March 3
1033: Passing away of Cunegunda, Queen of Bavaria, who left the palace to live in a Benedictine Nunnery after the death of her husband, Holy Roman Emperor Henry II. At the convent, she led a life of humility and insisted that no one treat her as the empress she had once been. She took up the duty of a servant and performed the lowest jobs at the convent. She was canonized in 1200 and is known as the Patroness of Luxemberg and of the Archdiocese of Bamberg in Germany.
1547: The Council of Trent declared in its 7th session, “If anyone says that one baptized cannot, even if he wishes, lose grace, however much he may sin, unless he is unwilling to believe, let him be anathema.’
1556: Two hundred Protestants are driven out of catholic Locarno in Switzerland. They are said to have had refuge in Zurich through Henry Bullinger.
1589: Death of Lutheran educator Johannes Sturm, whose emphasis on Latin studies dominated Protestant educational models long after the Reformation.
1744: David Brainerd, Colonial missionary to the American Indians, confessed in his journal, “In the morning, spent an hour in prayer. Prayer was so sweet an exercise to me that I knew not how to cease, lest I lose the spirit of prayer.”
1950: Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, reflected in his work Sign of Jonas, “The Christian life…is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. And these discoveries are sometimes most profitable when you find him in something you had tended to overlook or even despise.”
1959: The American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America merges into a single denomination.
1963: An assembly of priests and lay people from Kenya and Uganda held in Kampala reaffirms the participants’ full support of and belongingness to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org