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0417 St Innocent I ends his reign as Catholic Pope
0604 St Gregory I ends his reign as Catholic Pope
1000 Odo of Lagery elected as Pope Urban II, replacing Victor III
1054 Pope Leo IX escapes captivity & returns to Rome
1144 Gherardo Caccianemici elected Pope Lucius II, succeeding Callistus II
1350 Orvieto city says it will behead & burn Jewish-Christian couples
1496 Jews are expelled from Syria
1607 Birth of Paul Gerhardt, German clergyman and hymnwriter. He lost four of his five children in childhood, yet also composed over 130 hymns, including “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” (Gerhardt’s music marks the transition in Lutheran hymnody from confessional and high_church hymns to hymns of devotional piety.)
1622 Ignatius of Loyola declared a saint. Gregory XV canonized Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits; Philip Neri, Italian co_founder of a medical religious order; Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Carmelite nun; and Francis Xavier, the Jesuit “Apostle of Eastern Asia.”
1710 Birth of Thomas A. Arne, considered one of the outstanding English composers of the 18th century. Today, Arne is best remembered for his hymn tune ARLINGTON, to which we commonly sing, “Am I a Soldier of the Cross?”
1737 Galileo’s body moved to Church of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy
1826 Birth of Robert Lowery, American Baptist clergyman and hymnwriter. He is chiefly remembered today for writing and composing the hymns “Christ Arose,” “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus,” “We’re Marching to Zion,” “All the Way My Savior Leads Me” and “I Need Thee Every Hour.”
1904 Raphael Hawaweeny was ordained Eastern Orthodox bishop of Brooklyn, NY, at St. Nicholas Church. As a vicar under the Holy Synod of the Church of Russia, Hawaweeny thus became the first Russian Orthodox bishop ordained in America.
1926 Pope Pius XI names J E van Roey archbishop of Malines Belgium
1930 Mohandas Gandhi begins 200 mile (321 km) march protesting British salt tax
1939 Pope Pius XII crowned in Vatican ceremonies
1950 Pope Pius XII encyclical “On combating atheistic propaganda”
1994 Church of England ordains 1st 33 women priests

March 12

On this day in 1685, Anglican bishop and philosopher George Berkeley was born at his family home, Dysart Castle, near Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland.

Feast Day:

St Maximilian of Numidia, martyr, 296.
St. Paul of Cornwall, bishop of Leon, about 573.
St. Gregory the Great, Pope, 604.

March 12

Gorgonius (and Dorothy), martyrs (Translation) [GTZ: Metz]
Gregory (the Great), pope, confessor [common; PCP (Paris), 6082, in red]
Maximilian [BLS]
Maurus, abbot, confessor (Translation) [GTZ: Paris]
Paul, bishop (of Laon) [BLS]

On This Day

Fina,
Maximilian,
Pope Gregory I (Eastern Orthodox Church, Eastern Catholic Church, and Episcopal Church in the United States),
Theophanes the Confessor

In History

1930 - Gandhi’s Salt March begins, from Ahmadabad to Delhi, in protest against salt tax

1994  Church of England ordains first female priests

GREGORY THE GREAT
BISHOP AND DOCTOR (12 MAR 604)

Only two popes, Leo I and Gregory I, have been given the popular title of “the Great.” Both served during difficult times of barbarian invasions in Italy; and during Gregory’s term of office, Rome was also faced with famine and epidemics.

Gregory was born around 540, of a politically influential family, and in 573 he became Prefect of Rome; but shortly afterwards he resigned his office and began to live as a monk. In 579 he was made apocrisiarius (representative of the Pope to the Patriarch of Constantinople). Shortly after his return home, the Pope died of the plague, and in 590 Gregory was elected Pope.

Like Leo before him, he became practical governor of central Italy, because the job needed to be done and there was no one else to do it. When the Lombards invaded, he organized the defense of Rome against them, and the eventual signing of a treaty with them. When there was a shortage of food, he organized the importation and distribution of grain from Sicily.

His influence on the forms of public worship throughout Western Europe was enormous. He founded a school for the training of church musicians, and Gregorian chant (plainchant) is named for him. The schedule of Scripture readings for the various Sundays of the year, and the accompanying prayers (many of them written by him), in use throughout most of Western Christendom for the next thirteen centuries, is largely due to his passion for organization. His treatise, On Pastoral Care, while not a work of creative imagination, shows a dedication to duty, and an understanding of what is required of a minister in charge of a Christian congregation. His sermons are still readable today, and it is not without reason that he is accounted (along with Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine of Hippo) as one of the Four Latin Doctors (=Teachers) of the ancient Church. (Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzen, Basil the Great, and John Chrysostom are the Four Greek Doctors.)

English-speaking Christians will remember Gregory for sending a party of missionaries headed by Augustine of Canterbury (not to be confused with the more famous Augustine of Hippo) to preach the Gospel to the pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes that had invaded England and largely conquered or displaced the Celtic Christians previously living there. Gregory had originally hoped to go to England as a missionary himself, but was pressed into service elsewhere, first as apocrisiarius and then as bishop of Rome. He accordingly sent others, but took an active interest in their work, writing numerous letters both to Augustine and his monks and to their English converts.

I here mention something that was not Gregory’s doing, but is an important part of Church history. It was in Gregory’s lifetime that Rome, and with it the Western Empire, with astonishing suddenness, and for no reason that I know of, went monolingual. For more than six centuries previously, Greek had been spoken at Rome along with Latin. Every Roman with pretensions to being educated could speak it. Everyone involved in shipping and commerce, from banker to stevedore, could speak it. The list of the early Bishops of Rome has a fair proportion of Greek names. When Paul wrote an epistle to the Romans, he wrote in Greek as a matter of course. But in Gregory’s lifetime this changed. Gregory was ambassador to the Eastern Patriarch at Constantinople for six years, but he never bothered to learn Greek. And in his day (not, as far as I have any reason to believe, as a result of his example or influence) most other Latin-speakers did not trouble to learn Greek either. The already existing difficulties of communication between Latin and Greek theologians were greatly exacerbated by this development. Increasingly, Latins did not read the commentaries and other writings of Greek Christians, and vice versa. Thus differences between the two that dialogue might have resolved were left to accumulate, culminating in the formal split between Latin and Greek Christendom in 1054.

Readings:

Psalm 57:6-11
1 Chronicles 25:1a,6-8
Colossians 1:28–2:3
Mark 10:42-45

Preface of Apostles

PRAYER (traditional language):

Almighty and merciful God, who didst raise up Gregory of Rome to be a servant of the servants of God, and didst inspire him to send missionaries to preach the Gospel to the English people: Preserve in thy Church the catholic and apostolic faith they taught, that thy people, being fruitful in every good work, may receive the crown of glory that fadeth not away; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

PRAYER (contemporary language):

Almighty and merciful God, who raised up Gregory of Rome to be a servant of the servants of God, and inspired him to send missionaries to preach the Gospel to the English people: Preserve in your Church the catholic and apostolic faith they taught, that your people, being fruitful in every good work, may receive the crown of glory that never fades away; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

If I were to select a ground on which this devout Christian of great accomplishments might reasonably be censured, it would be that his Dialogues, a book on the Lives of the Saints, is full of accounts of dreams and visions that various persons were said to have had of souls in Purgatory. Gregory, a man of keen critical judgement on many matters, was completely uncritical in his acceptance of these stories. A general belief in Purgatory was standard among Christians when he wrote; but his reliance on “ghost stories” to fill in the imaginative details gave the doctrine as held thereafter in Latin Christendom both a prominence and a coloring that it had not previously had, with results that many Christians, including adherents of the Pope, have thought regrettable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT

There have been Popes of every shade of human character. Gregory the Great is one distinguished by modesty, disinterestedness, and sincere religious zeal, tempered by a toleration which could only spring from pure benevolence. The son of a Roman senator, with high mental gifts, and all the accomplishments of his age, he was drawn forward into prominent positions, but always against his will. He would have fain continued to be an obscure monk or a missionary, but his qualities were such that at length even the popedom was thrust upon him (on the death of Pelagius II in 590). On this occasion he wrote to the sister of the Emperor:

‘Appearing to be outwardly exalted, I am really fallen. My endeavours were to banish corporeal objects from my mind, that I might spiritually behold heavenly joys. I am come into the depths of the sea, and the tempest hath drowned me.’

The writings of Pope Gregory, which fill four folio volumes, are said to be very admirable. The English King Alfred showed his appreciation of one treatise by translating it. In exercising the functions of his high station, Gregory exhibited great mildness and forbearance. He eagerly sought to convert the heathen, and to bring heretics back to the faith: but he never would sanction the adoption of any harsh. measures for these purposes. One day—before he attained the papal chair—walking through the market in Rome, he was struck by the beauty of a group of young persons exposed to be sold as slaves. In answer to his inquiry of who they were, and whence they came, he was told they were Angli, from the heathen island of Britain. ‘Verily, Angeli,’ he said, punning on the name: ‘how lamentable that the prince of darkness should be the master of a country containing such a beautiful people! How sad that, with so fair an outside, there should be nothing of God’s grace within! His wish was immediately to set out as a missionary to England, and it was with difficulty he was prevented. The incident, however, led to a mission being ere long sent to our then benighted country, which thus owed its first reception of Christian light to Gregory.

Almsgiving, in such Protestant countries as England, is denounced as not so much a lessening of human suffering as a means of engendering and extending pauperism. Gregory had no such fears to stay his bountiful hand. With him to relieve the poor was the first of Christian graces. He devoted a large proportion of his revenue and a vast amount of personal care to this object. He in a manner took the entire charge of the poor upon his own hands. ‘He relieved their necessities with. so much sweetness and affability, as to spare them the confusion of receiving alms; the old men among them he, out of deference, called his fathers. He often entertained several of them at his own table. He kept by him an exact catalogue of the poor, called by the ancients Matriculae; and he liberally provided for the necessities of each. In the beginning of every month he distributed to all the poor corn, wine, pulse, cheese, fish, flesh, and oil; he appointed officers for every street, to send every day necessaries to all the needy sick: before he ate, he always sent off meats from his own table to some poor persons.’ There may be some bad moral results from this wholesale system of relief for poverty, but certainly the motives which prompted it must be acknowledged to have been highly amiable.

Gregory was a weakly man, often suffering from bad health, and he did not get beyond the age of sixty-four. We owe to him a phrase which has become a sort of formula for the popes—’Servant of the servants of God.’ His name, which is the same as Vigilantius or Watchman, became, from veneration for him, a favourite one: we find it borne, amongst others, by a Scottish prince of the eighth century, the reputed progenitor of the clan M’Gregor. It is curious to think of this formidable band of Highland outlaws of the seventeenth century as thus connected by a chain of historical circumstances with the gentle and saintly Gregory, who first caused the lamp of Christianity to be planted in England.

http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/saintoftheday/mar_12_-_st._gregory_the_great_pope_of_rome#6941

ST. THEOPHANES THE CHRONICLER
FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 2010

St. Theophanes was born at Samothrace, Greece around the year 759. He was orphaned while still a young child but he was left a large inheritance. As a young man, Theophanes’ guardian coerced him to marry but he and his wife vowed themselves to celibacy. They lived together for several years but eventually Theophanes’ wife joined a religious community and he became a hermit.

Theophanes’ wisdom and holiness were quickly noticed by others and he used his wealth to form two monasteries out of the men who sought his counsel. Theophanes became abbot of one of these monasteries and gained a greater reputation for his virtues. While he lived in the monastery, Theophanes worked to write a history of the Christian world starting at the end of the Diocletian persecution to the early ninth century. It is for this work that he gained the nickname “Chronicler.”

During the time Theophanes lived, the iconoclast heresy was causing problems in the Church. The emperor of Constantinople, who encouraged the destruction of icons, tried to gain Theophanes support through subterfuge and coercion but he remained faithful to Rome. Eventually, this fidelity got Theophanes arrested and imprisoned. He died in prison around the year 818.

Blessed Angela Salawa
(1881-1922)

Angela served Christ and Christ’s little ones with all her strength.

Born in Siepraw, near Kraków, Poland, she was the 11th child of Bartlomiej and Ewa Salawa. In 1897, she moved to Kraków where her older sister Therese lived. Angela immediately began to gather together and instruct young women domestic workers. During World War I, she helped prisoners of war without regard for their nationality or religion. The writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were a great comfort to her.

Angela gave great service in caring for soldiers wounded in World War I. After 1918 her health did not permit her to exercise her customary apostolate. Addressing herself to Christ, she wrote in her diary, “I want you to be adored as much as you were destroyed.” In another place, she wrote, “Lord, I live by your will. I shall die when you desire; save me because you can.”

At her 1991 beatification in Kraków, Pope John Paul II said: “It is in this city that she worked, that she suffered and that her holiness came to maturity. While connected to the spirituality of St. Francis, she showed an extraordinary responsiveness to the action of the Holy Spirit” (L’Osservatore Romano, volume 34, number 4, 1991).

BISHOP BERKELEY

Dr. George Berkeley, better known as Bishop Berkeley, the mathematician and ideal philosopher, graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, which he entered as a pensioner at the early age of fifteen. Very different opinions prevailed about him at College: those who knew little of him took him for a fool, while those who were most intimate with him considered him a prodigy of learning. His most intimate friends were the best judges in this case, for before he reached his twenty-third year he competed for and obtained a fellowship. Within the next three years he published his Theory of Vision, a work of remarkable sagacity, and the first of its kind. Its object may be roughly stated to be an attempt, and a successful one, to trace the boundary line between our ideas of sight and touch. He supposed that if a man born blind could be enabled to see, it would be impossible for him to recognise any object by sight which he had previously known by touch, and that such a person would have no idea of the relative distance of objects.

This supposition was confirmed in a very surprising manner in the year 1728, eighteen years after the publication of Mr. Berkeley’s book by a young man who was born blind and couched by Mr. Cheseldon. He said that all objects seemed to touch his eyes: he was unable to distinguish the dog from the cat by sight, and was so sorely puzzled between his newly-acquired sense and that of touch that he asked which was the lying sense. In the next year Berkeley published his Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he set forth his celebrated system of immaterialism, attempting to prove that the common notion of the existence of matter is false, and that such things as bricks and mortar, chairs and tables, are nonentities, except as ideas in the mind. A further defence of this system, in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, established his reputation as a writer, and his company was sought even where his opinions were rejected. Through Dean Swift he was introduced to the celebrated Earl of Peter-borough, whom he accompanied to Italy in the capacity of chaplain.

His first piece of preferment was the Deanery of Derry. And no sooner was he settled in this than he conceived and carried out to the utmost of his power a project which entitles him to the admiration of posterity. It was nothing less than a scheme for the conversion of the savage Americans to Christianity. He proposed to erect a college in Bermuda as a missionary school, to resign his deanery, worth £1,100 a year, and to go out himself as its first president, on the stipend of £100 a year. His plan was approved by parliament, and he set out, taking with him three other noble and kindred spirits. For seven years Sir R. Walpole delayed him with various excuses, and at last gave him to under-stand that the promised grant would not be paid till it suited ‘public convenience,’ thus rendering the whole scheme abortive.

In 1733, he was appointed to the bishopric of Cloync. The rest of his life was devoted to the earnest discharge of his episcopal duties and the further prosecution of his studies. His custom was to rise between three and four o’clock, summon his family to a music lesson, and spend the rest of the morning in study. In this part of his life, he published The Analyst, which was followed by several other works, among which was a letter to the Roman Catholics of his diocese, entitled A Word to the Wise, for which in the Dublen Journal of November 18, 1749, they returned ‘their sincere and hearty thanks to the worthy author, assuring him that they are deter-mined to comply with every particular recommended in his address to the utmost of their power.’

Suffering a good deal from a nervous colic towards the end of his life, and finding relief from tar-water, he wrote a treatise on its virtues, which, with its sequel, Further Thoughts on Tar-water, was his last work for the press. He died at Oxford, suddenly, in the midst of his family, on Sunday evening, January 14, 1753, while listening to a sermon of Dr. Sherlock’s which Mrs. Berkeley was reading to him. He was interred in Christ Church, Oxford.

LUDOVICK MUGGLETON

A time of extraordinary religious fervour is sure to produce its monsters, even as the hot mud of the Nile was fabled to do by Lucretius. Several arose amidst the dreadful sectarian contendings of the period of the civil war, and scarcely any more preposterous than Ludovick Muggleton, who is said to have been a working tailor, wholly devoid of education. About 1651, when this man was between forty and fifty years of age, he and a brother in trade, named Reeves, announced themselves as the two last witnesses of God that would ever be appointed on earth: professed a prophetic gift, and pretended to have been invested with an exclusive power over the gates of heaven and hell. When Reeves died, Muggleton continued to set himself forth in this character, affecting to bless those who respectfully listened to him, and cursing all who scoffed at him, assuming, in short, to have the final destiny of man, woman, and child entirely in his own hand.

By ravings in speech and print, he acquired a considerable number of followers, chiefly women, and became at length such a nuisance, that the public authorities resolved, if possible, to put him down. His trial at the Old Bailey, January 17th, 1677, ended in his being sentenced to stand in the pillory on three days in three several parts of London, and to pay a fine of £500, or be kept in jail in failure of payment. His books were at the same time ordered to be publicly burnt. All this severity Muggleton outlived twenty years, dying at length at the age of ninety, and leaving a sect behind him, called from him Muggletonians.

It would serve to little good purpose to go farther into the history of this wretched fanatic. One anecdote, however, may be related of him. It happened on a day, when Muggleton was in his cursing mood, that he very energetically devoted to the infernal deities a gentleman who had given him some cause of offence. The gentleman immediately drew his sword, and placing its point at the cursing prophet’s breast, demanded that the anathemas just pronounced should be reversed upon pain of instant death. Muggleton, who had no relish for a martyrdom of this kind, assumed his blessing capacity, and gave the fiery gentleman the fullest satisfaction.

There is no mention of Muggletomans in the official report of the census of 1851, though it included about a dozen small sects, under various uncouth denominations. As late as 1846, some of Muggleton’s incomprehensible rhapsodies were reprinted and published, it is sincerely to be hoped for the last time.

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