Today is celebrated as the dormition (‘falling asleep’) of the Mother of God in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches. According to traditions dating back to the 3rd century or earlier, Mary died in Jerusalem, and the apostles, scattered throughout the world, were miraculously transported to be at her deathbed: ‘the apostles descended on a cloud to Mary’s door: twelve of them, each seated on a cloud’. Thomas was three days late, because he had to fly all the way from India, but arrived just in time to see Mary leave her tomb in Gethsemane and ascend into heaven. In the Western Church, the feast is known as the assumption of Mary, and is also celebrated today.
‘And Mary arose and went outside, and she prayed, saying her prayer. And after her prayer, she went in and lay down. And she fulfilled the course her life. And Peter sat at her head, John at her feet, and the rest of the apostles encircled her bier. And at that hour of the day, there was a tumult and a sweet, pleasant smell, like the odour of Paradise.’ The Ethiopic Book of Mary’s Repose, 4th-7th century, translated by Stephen J Shoemaker
At 6pm today in 1981, Mother Angelica flipped a switch and the first Catholic satellite broadcasting network in the US, Eternal Word Television Network, opened for broadcasting. Mother Angelica was a Poor Clare nun at a monastery near Birmingham, Alabama, with a gift for communication, a made-for-TV personality, and a catchphrase she deployed to motivate her more faint-hearted followers: ‘Unless we are willing to do the ridiculous, God will not do the miraculous’. Her network remains one of the largest religious media operations in the world.
Today in 1578, John of the Cross, a Spanish Carmelite monk, escaped from his cell in Toledo after nine months of brutal imprisonment by his monastic order. John had been leading a reform of the order, and his enemies shut him up in a small space, with a window just three fingers wide, on a diet of bread, water and half a sardine per day, with beatings by the community every Friday after supper. John despaired of his life, but his jailer provided him with paper and pen, and so he wrote many of the spiritual poems for which he is loved. He escaped by loosening the screws of the padlock and hinges on his cell door over several days, and by tearing his bedding into strips and knotting them into a makeshift rope to climb down from a high window. Escaping at 2am, he was admitted to a friendly convent in the town after sunrise, where he was hidden and found safety.
O shepherds, you who climb
with your sheep high across the slope,
if by chance you see
the one I love most deeply,
tell him I suffer, grieve and die.
St John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, written during his imprisonment, translated by Willis Barnstone
At 4pm today in 1666 Adam Schall von Bell, the German Jesuit missionary and astronomer, died in Beijing, China. He had spent 44 years in China, where he reformed the Chinese calendar, and found favour with two successive emperors, who allowed the Jesuits to build hundreds of churches. But after the death of the emperor in 1661, Schall was targeted by his enemies and was tried for conspiring against the state. He narrowly avoided being put to death under a sentence of ling-ch’ih, where the condemned is cut to pieces by a sharp sword, but his health was broken, and he died three months after being released from prison. Schall is still celebrated in China – where he is known as Tang Ruowang – and appears from time to time in TV soap operas about the Ming and Qing emperors.
Pope Gregory XVI denounced the modern world today in 1832 in his encyclical Mirari vos (‘That you wonder’). At a time of political unrest across Europe, he thundered against liberty of conscience and freedom of the press, and spoke fondly of book burning. His words set the world-rebuking tone of the papacy for the next century.
‘We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice.’ Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari vos
Image: Lawrence OP