It is the feast of St Kevin of Glendalough, from Wicklow County, Ireland, who died in the year 618. He was a hermit who lived in a 3 foot high hole in the side of a cliff above a lake (which still exists and is known as St Kevin’s Bed), and took freezing swims in the dead of winter. He also founded a monastery in Glendalough (above) and attracted many disciples, who honoured his memory with wildlife folk tales:
‘As he knelt in his accustomed fashion, with his hand outstretched through the window and lifted up to heaven, a blackbird settled on it, and busying herself as in her nest, laid in it an egg. And so moved was the saint that in all patience and gentleness he remained neither closing nor withdrawing his hand; but until the young ones were fully hatched, he held it out unwearied, shaping it for the purpose.’ Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica
The relics of St Alexander Nevsky, a key saint of the Russian Church, were returned to the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in St Petersburg today in 1989. Almost 70 years earlier, at the time of the Russian Revolution, they had been seized by the Bolsheviks, taken from the cathedral and put into storage in a museum of religion and atheism. The cathederal itself had been used as a warehouse during the Soviet era.
Pope John XXIII – ‘the good Pope’ – died today in 1963. He was elected (in 1958) as a stopgap Pope to keep things ticking over until the cardinals could agree on a proper Pope, but surprised everyone by using his papacy to begin a total rewrite of the Catholic faith, by calling the Second Vatican Council.
Thomas Becket was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by his buddy King Henry II today in 1162. The idea was for Thomas to bring the Church under Henry’s control, but once in the job he unexpectedly got religion and refused to go along with the plan. Henry had him killed, which also wasn’t a terribly successful plan, as Thomas immediately became England’s greatest ever supersaint, and Henry had to renounce his evil machinations and do penance at Thomas’s relics.
The city of Antioch finally fell to the army of the First Crusade today in 1098. They had started the siege vigorously by catapulting 200 Turkish heads over the city wall, but over the next eight months, the besiegers succumbed to starvation, freezing and cannibalism. Their timing of their victory was disastrous. They conquered the city just before Turkish reinforcements arrived, and so were themselves besieged in a city they had reduced to starvation. Which serves them right.
Image: Jeff Nyveen