On this date in 1966, at 4.35pm (GMT), the spacecraft Lunar Orbiter 1 took a photograph of the Earth just before the craft passed behind the far side of the Moon. The black and white photograph (above), developed in the spacecraft and transmitted back to Earth, was published in newspapers around the world three weeks later as the first ever image of the whole Earth seen from space. The International Flat Earth Society denounced it as ‘fraud, fake, trickery or decceit’, while the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was shocked by the picture and its reduction of humanity, saying, ‘Only a God can save us.’
Cecilia Gimenez, an 81 year-old parishioner armed with a paintbrush, caused an internet sensation today in 2012 after she tried to improve a painting of Jesus in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain. The fresco was a mediocre Ecce Homo image of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, painted in the 1930s, but Cecilia turned into an amateur restorer when she noticed it was flaking off the wall due to damp. Under her hand, Jesus was transformed into ‘a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic’, according to an unkind but accurate journalist. While Cecilia took off on holiday, the botched image was discovered and went viral, causing endless online hilarity. Over the years following, the story of ‘monkey Jesus’ inspired a movie, a comic opera, a wine label and a range of merchandise, and drew thousands of visitors on ironic pilgrimage to the town.
The Christian mystic Heilwige Bloemardine died in Brussels today in 1335. The daughter of a wealthy family, she taught her followers while sitting on a silver chair, and distributed her teachings via handwritten pamphlets. Not much is known about her mysticism, as her writings were destroyed by her fellow mystic, John of Ruysbroeck, who considered her a heretic. She enjoyed huge popularity in Brussels, and it was said that when she went forward for communion, she was flanked by two seraphim.
The World Council of Churches met for first time today in August 1948, in a concert hall in Amsterdam, with delegates from 147 churches and 44 countries around the world. The council proposed a new way for the world’s multitude of churches to relate to each other: through dialogue and fellowship, rather than by accusations and anathemas. The largest body not to join in was the Roman Catholic Church, which remains a non-member.
‘We are a council of churches, not the Council of the one undivided Church. Our name indicates our weakness and our shame before God, for there can be and there is finally only one Church of Christ on earth. Our plurality is a deep anomaly. But our name indicates also that we are aware of that situation, that we do not accept it passively, that we would move forward towards the manifestation of the One Holy Church.’ Willem Visser ’t Hooft, address at the Amsterdam Assembly, 1948
Increase Mather, the influential Puritan church leader in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, died today in 1723. In his will, he left instructions for his slave, who was known by the name ‘Spaniard’, to be set free. Mather’s book, Remarkable Providences (1684), in which he explored ‘the compact which is between the devil and his witches’, is thought to have helped set the intellectual tone for the Salem Witch Trials in 1692-93, in which 20 people were put to death.
Image: NASA