Pope Paul VI issued the document Ingravescentem aetatem (‘Advancing age’) today in 1970, banning cardinals over 80 from having a say in the election of popes. This rule is still in force, though the Pope himself is allowed to be as old as he wants.
Robert Tilton’s notorious health and wealth show, Success-N-Life, which earned Tilton’s operation $80 million a year, was the subject of an exposé today in 1991. ABC News alleged that Tilton threw away prayer requests unread while harvesting the checks sent with them. The show routinely asked its viewers for donations of $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000, promising the Lord would bless those who gave with material wealth.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of liberal theology, was born into a devout Moravian family today in 1768. Young Friedrich experienced a spiritual awakening when he was 14, but even before that age he had a questioning and sceptical mind. By the time he was 18, he wrote to his father, an army chaplain, to say that he had lost his childhood faith in the divinity of Christ. He was drawn instead to the poets and philosophers of his time, and in a creative fusion between the piety of his childhood and the Romantic movement, he redefined religion as feeling and experience, freed from dogma. His revolutionary ideas were the beginnings of modern theology.
‘The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal.’ Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘The Nature of Religion’
Voltaire, the Enlightenment wit, essayist and philosopher, was born in Paris today in 1694. He was baptised the next day as Francois-Marie Arouet, but eventually rebranded himself as Voltaire, apparently because his family called him le petit volontaire (‘the determined little thing’) when he was a child. In his teens he went to a Jesuit school, but it only served to give him lifelong ammunition for his satirical and trenchant attacks on Christianity. During a two-year exile in England, Voltaire was impressed by the English Deists who believed in a supreme being, whose existence could be known by reason rather than by faith. He adopted the Deist view and took it back with him to France, promoting it to become a new international creed.
The Virgin Mary was presented at the temple in Jerusalem by her parents today, according to the traditional Christian calendar. The story, which is not in the New Testament, says that her parents, Joachim and Anna, brought her there in thanksgiving, as they had previously been childless.
‘And the priest received her, and kissed her, and blessed her, saying: The Lord has magnified your name in all generations. In you, on the last of the days, the Lord will manifest His redemption to the sons of Israel. And he set her down upon the third step of the altar, and the Lord God sent grace upon her; and she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her.’ Gospel of James, 2nd century
Image: Aleteia Image Department