It is St Catherine’s Day, the saint famous for holding a wheel. The legend of Catherine (above) is one of the most fantastical of all saintly stories: fed by a dove in prison, winning an argument with 50 philosophers, refusing to marry the emperor, surviving an attempt to crush her on a spiked wheel, converting 200 Roman soldiers, bleeding milk and not blood when beheaded, and finally flown by angels to Mt Sinai, where a monastery still stands in her name. (The last bit, about the existence of the monastery, is actually true.)
Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, who served both Kings Henry VIII and Edward VI, was excommunicated by the Pope in Rome today in 1555. The following February, he was publicly degraded from his office as archbishop (and also as bishop, priest and deacon), and a month after that, at the insistence of Queen Mary I, he was burned at the stake as a heretic.
Isaac Watts, the first great modern English hymn writer, died today in 1748. Watts was a Congregationalist minister, and his first book of hymns was published in 1707. At that time, nonconformist churches had been legal in Britain for only 18 years, and before that they had had to keep the noise down. Other dissenters had published hymns before Watts, but his were the first that were any good.
See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down:
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown.
Isaac Watts, ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’
The biggest Orthodox cathedral in the world, the People’s Salvation Cathedral in Bucharest, Romania, was consecrated today in 2018. Standing at 120 metres tall, containing 42 crypts and four atomic bunkers, capable of welcoming a congregation of 5,000, and looking down on the Communist-era Romanian Parliament building, the monstrous cathedral cost 110 million euros, most of it from the pockets of taxpayers. At the time the cathedral was consecrated, a mosaic of the Virgin Mary, the biggest in the world, was still taking shape above the altar.
Today in 1996, the liberal Catholic reform group We Are Church was founded in Rome, and called for a new Pope who would allow equality, dialogue and democracy in the Church. The group, which claimed the theologian Hans Küng as a prophet, sought renewal of the Church in the direction of women’s ordination, an end to priestly celibacy, and the election of Bishops by popular vote.
‘In the wintry Church, We Are Church has kept the embers smouldering under the ashes. May the fire of reform now finally take hold of the whole Church and also the Vatican. So continue, dear friends: courage, creativity and perseverance!’ Hans Küng, 2020
Image: Rijksmuseum / Public domain