The film director Franco Zeffirelli (above) died today in 2019 in Rome, aged 96. He initially made his name with two film adaptations of Shakespeare, but in the 1970s his focus shifted to faith, with his movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about the life of Francis of Assisi, and then the epic film and TV drama Jesus of Nazareth. Zeffirelli’s Jesus film was triply blessed by being endorsed by the Pope, condemned as blasphemous by American fundamentalists before they had even seen it, and funded by General Motors.
The Anglican priest and anti-apartheid leader Trevor Huddleston was born in Bedford, England, today in 1913. He sailed to South Africa in his late 20s and became a popular and much-loved priest in Sophiatown, a black suburb of Johannesburg which Huddleston said had ‘a vitality and exuberance about it which belong to no other suburb in South Africa… it positively sparkles with life’. He campaigned there against the racist apartheid laws, which increasingly restricted the non-European population of South Africa, and against the brutal bulldozing of Sophiatown, a tragedy which happened in 1955. He is the author of Naught for Your Comfort, one of the most culturally significant books of the 1950s.
‘I am not trying to fight the religious convictions of the Calvinist Afrikaner by any other means than the proclamation of the Catholic faith. But I do not, for that reason, believe it to be wrong or foolish or un-Christian to try to strike from the hand of white South Africa the weapons which not only hurt and wound the African every day but must also ultimately destroy civilisation on this sub-continent.’ Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort
Today in 1497, Giovanni Borgia’s corpse was found floating in the River Tiber in Rome, mutilated by nine dagger wounds and with 30 golden ducats untouched in his purse. The beloved son of the corrupt Borgia Pope Alexander VI and his former mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei, the word on the street was that he was killed in a love triangle with his brother Gioffre Borgia and his wife. The Pope’s grief was intensified when the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro called him ‘a fisher of men’ in retrieving his dead son from the Tiber.
Pope Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine (‘Arise O Lord’) today in 1520, putting the German Reformer Martin Luther on notice that he had 60 days to stop preaching and publishing, and that he had to publicly recant his teachings. The bull, which called Luther ‘the wild boar from the forest’, was thrown into a river by Luther’s followers, and Luther himself burned his own copy on a bonfire in Wittenberg the following December. He said (possibly anticipating the modern meaning of the word ‘bull’), ‘whoever wrote this bull is Antichrist’. A month later, he was excommunicated.
‘We condemn, reprobate, and reject completely each of these theses or errors as either heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears or seductive of simple minds, and against Catholic truth. By listing them, we decree and declare that all the faithful of both sexes must regard them as condemned, reprobated, and rejected.’ Exsurge Domine
It is the feast day of St Germaine of Pibrac, a shepherdess from a village near Toulouse, France, who died today in 1601. Ill as a child, she was badly treated by her stepmother, and mocked for her religious piety by the villagers, who called her ‘the little bigot’. This changed one winter’s day when her stepmother suspected Germaine had sneaked bread out of the house in her apron to give to a homeless person. When Germaine opened the apron, spring flowers tumbled out. She was made a saint in 1867.
Image: Alexey Yushenkov