The Papal States came to an end today in 1870, ending 1,114 years during which the Pope had ruled significant parts of Italy like a King, complete with military forces. Pope Pius IX defied the Italian army besieging Rome to the end, fallibly declaring just 10 days earlier, ‘I am no prophet, nor son of a prophet, but I tell you, you will never enter Rome!’ However, the army did exactly that by breaching the city wall by the Porta Pia (above). Rome became the capital of the newly unified Italy, and the papacy went into a 60 year sulk. Successive Popes became ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’, refusing to leave the tiny territory, and disdaining to appear on the balcony of St Peter’s.
Sometime between midnight and 3am this morning in 1931, CS Lewis, the eventual author of Narnia and Screwtape, took a walk along the riverbank in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, with two friends – JRR Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. As they walked they talked about Lewis’s objections to becoming a Christian. Tolkien and Dyson, a Catholic and an Anglican, persuaded Lewis to think of Christianity with the same appreciation and enjoyment he brought to thinking about ancient myths. As they talked, something fell into place for Lewis, and a few days later, during a motorbike ride to a zoo, he came to believe, as he later said, ‘that Jesus Christ is the Son of God’.
‘Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself… I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and revived god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels… Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.’ CS Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 1931
York Minster took delivery of a new bell today in 1927. Christened Great Peter, it weighed 10.8 imperial tons, the third biggest British bell at the time it was cast. Installed in the belfry of York Minster, Great Peter rings in E-flat, like its brother bell Great Paul, the unfeasibly large bell of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, which weighs 16.7 tons.
It is the birthday of the Methodist Church of Great Britain. On this day in 1932, three separate branches of Methodism united in London’s Royal Albert Hall. They were the Wesleyan Methodists, who owned most of the church buildings; the Primitive Methodists, whose religion was hot and enthusiastic; and the United Methodists, who had come together from several small groups, such as the Bible Christians. They celebrated by producing a new hymn book which included all their favourite hymns.
It is the feast day of Eustace, a fictitious saint with a good folk tale. Pious legends say that he was a general of the 2nd century Emperor Trajan, who was out hunting when he came across a stag with a neon crucifix between its antlers. Converted to Jesus on the spot, he was sacked from the army, then reinstated, led his men to glorious victory over the barbarians, only to be martyred when he refused to give thanks to the gods.
Image: Wikimedia Commons