March 31
1376: Pope Gregory XI issues an interdict against the city of Florence for joining a league to abolish the pope’s secular power.
1515: Pope Leo X announces the sale of indulgences for eight years beginning this day, in an effort to funds to rebuild St. Peter’s basilica. This triggered Martin Luther, who already differed with the catholic church on its various teachings, to post his Ninety-Five Theses in response, leading to the protestant Reformation.
1783: Franiskan priest  Junipero Serra founds San Buenaventura, the ninth Spanish mission in California, on Easter Sunday.
1787: John Wesley, English founder of Methodism, claimed in a letter, “When the witness and the fruit of the Spirit meet together, there can be no stronger proof that we are of God…. Were you to substitute…reason for the witness of the Spirit, you would never be established.”
1816: Passing away of Francis Asbury, a pioneer Methodist bishop in America. He witnessed the growth of the denomination from under 500 members to over 200,000.
1879: Death of archbishop John Veniaminov (St. Innocent of Alaska) of the Russian Orthodox, who served as a missionary to Alaska and as the archbishop of the far western territories of Russia. He later became the Metropolitan of Moscow.
194:5 Mother Maria Skobtsova, a Russian poet and nun in the Orthodox Church,  is executed at the gas chamber in Ravensbrück. She was famous for helping the “down and out” people, including Jews persecuted by the Nazis in France. She was declared a saint in 2004.
1958: C. S. Lewis, English apologist, regretted in Letters to an American Lady, “What most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour.”
1976: Francis Schaeffer, American Presbyterian apologist, reminded the believers in a letter, “You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand.”
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy:Â www.studylight.org