The 39 day siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity (above) came to an end today in 2002. A group of Palestinian militants had fled into the church for sanctuary when Israel’s Jerusalem Brigade had tried to capture them. With them were some 200 monks and nuns of the church’s religious community. After several gun battles and intense negotiations, Israel withdrew the tanks and snipers surrounding the church when 13 Palestinians gave themselves up and were sent into exile.
The Swiss theologian Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, today in 1886. A brilliant liberal theological student, he was so horrified when his former tutors, including the church historian Adolf von Harnack, had signed a disastrous statement in support of the German Kaiser’s military agression at the beginning of World War I, that he dumped liberalism wholesale and invented Neo-orthodoxy. His Church Dogmatics (12 volumes, 6 million words) was the most purgatorial work of theology since Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologia.
Sebastian Brant, the German satirist, whose most famous book, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), which lampooned the foolishness of the church and the world, died today in 1521.
Today in 1525, the Marriage Ordinance of the city of Zurich became law, establishing the grounds for divorce as well as marriage. The ordinance, which was probably authored by Ulrich Zwingli, the leader of the Reformation in Zurich, allowed for divorce because of adultery, but also for ‘destroying life, endangering life, being mad or crazy, offending by whorishness, or leaving one’s spouse without permission, remaining abroad a long time, having leprosy, or such other reasons’. It also made it legal for priests to marry, leading Zwingli to become the first Protestant reformer to get wed.
Today in 1497, Amerigo Vespucci (or as he preferred his name in Latin, Americus Vespucius) set sail on his first voyage to the new world, allegedly. The evidence for this is a letter written by Vespucci, which has been contested by some historians. Amerigo is thought to have given his name to the continent he helped discover.
John of Ávila, the Spanish teacher and mystic, died today in 1569. Today is his feast day.
Image: David Jones