrounding Muslim nations. When the Portuguese reached India in the late 1400s it was possible for Roman Catholicism influence to be felt. When Ethiopia appealed for help against the Muslim Adal Sultanate in 1531, the military aid opened up the country further. Jesuit missionaries arrived and made some converts among the people but their real target was the ruling class. The Emperor Susenyos I was converted to Catholicism and in 1622 declared it to be the country’s official religion. When Afonso Mendes, a Portuguese Jesuit, was named Patriarch of the Ethiopian Church and Susenyos used force to compel the latinization, resistance grew. On the death of the Emperor the union with Rome was declared over, Mendes was expelled and the Catholic missionizing came to an official end. Jesuits who lingered were martyred.

1929 The Lateran pacts are signed

The reunification of Italy in the 19th century came at the expense of the Papal States, ruled by the Pope since the 700s. When the last bit was gobbled up by Italy in 1870 subsequent popes refused to recognize the status quo and claimed to be prisoners in the Vatican. In the Lateran Pacts signed with Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, the Vatican received independence and reparations while agreeing to recognize the Kingdom of Italy.

2013 Pope Benedict XVI resigns the papacy

When the noted theologian Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 he was already 77 years old. He served as Bishop of Rome until 2013 when he stepped down from his office, not wishing to imitate the example of his predecessor John Paul II who was incapacitated in the latter part of his reign. He cited “lack of strength of mind and body” as the reason for his decision. He was the first Pope to resign since 1415 when Gregory XII was forced to step down under pressure from the Council of Constance. The last pope to resign voluntarily was the unfortunate Celestine V who retired in 1294.

1405

The birth of the last Christian Roman emperor.

Constantine XI Palaiologos (1405-53) was born at a time when the once-great Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, empire had been reduced to the city of Constantinople and a few holdings on the mainland of Greece. For centuries Constantinople had stood as a barrier, preventing Islam from expanding into eastern Europe but now it was surrounded by the territory of the Ottoman Turks and was forced to pay allegiance to their ruler. In fact it was the Turkish sultan Murad II who chose Constantine to be crowned emperor in 1449 over the claims of his brother.

The Byzantines had maintained their existence though shrewd diplomacy and the impenetrable walls of Constantinople, built one thousand years before by the emperor Theodosius II, but by the 1450s both failed them. The only help they could appeal to were western Catholic powers but the price for that aid was to renounce Orthodoxy and accept the headship of the pope — a move that the citizens of Constantinople were unwilling to make. Their motto became “better the turban than the tiara”, better to bow to the Turks than to the papacy. Moreover, advances in siege warfare, particularly the invention of artillery meant that the great walls were no longer guarantees of safety.

In 1452 the new and ambitious Turkish ruler Mehmed II vowed to extinguish the last remnants of Christian opposition to the expansion of his people. He assembled a vast army with a huge train of cannon to attack Constantinople with its meagre troop of defenders. The city fell on May 29, 1453. Constantine was killed in the battle but legend says that he became one of history’s sleeping kings — gone but who will return when their nation needs them, like England’s King Arthur, Germany’s Barbarossa or Wenceslas of the Czechs. It is said that angels took Constantine and placed him in a subterranean rock beneath Constantinople’s ceremonial Golden Gate from whence he will come to once more create a Christian empire.

1497

The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Florence in the 15th century was at the heart of the Italian Renaissance, the engine of humanist scholarship and great works of art and architecture produced by the likes of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Donatello. The patronage of the leading Medici family inspired Florentine institutions and nobles to support these efforts but in the 1490s the city was taken over by someone with far different ideas. This was the monk Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98).

Savonarola was a fiery Dominican who benefited at first from the patronage of the Medici ruler Lorenzo the Magnificent but who then turned against him. Preaching furiously against the corruption, of the pope (the Borgia, Alexander VI), the Medici clique and the rich magnates of the city, Savonarola sparked the coup that ejected the Medici and established a ‘godly’ republic. Bands of young followers dressed as angels patrolled the city, punishing gambling, swearing and drunkenness. Telling Florentines that the End of Time was near, Savonarola organized “Bonfires of the Vanities” where people were urged to divest themselves of all that could separate them from concentrating on the spiritual life: fancy clothes, jewels, cosmetics, rich furniture, classic manuscripts and fine art. These objects were hauled to public fires and burnt. A particularly spectacular demonstration was held this day in 1497. Paul Strathern’s Death in Florence describes the scene:

The bonfires in each neighbourhood around which people had traditionally danced in abandoned fashion during the pre-Savonarolan Carnival were now all amalgamated into one massive bonfire in the Piazza della Signoria, which was intended to accommodate all the vanities that Savonarola’s boys had collected. An eight-sided wooden pyramid had been constructed, with seven tiers, one for each of the seven deadly sins. The vanities were placed on these tiers, and the inside of the pyramid was filled with sacks of straw, piles of kindling wood, and even small bags of dynamite (intended to spread the flames throughout the pyramid, as well as cause incendiary firework effects such as bangs and showers of sparks). In the end, this ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ rose to sixty feet, and the circumference at its base was 240 feet. At its peak was placed wooden effigy made to look like the traditional image of the Devil, complete with hairy cloven-hoofed goats’ legs, pointed ears, horns and a little pointed beard.

It should be noted that in this drive to consume corruption by cleansing fire he was following the example of the earlier wandering Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444).

590

Gregory the Great is elected pope.

It would be hard to name a more influential pope of the early Middle Ages than St. Gregory I (540-604), called the Great. (Supporters of the claim of Leo I, also the Great and also a saint, may send their arguments on a postcard to St Margaret’s Church, Winnipeg.) Born into a wealthy Roman family with a pope and many high-ranking officials on his family tree, he was superbly educated in the liberal arts and entered at an early age into political life, becoming Prefect of Rome (the highest rank in the city) by his early 30s. He took office at a miserable time in the history of Rome with Italy ravaged by the barbarian Lombards and still recovering from the depopulation and chaos caused by the Byzantine attempt at reconquest and the plague.

On the death of his father he converted his family villa into a monastery and became a monk, soon rising in influence in the Church. In 579 he was chosen by the pope to lead an embassy to the emperor in Constantinople to whom Rome still owed allegiance. His attempt to convince the emperor to send troops to Italy to stop the Lombard advance was fruitless.

In 590, much against his will, he was elected Pope to replace Pelagius II who died of the plague. He took on this task with great energy and succeeded by the time of his death 14 years later in elevating the status and reach of the Roman papacy. For the previous century the bishops of Rome had had little positive influence on the lands of the western empire which had been lost to the Germanic invaders. Britain had lost contact with civilization for almost a century; Spain was dominated by Arian heretics; and the Church in Gaul was in the hands of the Frankish landowners who had little thought for evangelism. Under Gregory the papacy reached out to assert the international leadership of the Bishop of Rome once more. One of his great achievements was sending the mission of Augustine, a monk from his own monastery, to England to spread Christianity to the German tribes there. He reformed the liturgy and encouraged the music we now call Gregorian chant. He reformed the management of church lands which came to provide food and revenue for the poor of Rome. His book Pastoral Care was translated by Alfred the Great into English and was one of the civilizing books every church had to have a copy of.