It is St Pancras’s Day. According to legend, he was a 14 year old orphan who died in the year 304 and was buried as a Christian martyr on the Aurelian Way in Rome. He is invoked for the spiritual wellbeing of teenagers. Especially popular in England, his name lives on in the Victorian fairytale-Gothic St Pancras railway station in London (above).
Today in 1982, an assassin dressed in a cassock attacked Pope John Paul II with a bayonet, calling out, ‘Down with the Pope, down with the Second Vatican Council!’ The assault took place during the Pope’s pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal, where he was giving thanks for surviving an assassination attempt of the previous year. That wasn’t the only irony: the Pope’s assailant believed the pontiff to be a secret agent of Communism.
The first stone of the New Room, the first Methodist meeting house, was laid today in 1739, ‘with the voice of praise and thanksgiving’. John Wesley had appointed 11 trustees to oversee the building, but when his partner Whitefield pointed out that they could turn him out if they disliked his preaching, he sacked the lot and went ahead out of his own resources and (more to the point) faith.
It is the feast of St Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 8th century. He is mostly remembered for defending Orthodox icons against Emperor Leo III, the first of the iconoclastic emperors, whose idea of a good time was smashing pictures of Jesus and the saints and throwing them on bonfires. Germanus retired (or, more likely, was deposed) and died soon after at the age of 100. He is the author of the Christmas carol, ‘A great and mighty wonder’.
A great and mighty wonder,
A full and holy cure!
The Virgin bears the infant
With virgin-honour pure:
Repeat the hymn again:
‘To God on high be glory,
And peace on earth to men.’
St Germanus
It’s also the feast of Epiphanius of Salamis, the 5th century Cypriot bishop, who loved arguing about correct doctrine a bit too much, and was known as a fiery controversialist. His book, The Medicine Box, takes issue with 80 heresies, which, he pointed out, match the 80 concubines of King Solomon mentioned in the Song of Songs.
John Masefield, the British Poet Laureate, died today in 1967, and his ashes were interred in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. So it was unfortunate when his family, a short time later, found these lines of verse addressed to them:
Let no religious rite be done or read
In any place for me when I am dead,
But burn my body into ash, and scatter
The ash in secret into running water,
Or on the windy down, and let none see;
And then thank God that there’s an end of me.
John Masefield
Image: Elliott Brown