December 25
336: The earliest known year in which Jesus’ nativity is celebrated on December 25th, as noticed in the Philocalian Calendar of A.D. 354. But Greek Orthodoxy commemorated Jesus’ birth on January 6th, although most of the Eastern churches had accepted the Roman date by the 400s.
508: (or as early as 496) St. Remigius baptizes King Clovis, who united Gaul and founded France, in the Cathedral of Rheims along with three thousand of his warriors. Clotilda, the king’s wife, was instrumental in “converting” him.
597: Thousands of Anglo-Saxons are baptized by Augustine, a missionary, paving the way for the Christianization of Southern England.
1537: Martin Luther, the German reformer, said: ‘It is the most ungodly and dangerous business to abandon the certain and revealed will of God in order to search into the hidden mysteries of God.’
1572: Demise of Peter Melius Juhász, a Hungarian reformer and religious writer and prominent bishop of the Calvinist Reformed Church in Transylvania. He also had produced an early botanical and medicinal work in Hungarian language.
1898: The first continental council of the Latin American Roman Catholic Church convened in Rome, attended by thirteen archbishops and forty-one bishops. It issued 998 canons, with the aim of checking anti-Christian influences.
1905: Repose of Apostolos Makrakis in Athens, who had considered himself chosen to liberate Byzantium from the Turks and to renovate the church. He was often at odds with the Greek Orthodox Church but was popular with the middle class Christians. He had he preached controversial sermons on Christ throughout Greece, and condemned Freemasonry, materialism, and the buying and selling of church positions, which forced the Local councils condemned him to prison.
1909: Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese evangelist, begins his ministry in the slums of Shinkawa. He is known for his statement, “Theology is but an appendix to love, and an unreliable appendix!”
1923: The first electrically-lit Christmas tree appears in the White House, during Calvin Coolidge’s first Christmas as president.
2011: Islamic terrorists bomb many churches in Nigeria (in Madalla, Jos, Kano, Damaturu, and Gadaka), in which dozens of Christians attending Christmas services were killed.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy:Â https://studylight.org