Ayrton Senna (above), the Brazilian Forumla One racing driver, died today in 1994 when his car left the track and crashed into a concrete wall during the San Marino Grand Prix. A faithful Catholic, Senna had a daily practice of Bible reading and reported seeing a vision of God when he won his first championship in 1988. An estimated 3 million people lined the streets of São Paulo for his funeral.
Today in 1965, during the Cold War, Gabriel the Holy Fool, a priest-monk from Tbilisi, Georgia, burned a 26 foot high portrait of Lenin during a communist May Day parade. He was beaten by the crowd, tortured, sentenced to death, and finally declared to be a psychopath. When he was released, he became a holy fool, masquerading as a drunkard and preaching loudly in the streets. Icons of St Gabriel, who died in 1995, show him smiling sweetly, a rare sight in the severe world of Orthodox icons.
It is May Day. The ancient May Day tradition of young girls dancing around a tall pole was presumably a fertility rite, but retained its popularity right through the Middle Ages. In England, the Cromwell regime of the 1650s outlawed maypoles, so on the first May Day after the King’s restoration, in 1661, a 130 foot maypole was erected in London’s Strand, in place of the Charing Cross (which the Puritans had also destroyed because crosses are idolatrous). Fifty-seven years later, in 1718, Isaac Newton bought the maypole and used it to construct a telescope.
David Livingstone died today in 1873, in what is now Zambia. He spent 30 years walking across Africa with his wife and child, mapping, discovering and opening it up to the benefits of Christian faith, European culture, and… er… colonial oppression. Where he went, the colonialist Cecil Rhodes soon followed.
Today in 1987, Pope John Paul II beatified Edith Stein, a Jewish-born Carmelite nun who was gassed in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. On the same day in 2011, John Paul II was himself beatified by his successor, Pope Benedict XVI.
Pope Pius V, the excommunicator of Queen Elizabeth I, died today in 1572.
Augustin Schoeffler, a French missionary in northern Vietnam, was executed in Son Tay for illegal preaching today in 1851. A sign was carried before him as he walked to the execution site, which read, ‘He preached truly the whole charge of preaching the religion of Jesus. His crime is patent. Let Mr Augustin be beheaded and cast into a stream.’ He is now a saint of the Catholic Church.
Image : Ben Sutherland