Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians after a two year siege today in 587 or 586 BC, when the army of King Nebuchadnezzar II broke through the city walls (above). The Babylonians razed the city to the ground, destroyed the 350 year-old Temple of Solomon, blinded King Zedekiah and led him into exile in Babylon, together with his people. The calamity made a bloody end of the Kingdom of Judah.
What can I say for you, to what compare you,
O daughter Jerusalem?
To what can I liken you, that I may comfort you,
O virgin daughter Zion?
For vast as the sea is your ruin;
who can heal you?
Book of Lamentations
Joy Lewis, the wife of CS Lewis, died of cancer today in 1960. Jack (CS Lewis’s family nickname) had married Joy in a registry office in 1956 to prevent the Home Office from deporting her, but within six months, she was diagnosed with cancer. She and Jack married again, this time for love. They were wed by an Anglican priest at her bedside, just after she had been told her cancer would kill her. In their last known exchange, Jack asked Joy: ‘If you can – if it is allowed – come to me when I too am on my deathbed.’ She replied: ‘Allowed? Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.’ Lewis explores Joy’s death and his own grief in one of his best books, A Grief Observed.
Thomas Kelly, the Irish evangelical hymn writer, was born today in 1769 in Kellyville, Ireland. He is the author of treasured gems such as ‘The head that once was crowned with thorns’; but also of best forgotten clunkers such as ‘Blest intercourse! when Christians meet, And speak of Him who died for them’.
It is the feast of St Francis Solano, a Franciscan friar who was sent to Peru as a missionary in 1589. It was thought he had the gift of tongues, because he could talk with the indigenous people, but he’d simply taken the trouble to learn their language.
Today in 1870 the first Vatican Council took a preliminary vote on whether to declare the Pope infallible. 451 members voted in favour and 88 against (76 managed not to be around for the vote). After a final protest, most opponents joined the truants for the final vote a week later. Papal infallibility has only been consciously used once since then, when Pope Pius XII declared that the Virgin Mary was bodily received into heaven, in his apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, in 1950.
‘By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.’ Pope Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, 1950