July 13
574 Passing away of Pope John III; He had to witness the Lombards repeatedly ravaging Italy during his lifetime.
1760 Demise of Conrad Weiser, a Lutheran peacemaker and negotiator, who had learned the Mohawk language and customs of the Mohawk people, who are part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, in order to communicate and make treaties with them.
1769 Birth of Thomas Kelly, a later Irish Episcopal clergyman and the author of 765 hymns, including “Praise the Savior, Ye Who Know Him.”
1778 John Newton, an Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer, stated in a letter, ”It is perhaps the highest triumph we can obtain over bigotry when we are able to bear with bigots themselves.”
1815 President John Adams commented on the Jews in a letter, “The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist,… I should still believe fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.’
1886 Birth of Father Edward Flanagan, later an American Catholic parish priest. He held that there is ‘no such thing as a bad boy,’ and started Boys Town near Omaha, Nebraska in 1922.
1906 The Orthodox archbishop, Abune Mateos, prosecutes the evangelical preacher Onesimus Nesib in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and finds him guilty of the (cooked up) charges leveled against him and directs the authorities to confiscate all his property. However the emperor’s agent later investigated the case and acquitted Nesib.
1917 The apparition of the Virgin Mary to three children in Fatima, Portugal; she also handed over letters to them to be taken to the Pope.
1968 Passing away of Henry F. Blood, a Wycliffe Bible Translators missionary, during the captivity in Vietnamese jails. There he could win a fellow captive, Mike Benge, for Christ.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org