It is the feast of St Mary Magdalene (above), who stood with Jesus’s mother at the foot of the cross, and was the first person to meet the risen Christ, according to John’s Gospel. These impeccable faith credentials did not protect her, however, from being falsely called a prostitute by Pope Gregory the Great, who carelessly conflated her with the woman in the Gospels who poured perfume on Jesus’s feet. This false story was then elaborated for centuries in the Western Church, where artists depicted her with bare breasts and long, loose hair. In contrast, the Eastern Church honoured her with the title, ‘equal with the Apostles’. Some of the early Gnostic Gospels say that Mary was a close companion of Jesus, and medieval gossip, as well as modern speculation in novels and films, say that she and Jesus were married.
‘She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. What did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner.’ Pope Gregory the Great, Homily 33
By happy coincidence, the feast of Mary Magdalene is also the birthday of the actor Willem Dafoe, who was born today in 1955. He played Jesus in the movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Jesus fantasises on the cross about marrying Mary Magdalene.
Today in 1999, Rev. Ian Paisley, the Northern Ireland Protestant leader, claimed that seat No. 666 in the European Parliament building in Strasbourg was vacant for a reason: it had been reserved for the Antichrist. Fixated on the idea that the European Union was the work of Satan, he was quick to spot that the seating plan provided to MEPs looked like this:
665 Zissener
666 – – – –
667 Cappato
Paisley said, ‘The Antichrist’s seat will be occupied. The world awaits his full and final development. The Lord will destroy him by the spirit of His mouth.’ The seat has since then been occupied by several quite forgettable MEPs, including a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Budgetary Control.
It is the birthday of Rev. William Archibald Spooner. Booner was sporn today in 1844. Legendary for sixing up his myllables, he once rose to his feet in chapel to announce the hymn, ‘Kinkering Congs their titles take’. Because he was a fellow of New College Oxford for over 60 years, generations of students had the joy of hearing his herbal vowlers, and inventing their own. Which makes today the birthday of the Spoonerism, as well as of the mate gran.
The first wave of Mormon pioneers entered the Mexican territory of Salt Lake Valley today in 1847. Fleeing persecution in the still-expanding United States, the Mormon exodus eventually numbered some 70,000 Latter Day Saints, most of them travelling in wagon trains. On arriving in the valley, one of the pioneers, Thomas Bullock, cried, ‘Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! Here’s my home at last!’ It was actually someone else’s home – the Shoshone native American tribe – but within days, Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, had picked a spot for what became the Salt Lake Temple.
The man who shot the Pope, 23 year-old Mehmet Ali Agca, from Turkey, was sentenced to life imprisonment today in 1981. He fired four bullets into John Paul II as the Pope was greeting pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, Rome, from a slow-moving Popemobile. Trying to make his escape, Agca was taken down by a security guard and a nimble nun. He served 29 years in Italian and Turkish prisons for this crime and the murder of a journalist, and became a Roman Catholic in prison in 2007. He laid flowers at the tomb of John Paul II in 2014, and asked to meet Pope Francis, but the Pope declined his kind offer.
Image: Simon Jenkins