April 04
397: Passing away of St. Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, one of the four Latin fathers. He was instrumental in leading Augustine of Hippo to Christ.
636: Demise of Isidore, archbishop of Seville, a Spanish scholar well known for his Etymologies, an encyclopedia of early medieval knowledge in twenty books that used liberal arts and secular learning as the foundation of Christian education.
896: Death of the controversial Pope Formosus, who had power struggles with political and religious leaders. His bones were exhumed and his corpse had to undergo a trial under Pope Stephen VI for alleged perjury. Later the mortal remains were reburied with full honors in St. Peter’s under Pope Romanus.
1081: Crowning of Alexius Comnenus as emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine), who sought military assistance from the West for the crusades.
1507: Ordination of Martin Luther as a priest of the Dominican Order in the Roman Catholic church, at age of 21. He later became the German reformer.
1523: Leonard Kopp smuggles twelve nuns out of the cloister at Nimbschen in Saxony, hiding them in his fish barrels. One of them, Katherina von Bora, later wedded Martin Luther.
1541: Ignatius Loyola, Spanish ecclesiastic reformer and mystic, elected the first General of the Jesuit Order, which he had founded the previous year.
1634: Passing away of Episcopius, leading Arminian theologian, in Amsterdam.
1660: King Charles II of England issues the Breda Declaration from his exile, making promises such as religious freedom, right to public opinion and equality. But he violated them soon after his return to England. The Presbyterians and the Independents such as John Bunyan had to suffer under him.
1687: James II issues a Declaration of Indulgence, allowing total freedom of worship in England, peaceable meetings of nonconformists and forgiving ecclesiastical offenses till date.
1739: The oratorio of Handel “Israel in Egypt” is performed for the first time completely at the King’s Theatre, London.
1742: Charles Wesley delivers his famous sermon, “Awake, thou that sleepest,” at the University of Oxford, which later became the most popular tract of Methodism.
1840: Passing away of John Campbell, a Scottish businessman, missionary, preacher, and philanthropist, who founded a tract society, numerous Sunday schools, societies for disgraced women, and a Bible society and even guided the mission work in South Africa. He brought Africans to Britain for training and pleaded for the abolition of the slave trade.
1889: Demise of Asa Mahan, an American holiness leader and the first president of Oberlin College and of Adrian College.
1944: Anne Frank, German Holocaust victim, wrote in her diary at the age of 14, “I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift…of expressing all that is in me.”
1964: The leading Catholics of Brazil side with dictator General Castelo Branco against the social democrat João Goulart. In their manifesto entitled “Brazil Has Decided for Freedom” they denounced atheistic communism.
1965: Jurgen Moltmann, German theologian, confessed in a letter to Karl Barth, “Polemics always make(s) one a little one-sided.”
1968: Assassination of Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., a staunch advocate of civil rights, in Memphis, Tennessee.
1995: Passing away of Sun Yanli, an eminent leader in the Three-Self Patriotic Church, the officially sanctioned church of China. He was cruelly persecuted for several years during the Cultural Revolution, in spite of this association with the government.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org