Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the USSR, died on this day in 1971. He was responsible for the most devastating attack ever made on the Russian Church. Where his predecessor, Stalin, had controlled religion, Khrushchev attempted to destroy it. Under his instigation, some 15,000 churches and 40 monasteries were closed, priests were made to do forced labour, believers who met secretly were imprisoned, and children under 18 were forbidden from attending church services. Khrushchev was deposed by his enemies in 1964 and is said to have asked them, ‘What are you going to do now? Crucify me on a cross like Christ?’ Instead, he was given a pension and a country dacha, where he grew vegetables, took up photography, and wrote memoirs which the Kremlin denounced as a fraud.
‘I want to die an honest man. I’m seventy years old. I’m in my right mind, and I answer for all my words and deeds… I’m ready to die on the cross. Bring on the nails and the hammer. That’s not just a phrase. I want it.’ Nikita Khrushchev, 1970
Today is the feast day of St Paphnutius of Thebes, an Egyptian monk and a hero of the early church. Paphnutius was tortured in one of the last persecutions of the Roman Empire, under the Emperor Maximinus, and was blinded in one eye and had his leg hamstrung. For this reason he commanded special respect when he attended the Council of Nicea in the year 325.
Oliver Cromwell’s notorious massacre of Drogheda took place today in 1649. Cromwell invaded Ireland to fight an alliance of Irish Catholics and English Royalists and put Ireland back under the heel of the English Parliament. When Drogheda, a coastal town north of Dublin, refused to surrender, Cromwell’s New Model Army massacred the defending garrison, which numbered 3,000 soldiers, and mercilessly butchered hundreds of the town’s inhabitants, including Catholic priests, who were clubbed to death. The cold-blooded brutality of Drogheda is a terrifying moment in the history of Ireland, and a terrible mark on the Old Testament style faith of Cromwell.
‘And now give me leave to say how it comes to pass that this work is wrought. It was set upon some of our hearts, that a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the Spirit of God. And is it not so, clearly? That which caused your men to storm so courageously, it was the Spirit of God, who gave your men courage, and took it away again; and gave the Enemy courage, and took it away again; and gave your men courage again, and therewith this happy success. And therefore it is good that God alone have all the glory.’ Oliver Cromwell, letter to Speaker Lenthall, 17 September 1649
Two men who spent time with the astronomer Galileo Galilei had their birthdays on this date. The first, Vincenzo Maculano, was the Roman Inquisitor who grilled Galileo for heresy, and who was born today in 1578. Maculano threatened Galileo with torture, and found him ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’, for which he was confined to his house for the rest of his life. The second, Joseph Calasanz, born today in 1557, was a Spanish priest and close friend of Galileo who supported and defended him in Rome when he was undergoing interrogation by the Inquisitor. Calasanz is a saint of the Catholic Church.
Perpetual adoration of the holy sacrament began in the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Avignon today in 1226, and continued with hardly any interruption until the French Revolution closed it down in 1792. The consecrated bread was put on visible display in thanksgiving for a peaceful end to the Siege of Avignon in 1226. The crowds who came to see it were so huge that the Chapel stayed open all night as well as all day, and then basically never closed for the next 566 years.
Image: Wikimedia Commons