It is the feast day of St Arsenius the Great (above), one of the Desert Fathers, who lived in the 4th and 5th centuries. Originally a tutor to the royal family in Constantinople, and living in great luxury, Arsenius one day prayed, ‘Lord, show me the way of salvation,’ and was answered by a voice saying, ‘Arsenius, flee from the company of others, and you will be saved.’ He left for the desert, lived a life of great humility and poverty for the rest of his life, and became a huge influence on the early monastic movement.
Today in 1844 Pope Gregory XVI issued his encyclical, Inter Praecipuas Machinationes (‘Among the principal schemes’), which condemned the work of Protestant Bible societies for encouraging individual Bible reading that was not supervised by the Church.
‘We now see them as an army on the march, conspiring to publish in great numbers copies of the books of divine Scripture. These are translated into all kinds of vernacular languages for dissemination without discrimination among both Christians and infidels. Then the biblical societies invite everyone to read them unguided. Therefore it is just as Jerome complained in his day: they make the art of understanding the Scriptures without a teacher “common to babbling old women and crazy old men and verbose sophists,” and to anyone whocan read, no matter what his status.’ Pope Gregory XVI, Inter Praecipuas Machinationes
Pope Innocent XIII, the last of the Innocents, became Pope today in 1721.
Today in 1737 the historian Edward Gibbon, famous for his withering attack on Christian history and doctrine in his epic work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was born in Putney, London. One of a family of seven siblings, he was the only one to survive infancy.
Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Spanish priest and leader of the Mexican War of Independence, was born today in 1753. He inspired thousands of ordinary people to rise up against Spanish colonial rule, and although he was captured, defrocked and executed during the revolt, the struggle against Spain eventually succeeded a decade after his death. He is now honoured in Mexico as the father of the nation.
Edward Foxe, who made himself useful to England’s King Henry VIII by enabling his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, died today in 1538. He helped create the biblical and historical propaganda used by Henry to argue that he and England did not have to submit to the Pope. For all this, he gained the lucrative archdeaconries of Leicester and Dorset, the deanery of Salisbury and the bishopric of Hereford, but surely lost his own soul.
Image: Wikimedia Commons