Pope Nicholas III (above, centre) died unexpectedly, today in 1280, after just two-and-a-half years on the job. He was at his country house, where he collapsed and died suddenly, which led to rumours that someone had slipped poison into his wine. Forty years later, Dante included Nicholas in the first part of his Divine Comedy, the Inferno. He placed the Pope in the eighth circle of Hell, upside down with his head in the ground and his feet on fire, for pocketing large sums of money in return for lucrative jobs in the Church.
‘Master, who is that writhing wretch, who lashes
Out harder than all the rest of his company,’
Said I, ‘and whom a ruddier fire washes?’
Dante asks his tour guide in Hell to identify Pope Nicholas III
The Chief Justice of Alabama, Roy Moore, was suspended from office today in 2003 for refusing to remove a 2.5 ton monument to the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, Alabama. Moore had installed the granite block two years earlier, saying it marked ‘the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land.’ But two courts ruled that the monument violated the constitutional separation of church and state, and Moore lost his job when he defied the order to remove it.
After an almost 12 hour flight, Pope Paul VI arrived in Bogotá, Colombia, today in 1968. It was the first-ever visit of a Pope to Latin America, and he was welcomed by a crowd of 50,000 ecstatic Catholics chanting, ‘Papa! Papa!’
‘An intimate joy and a thrilling emotion invade our spirit when we see that Providence has reserved for us the privilege of being the first Pope to come to this most noble land, to this Christian continent, where one day long ago, predestined in the salvific designs of God, the height of the Cross began to be added to the Andean peaks.’ Pope Paul VI, speech on arriving in Bogotà, 1968
St Guinefort, a faithful dog who has been venerated as a folk saint in southern France for 800 years, has his feast day today. According to legend, the godly greyhound was left one day to babysit the Lord of Villars’ infant son, but when the lord returned to the castle, he found the nursery wrecked, the cradle overturned, and the dog drenched in blood. In a fury, he slew the dog, but immediately afterwards found the baby under the cradle, safe and sound, and a great snake dead nearby, covered in dog bites. Guinefort was honourably buried, and was soon venerated as a saintly protector of children. The cult of Guinefort was suppressed by an inquisitor, Stephen of Bourbon, in the 1260s, but local people were still praying to the holy hound in the 20th century.
Bartolomé Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, and therefore Primate of Spain, was arrested by the Spanish Inquisition today in 1558 on an accusation of heresy. He had enjoyed a high profile career – censoring books for the Inquisition; rooting out Protestant heresy in Oxford for Queen Mary of England; giving the last rites to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. But his enemies spread a false story that Charles had not died in the Catholic faith because Carranza had infected him with Protestant ideas on his deathbed. He spent the next 17 years in prison, while the Inquisition investigated him at a glacial pace. His trial in Rome lasted nine years, and eventually delivered a verdict of not guilty. Carranza died just 18 days later.
Image: Ryan Dickey