It is the feast of St Ignatius of Antioch, a Christian leader in the second generation of the Church, who died early in the 2nd century. We know about Ignatius because he wrote seven letters as he travelled across the Roman world, guarded by the 10 Roman soldiers bringing him to trial in Rome. The letters reveal Ignatius’s fierce, passionate character. He was the Bishop of Antioch, and wrote strongly about the organisation of Church ministry under bishops, priests and deacons, and he keenly looked forward to his martyrdom for Christ (above). Dubious legend claims he was the child Jesus brought among the disciples, saying, ‘Unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.’
‘Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the Devil – only let me get to Jesus Christ! Not the wide bounds of earth nor the kingdoms of this world will avail me anything. I would rather die and get to Jesus Christ, than reign over the ends of the earth.’ Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans
Today is also St Lazarus’s Day, celebrating the brother of Mary and Martha who was raised from the dead by Jesus, as told in John’s Gospel. According to Orthodox tradition, Lazarus became a roving missionary and was a Bishop on Cyprus for 30 years, until he died and was buried, neither of which were a new experience for him. Emperor Leo VI of Constantinople built a basilica church over his tomb in Larnaca in the 9th century, but then spoiled the gesture by raiding the tomb and taking Lazarus’s bones off to Constantinople.
Tonight in 1534, radicals in the young Reformation movement in France launched a brilliant publicity campaign, known as the Affair of the Placards, hoping to appeal directly to the people over the heads of their rulers. Placards were posted in Paris, Orleans, Rouen and other cities – including on the door of the King’s bedchamber – attacking the doctrine of the Mass, and promising ‘Genuine articles on the horrific, great and unbearable abuses of the papal Mass’. King Francis I had previously been sympathetic to discussing reform of the Church, but the impertinence of the campiagn ignited a ferocious response, with some reformers executed, and others driven into exile, including a 25 year-old Frenchman called Jean Calvin.
Today is the feast of St Rule, a 4th century monk from Patras, in what is now Greece. In the legend of Rule, the monk was told to take some of the bones of St Andrew from his tomb in Patras to the ends of the earth for safekeeping. Rule set off with a few of the bones (including three fingers and a kneecap) and after a long voyage was shipwrecked on the shore of Fife in Scotland. The holy relics came to rest in what is now the city of St Andrew’s. The association with St Andrew was and remains very helpful in both medieval and modern times in asserting the independence of Scotland.
Mother Teresa, the nun whose lifelong work provided practical and spiritual help for orphaned children, people living with leprosy, and the terminally ill in Calcutta, won the Nobel Peace Prize today in 1979. She was cited ‘for bringing help to suffering humanity’.
‘As if that was not enough – it was not enough to become a man – he died on the cross to show that greater love, and he died for you and for me and for that leper and for that man dying of hunger and that naked person lying in the street not only of Calcutta, but of Africa, and New York, and London, and Oslo – and insisted that we love one another as he loves each one of us.’ Mother Teresa, Nobel Lecture, December 1979
Image: Wellcome Collection