The Hanscom Family Weblog

1267 Synod of Breslau orders Jews of Silesia to wear special caps
1537 Pope Paul III routes Cardinal Pole to England
1621 Alexander Ludovisi is elected Pope Gregory XV
1812 Pioneer missionary Samuel Newell married fellow Congregationalist Harriet Atwood. They afterward sailed for India with Adoniram and Ann Hasseltine Judson. (Harriet Newell and Ann Judson thereby became the first American women commissioned for missionary work abroad.)
1819 Birth of William True Sleeper, New England Congregational clergyman and author of the hymns “Jesus, I Come” and “Ye Must Be Born Again.”
1822 American Indian Society organizes
1839 Scottish clergyman Robert Murray McCheyne wrote in a letter: ‘In spiritual things, this world is all wintertime so long as the Savior is away.’
1918 Army chaplain school organized at Fort Monroe VA
1926 Teaching theory of evolution forbidden in Atlanta GA schools
1930 American pioneer linguist and missionary Frank Laubach wrote in a letter: ‘The sense of being led by an unseen hand which takes mine, while another hand reaches ahead and prepares the way, grows upon me daily.’
1948 U.S. Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall prayed: ‘We are tempted to despair of our world. Remind us, O Lord, that Thou hast been facing the same thing in all the world since time began.’

February 9

Alto, abbot, confessor [GTZ: Freising]
Ansbert, bishop (of Rouen), confessor [BLS; GTZ: Paris, Reims, Rouen]
Apollonia, virgin, martyr [common]
Attracta [BLS]
Erhard [BLS]
Furseus, bishop (sometimes abbot), confessor [GTZ: Strassburg, Poitiers]
Nicephorus, martyr [BLS]
Savin, bishop, confessor [6082, in red]
Simeon, bishop (of Jerusalem), martyr [GTZ: Abo]
Theliau, bishop [BLS]

February 9

On this day in 1649, William Marshall’s engraving of Charles I of England as a Christian martyr was published in the Eikon Basilike [Royal Portrait] ten days after the king was beheaded by Parliament in the aftermath of the English Civil War.

Feast Day:

St. Apollonia, virgin martyr at Alexandria, 249.
St. Nicephorns, martyr at Antioch, 260.
St. Attracta, virgin in Ireland, 5th century.
St. Theliau, bishop of Llandaff, circ. 580.
St. Ansbert, archbishop of Rouen, 695.
St. Erhard, of Scotland, 8th century.

February 9

Alto, abbot, confessor [GTZ: Freising]
Ansbert, bishop (of Rouen), confessor [BLS; GTZ: Paris, Reims, Rouen]
Apollonia, virgin, martyr [common]
Attracta [BLS]
Erhard [BLS]
Furseus, bishop (sometimes abbot), confessor [GTZ: Strassburg, Poitiers]
Nicephorus, martyr [BLS]
Savin, bishop, confessor [6082, in red]
Simeon, bishop (of Jerusalem), martyr [GTZ: Abo]
Theliau, bishop [BLS]

On This Day

St Teilo (Wales, Brittany)  founder of Llandaff Cathedral
Apollonia, patron saint of dentists and dental technicians

In History

1825 John Quincy Adams elected President of the United States.
1962 Jamaica becomes an independent nation within the Commonwealth
1965 First US combat troops sent to South Vietnam
1996 IRA bomb in Canary Wharf, London

St. Jerome Emiliani
(1481?-1537)

A careless and irreligious soldier for the city-state of Venice, Jerome was captured in a skirmish at an outpost town and chained in a dungeon. In prison Jerome had a lot of time to think, and he gradually learned how to pray. When he escaped, he returned to Venice where he took charge of the education of his nephews—and began his own studies for the priesthood.

In the years after his ordination, events again called Jerome to a decision and a new lifestyle. Plague and famine swept northern Italy. Jerome began caring for the sick and feeding the hungry at his own expense. While serving the sick and the poor, he soon resolved to devote himself and his property solely to others, particularly to abandoned children. He founded three orphanages, a shelter for penitent prostitutes and a hospital.

Around 1532 Jerome and two other priests established a congregation dedicated to the care of orphans and the education of youth. Jerome died in 1537 from a disease he caught while tending the sick. He was canonized in 1767. In 1928 Pius Xl named him the patron of orphans and abandoned children.

ST. APOLLONIA OF ALEXANDRIA
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 09, 2010

A holy virgin who suffered martyrdom in Alexandria during a local uprising against the Christians previous to the persecution of Decius (248-249).

During the festivities commemorative of the first millenary of the Roman Empire, the populace committed bloody outrages on the Christians whom the authorities made no effort to protect. The great Dionysius, then Bishop of Alexandria (247-265), relates the sufferings of Apollonia. These men seized her also and by repeated blows broke all her teeth. They then erected outside the city gates a pile of fagots and threatened to burn her alive if she refused to repeat after them impious words (either a blasphemy against Christ, or an invocation of the heathen gods). Given, at her own request, a little freedom, she sprang quickly into the fire and was burned to death.” Apollonia belongs, therefore, to that class of early Christian martyrs who did not await the death they were threatened with, but either to preserve their chastity, or because confronted with the alternative of renouncing their faith or suffering death, voluntarily embraced the latter in the form prepared for them. The Roman Church celebrates her memory on 9 February, and she is popularly invoked against the toothache because of the torments she had to endure. She is represented in art with pincers in which a tooth is held.

http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/saintoftheday/feb_09_-_hieromartyr_peter_bishop_of_damascus_and_hesychast_peter_of_damasc#6703