The Synod of Diamper opened today in 1599, in Udayamperoor (above), in Kerala State, India. In it, Alexis de Menzez, the Catholic Archbishop of Goa, single-handedly rewrote the 1,500-year old traditions of Indian Christianity by imposing Latin Catholicism. The Thomas Christians, who traced their story back to the missionary journeys of the apostle Thomas, which brought him to India, had previously been part of the Church of the East, headquartered in Persia. Fifty years after the synod, there was a revolt, which resulted in a permanent schism among the Thomas Christians.
John Chrysostom, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was exiled on this day in 404 for his attacks on the morality and social ethics of his rich parishioners and priests. Wanting to avoid a riot at his arrest, John had his mule saddled and waiting at the great west door of the cathedral, while he slipped out of a side entrance, where he was whisked away into a small boat at the harbour. John’s supporters, trapped in the cathedral, rioted anyway, and the cathedral was burned to the ground.
Margareta Ebner, the German nun and mystic, died today in 1351, in her convent in Dillingen, a Bavarian town on the Danube. She entered the local convent when she was 14, but at 21 she became seriously ill for the next decade of her life. It was then that she started to have dreams and visions of meeting and talking with the infant Jesus, which her confessor encouraged her to write down in letters and a journal. She was beatified in 1979, after an investigation process that took church bureaucrats 300 years to sort out.
‘Your sweet pleasure finds me, your inner yearning forces me, your burning love binds me… now I want to give you the love-kiss which is a pleasure to your soul, a sweet inner touching, a lovely union.’ Margareta Ebner, Revelations
Theophilus Lindsey, the English theologian and clergyman who founded the first Unitarian congregation in Britain, at Essex Street Chapel, London, was born today in 1723. He became the Vicar of Catterick in Yorkshire, but after he lost his belief in the trinity, he petitioned parliament to let C of E clergymen interpret the Bible for themselves. Parliament refused even to look at the petition, and so Lindsey resigned as Vicar and became a Unitarian.
Image: Sivahari