Today is the birthday of Sergius of Radonezh (above), one of Russia’s best loved saints, who was born today in about 1314. According to folk legend, his two brothers quickly learned to read and write, but Bartholomew (Sergius’s birth name) fell behind. One day, searching for a lost foal, he came across a monk under an oak tree, with the appearance of an angel, who blessed him and asked what he was seeking. The boy asked him to pray he would understand books. The monk gave him a piece of bread, which tasted of honey, and said, ‘Take and eat this, child; it is given you as a sign of God’s grace.’ The two of them returned to Batholomew’s parents. They all went into the village chapel, where the monk read the service, while Bartholomew assisted, reading perfectly from the book of Psalms.
Today in 1918 saw the first known two-minute silence. It took place in Cape Town, South Africa, at the instigation of the mayor, Sir Harry Hands, whose son had died on the Western Front in France the previous month. Repeated daily for a whole year, the silence began with the firing of the Noon Gun on Signal Hill, at which the traffic stopped and the streets fell silent. The two-minute silence was adopted across the British Empire in November 1919.
’It is my desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities. During that time… all work, all sound, and all locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.’ King George V, November 1919
Meanwhile, among the contenders for the worst Pope of all time and eternity, John XII died today in the year 964, in bed (not his own) of a stroke, in his mid-twenties. Seventeen years old when he got the job, he had converted the papal palace into a brothel, sexually assaulted visitors to his church, and allegedly castrated clergy who criticized him. After a botched attempt to have the Holy Roman Emperor overthrown, he took all the church gold he could fit into a suitcase and made a run for it. Appropriately enough, it was John (previously known as Octavian) who started the tradition of Popes taking a saintly pseudonym, to dissociate the holy office of St Peter from their private lives.
Israel proclaimed itself an independent state today in 1948. It was immediately recognised by the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain declared an end to its mandate the following day, and the new state was beseiged by the armies of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and Syria, marking the beginning of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Image: shakko