February 14
270: (traditional date) St. Valentine, a priest and physician, believed to have lived in Rome. He is supposed to have been martyred during the Christian persecution by Emperor Claudius II. He is popular as the patron of lovers, people with epilepsy and of the beekeepers.
1009: Martyrdom of Bruno of Querfert (also known as Boniface) and his associates at the hands of the Lithuanians, the Baltic ethnic group in Lithuania.
1568: Orthodox monk Damian is martyred by Turks in Larissa, Greece, after 15 days of torture in jail, because his teachings allegedly led to a decrease in sales on Sunday.
1760: Birth of Richard Allen in slavery in Philadelphia. He was the first black to be ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church (1799).
1805: Henry Ware, Colonial American theologian, was confirmed as the first Unitarian professor to teach at Harvard University.
1942: Chen Sulan, a Methodist, is captured by Japan’s secret police while fleeing Japanese invaders, because he fought against his government’s monopolistic sale of opium. He had also established an anti-opium clinic that rehabilitated around seven thousand addicts. He was one among the founders of the Chinese YMCA.
1949: Chaim Weizmann, Russian-born English chemist and Zionist leader, is elected the first president of the newly restored modern state of Israel.
1985: The U.S. Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism announces their revolutionary decision to accept women as rabbis.
Edited by:Â T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org