Tonight in 1879, people passing by the parish church in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland, saw its gable end illuminated by soft, flickering light. Soon, there appeared on the wall the Virgin Mary, St John, St Joseph, a lamb standing on an altar, and angels going up and down. Between 7.30 and 10pm, some 20 villagers stood mesmerised by this rather crowded apparition, even though they were soon drenched by the pouring rain. In the days following, miracles of healing were reported at the scene, and the gable end of the church was torn to bits by people wanting relics to take home. Knock has since become a major Marian pilgrimage centre, with its own basilica (above), and has been visited by Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis.
Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster and an otherwise good man, preached an aloof and pedantic sermon at the height of a London plague, today in 1603. He was in the pulpit of a church in Chiswick, because he had abandoned his parish of St Giles Cripplegate, where almost 3,000 of his parishioners died that year while he took a break and was waited on by a butler and a cook.
‘Generally, there is no evil (saith Job) but it is a sparke of God’s wrath. And of all evils, the Plague by name. There is wrath gone out from the Lord, and the plague is begunne (saith Moses, Numbers 16.46). So it is said, God was displeased with David, and he smote Israel with the plague. So that if there bee a plague, God is angry: and if there be a great plague, God is very angry.’ Lancelot Andrewes, ‘A Sermon Preached at Chiswick in the Time of Prestilence’
The Aussie Bible, backed by the Bible Society of New South Wales, was launched in Sydney today in 2003. Written by radio talkshow host and crime writer Kel Richards, whose previous bestseller had been The Case of the Vanishing Corpse, the new Bible turned Jesus into ‘God’s toddler’, and the Virgin Mary into ‘a pretty special Sheila’. Asked about the source of his inspiration, Kel Richards said, ‘I don’t know if it was a brainwave, a seizure, or a bad oyster.’ It sold 100,000 copies in short order after it was published.
‘When Libby was six months gone, God sent the same angel, “this Gabriel bloke”, to a backblocks town called Nazareth, in the Galilee shire, to a nice young girl who was engaged to the local carpenter, Joe Davidson. Her name was Mary. The angel said to her, “G’day Mary. You are a pretty special Sheila. God has his eye on you.” Mary went weak at the knees, and wondered what was going on.’ The Aussie Bible
It is the feast of St Pius X, who died yesterday in 1914. As Pope, he beatified St Joan of Arc and introduced a purge of ‘modernism’ from the Church, in which the jobs of priests, theologians, bishops and even cardinals were at risk. The paranoid espionage service which ran this new inquisition had its own secret code in which Pius himself was known as ‘Mama’.
St Francis de Sales was born today in 1567. Bishop of Geneva and one of the leaders of the Catholic Reformation, Francis is now best known for writing his much-loved book, Introduction to the Devout Life, and for being the patron saint of journalists.
Image: jcsullivan24 under CC BY-NC 2.0