Today is the birthday of Thomas Becket (above), who was born in Cheapside, London, in 1119 or 20. After a distinctly average time at school, Becket became a clerk, and through family connections eventually joined the household of Theobald of Bec, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent him to Rome on business, and to Bologna to study church law. He did so well at this that Theobald started promoting him as a church official, which in time led him to become Theobald’s successor at Canterbury, and eventually (via his murder in the cathedral) medieval England’s greatest saint.
John Newton, the 18th century slave ship captain who found faith and became a priest and abolitionist, died today in 1807. Newton’s career path was complex and contradictory. He was consecutively a sailor, slave, evangelical convert, slave trader, Anglican priest, hymn writer, and slave trade abolitionist. Disturbingly, his involvement in the slave trade increased after his evangelical conversion, which later in life became a source of grief to him. However, when he joined the abolitionist cause, his inside knowledge of the trade made him a powerful voice for change, and he deeply influenced William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and others.
‘I am bound, in conscience, to take shame to myself by a public confession, which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent, or repair, the misery and mischief to which I have, formerly, been accessory. I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument, in a business at which my heart now shudders.’ John Newton, Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, 1788
The Mayflower Pilgrims, led by William Bradford, are said to have landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts (but was then Patuxet, a native American village), today in 1620, after their voyage from England. The pilgrims were orginally Puritans from Nottinghamshire, who suffered persecution when they tried to separate from the Church of England to form their own congregation. They fled first to Holland in 1608, but after a decade of living in poverty decided to sail for the New World. They founded the Plymouth Colony, which became symbolic in American history for religious freedom, but which also led to conflict with the indigenous peoples, who suffered genocide and enslavement.
Peter Canisius, the resourceful Dutch Jesuit writer and preacher, died today in 1597. He lived when the Protestant Reformation was in full swing, and advocated for Catholicism through reasoned debate, writing and teaching. He became the pope’s secret agent, smuggling documents to Catholic bishops and princes across Protestant Germany, which was dangerous work, and earned him the nickname, ‘the Second Apostle of Germany’. It is claimed that the survival of Catholicism in Austria, Bavaria and Poland is partly due to his influence.
Today in 1511, on the Sunday before Christmas, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar, preached a revolutionary sermon to a church full of Spanish colonialists on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He attacked his congregation for enslaving the Taino people and treating them cruelly. The following Sunday, he preached again, telling them that the friars would no longer give them confession and absolution. Montesinos and his fellow friars were quickly shipped back to Spain by order of the king, but by the following year, his protest had produced the first laws regulating the treatment of indigenous people in the Americas.
‘Tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? Why do you keep them so oppressed and weary, not giving them enough to eat nor taking care of them in their illness? For with the excessive work you demand of them they fall ill and die, or rather you kill them with your desire to extract and acquire gold every day. Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?’ Antonio de Montesinos, sermon of 1511
Image: John K Thorne / CC BY 2.0