August 9
1253: Pope Innocent IV approves St. Clare’s rule for the Order of the Poor Clares.
1378: French bishops declare Pope Urban VI’s election to be invalid since a mob pressured them to elect an Italian pope. The bishops could not bear with the new Pope either. This led to the Great Schism in which two and three popes ruled at once.
1644: English Parliament orders Roger Williams’s book The Bloudy Tenent to be burned in public, because it made an appeal for liberty of conscience against the “bloudy” practice of persecution.
1788: Birth of Adoniram Judson, an American Baptist missionary, who sailed to Burma and spent 38 years in missionary and literacy work there. He also translated the entire Bible into Burmese by 1834.
1851: Repose of Karl F. A. Guetzlaff, the first German Lutheran missionary to China.
1883: Demise of Robert Moffat, a pioneer missionary to southern Africa, who also translated the Bible into the Sechvana language.
1884: Birth of Kenneth Scott Latourette, a Baptist church historian, who authored a 7-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity (1937-45) and a 5-volume Christianity in a Revolutionary Age (1958-62).
1933: Repose of hymn-writer William H. Draper at Clifton, Bristol, who had translated the hymn “All Creatures of Our God and King” by Francis of Assisi into English.
1945: The United States drops an atom bomb on Urakami (Nagasaki), killing many and causing colossal damages to the ecology, which are felt even today.
1951: Arrest of Tsiang Beda, the Jesuit bishop of Shanghai, because he refused to head the state-run church in China. He then died in prison.
1960: The Church of the Lutheran Confession adopts its constitution at a convention held at Watertown, South Dakota. But the denomination was formally organized only in the following January (1961) at Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.
1970: A solemn liturgy is conducted at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Cathedral on Kodiak Island, Alaska to honour St. Herman, the “Wonderworker of All America.” Simultaneous services took place at other Orthodox centers too.
1992: Zareef Moreed Iskander, a Christian building contractor from Beni Khalid, Egypt, is murdered by militant Muslims, who accused him of attempting to construct a church without the building permit.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org