Coventry Cathedral, which had been bombed to bits in the Coventry blitz of 1940, was rededicated today in 1962. The new building, which stands alongside the cleaned-up old ruins, was designed by Basil Spence, an architect of the brutalist style, but came out pretty well, with a 23 metre high tapestry of Christ, a baptistery window of smouldering beauty, and a startling sculpture of St Michael brandishing a spear while hovering over a chained Devil.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, was disciplined today in 1989 by the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, in which he was an elder, for offending God. Lord Mackay’s dreadful sin was that he had gone to a Roman Catholic requiem mass for a friend and colleague. His church, sometimes nicknamed the Wee Wee Frees, who specialise in putting the ‘mental’ back into ‘fundamentalism’, told him he could forget about coming to church again until he had repented and promised never to go anywhere near a Catholic church ever again. Instead, Lord Mackay left the church, which promptly split in two, with the Mackayites forming a new grouping, the Associated Presbyterian Churches. God was unavailable for comment.
Pope Gregory VII, a towering figure of the Middle Ages, died today in 1085. He was the first Bishop of Rome to monopolise the title of ‘Pope’, which all patriarchs in the Eastern Church had shared in the early days, and declared that all Popes (of Rome) are automatically saints. He famously excommunicated and deposed the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, and then kept him waiting for three days as the Emperor stood barefoot in the snow seeking reconciliation.
Today in 1995, Pope John Paul II issued his encyclical Ut Unum Sint (‘That They May be One’), inviting other Christian denominations to ‘patient and fraternal dialogue’ in search of full and visible unity.
It is the feast day of St Aldhelm, a 7th century bishop in Wessex, and one of the greatest scholars of Anglo-Saxon England. His intense love of Latin led him to write word plays, riddles, acrostics and poetry, as well as complex prose works such as De Laude Virginitatis (The Praise of Virginity), which he addressed to the nuns of Barking Abbey. As Bishop of Sherborne, he was energetic and unconventional. When people were slow to come to church, he took church to them, standing on a bridge, clowning and singing hymns, until he had a crowd big enough to preach to. He also wrote songs which were still being sung in the reign of King Alfred, 150 years after his time. Sadly, not a note of them has come down to us today.
Image: Diliff