It is St Bernadette’s Day. Bernadette Soubirous, who was born into extreme poverty in the French market town of Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, reported the visions of the Virgin Mary for which she (and her town) became famous when she was 14 years old. She died of tuberculosis today in 1879 at the age of 35. Since the appearances of Mary to her in 1858, more than 200 million people have visited the shrine of Lourdes.
Today in AD 73, Masada, a Jewish fortress perched on an impressive rock plateau overlooking the Dead Sea, fell to the Romans 10th Legion after several months of siege. The fortress, orginally built by King Herod the Great, had been seized seven years earlier by the Sicarii (‘dagger men’), a group of Jewish Zealots who specialised in acts of cloak and dagger warfare. When the Romans finally broke the siege, they discovered that the rebels had committed mass suicide, or rather, that a group of men had been chosen by lot to kill everyone, and then each other.
‘Let our wives die unabused, our children without knowledge of slavery. After that let us do each other an ungrudging kindness, preserving our freedom as a glorious winding-sheet. But first, let our possessions and the whole fortress go up in flames. It will be a bitter blow to the Romans, that I know, to find our persons beyond their reach and nothing left for them to loot.’ Speech of Eleazar ben Ya’ir, Sicarii commander
Martin Luther King Jr wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail today in 1963, arguing that non-violent protest against racism and recial segregation was justified, even if it meant breaking unjust laws. King had been imprisoned a few days earlier, and began writing his letter in the margins of a newspaper, until he was allowed a writing pad. King made his case by quoting Augustine, Aquinas and other theologians, and by appealing to the teaching of Jesus.
‘Never before have I written so long a letter… It would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?’ Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail
Today is also the feast of Benedict Joseph Labre, the western fool for Christ and wandering holy man. He traipsed around Europe barefoot from shrine to shrine on a meandering pilgrimage to Rome, where he died in the back of a butcher’s shop after sleeping rough in the Colosseum. He is a patron of people rejected by religious orders (which he was), the homeless (which he also was), and the mentally ill.
St Fructuosus of Braga, prolific founder of monasteries in northwest Spain, died today in the year 665.