Posted 12:53am CT Jan 14, 2008 in Minneapolis

Researched and written by Gloriscope staff

1994: Duchess of Kent, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, converted to Roman Catholicism. – She was the first member of the British Royal Family in over 300 years to do so.

1967: Catholic elementary and secondary school in Montreal, Canada. had to be closed because of a teachers’ strike. – The strike ended February 17.

1915: Death of Richard Meux Benson, an English Anglican priest and the founder in 1865 of Mission Priests of St. John the Evangelist, the first Anglican order of monks after the Reformation. – He was the first leader of this order, which spread to India, South Africa and the Unfired States in the following twenty years.

1898: Death of Lewis Carroll (pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), an Anglican, the author of Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland (1865) and other literary works.

1892: Birth of the prominent German Lutheran theologian, pastor, and pacifist leader Martin Niemöller, who opposed Nazification of German Protestant churches in the 1930s and advocated pacifism in the 1950s. — Along with Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he was one of the leaders of the German “Confessing Church,” a group of German anti-Nazi Christians who declared in their Barmen Declaration of 1934 that the German church belonged to Jesus Christ, not to the German State. Because of his opposition to Hitler, Niemöller was imprisoned in concentration camps in 1937-1945. He was liberated by the Allies and became a hero in the United States. In the 1950s, Niemöller was a pacifist advocating nuclear disarmament and a leader of the German peace movement. He became the president of the World Council of Churches in 1961. He died in 1984.

1833: Death of St. Seraphim of Sarov, one of the greatest saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. – He lived many years as a solitary monk near the Sarov Monastery.

1818: Birth of Zacharias Topelius (d. 1898), a prominent Finland-Swedish writer of poems, psalms, fairy tales and plays, a very pious Protestant leaning toward Pietism.

1753: Death of George Berkeley, an influential Irish philosopher of subjective idealism and a bishop in the Church of Ireland. Berkeley’s conclusion was that our empirical experiences require God as their cause. The City of Berkeley and the University of Berkeley, both in California, were named after him.

1514: Pope Leo X issued a papal bull (order) against slavery.

1331: Death of Odoric of Pordenone, a very pious Franciscan friar from Italy and a famous Christian explorer of the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and China. - He remained in the present-day Beijing for three years. After his return to his native Italy, he wrote an incredibly interesting story of his travels, which was published in many editions in the 14th century and brought him fame in all of Europe. He provided one of the most important European descriptions of Asia in the 14th century. His travel memoirs were published by the Christian publishing company Eerdmans in 2001 under the title The Travels of Friar Odoric.

1129: The Church formally endorsed the Knights Templar, a powerful Christian military order during the Crusades. – This order’s official name was “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.” Members of this charitable monastic order, popularly known as the Templars, wore a characteristic white mantle with a big red cross on the chest. Templars were some of the best Christian fighters during the Crusades. They were called Templars because during the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, these knights had their headquarters in the royal palace on the Temple Mount, which was considered to be the place of the Solomon’s Temple. The monastic order of Knights Templar was officially recognized by the Western Church at the Church Council of Troyes in 1129 and dissolved by Pope Clement V by his papal bull Vox in excelso (1312). The main function of the Templars was to protect European pilgrims to the Holy Land and fight Muslim armies threatening Christianity. The Templars’ most famous military victory was in the Battle of Montgisard near Ramla in 1177, when heavily armed Templars and a few thousand foot soldiers defeated a much larger Muslim army of over 26,000 soldiers led by Sultan Saladin (Salah ad-Din), one of the most famous of all Muslim military heroes in history. A Benedictine monastery was built at the site of the battle to commemorate the victory.

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TO GOD BE ALL THE GLORY!

Published in the U.S.A. Copyright © 4T4C News Corp. 2008. All rights reserved.