Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on the balcony of his motel (above) in Memphis, Tennessee, at 6.01pm today in 1968. He died from a single bullet wound in hospital an hour later. His final words, to a musician present on the balcony, were, ‘Ben, make sure you play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.’
John Venn, one-time Anglican priest, mathematician, philosopher and creator of the Venn diagram, died today in 1923. The son of a long line of evangelicals, he gave up being a priest when his faith and his philosophy no longer overlapped.
Today in the year 896, Pope Formosus died and was buried. Nothing very unusual about that, except that he was dug up the next year by Pope Stephen VI and put on trial for perjury at the notorious Cadaver Synod. Dressed in papal robes and seated on a throne, Formosus’s corpse was found guilty, buried again in a poor graveyard, then dug up again and thrown into the Tiber, where it washed ashore and allegedly started performing miracles. None of this did Pope Stephen much good. He was deposed a few months later and strangled in prison.
It is St Isidore of Seville’s Day. Isidore was a prolific writer and produced a dictionary, a history of the world, books on astronomy and natural history, and a 20 volume encyclopedia called the Etymologiae. In 2001 he became patron saint of the Internet, which must keep him busy.
St Francisco de Jesus Marto, one of the three young Portuguese children who witnessed the Fátima apparitions in 1916 and 1917, died today in 1919 at the age of 10. Along with his sister Jacinta, he was made a saint by Pope Francis I in 2017.
St Ambrose died today in 397. As Bishop of Milan, a city deeply divided between the Nicenes and the Arians (two rival factions in early Christianity) he organised a sit-in to prevent his church being handed over to the Arians. He organised a sing-song to keep his congregation’s spirits up and their theology on target – and thus helped introduce hymn-singing to the western church.
Image: David Wilson