It is the birthday of Catherine of Aragon (above right), the first wife of King Henry VIII of England. The daughter of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, she was born today in 1485, betrothed in marriage at the age of three to the English Tudor Prince Arthur, and actually married him when she was 16 and he 15. When Arthur died a few months later, Catherine went on to marry King Henry VIII, and became a hugely popular Queen with the English public… although not so much with Henry, who divorced her.
Today in the year 882, Pope John VIII was murdered by members of his own clergy, who poisoned him and then clubbed him to death. John deserves lasting fame for encouraging the enterprising missionary to the Slavs, St Methodius. He gave his blessing to Methodius’s translation of the Bible into Slavonic, and also gave him permission to sing Mass in Slavonic, making him the last Pope to authorise a non-Latin mass until the 1960s. After John’s murder, the papacy was plunged into a century of violence, with six further papal homicides in the next 100 years.
‘He who made three main languages – Hebrew, Greek and Roman – also made all the other languages to sing his praise and glory.’ Pope John VIII
George Whitefield, spellbinding preacher in America and Britain in the 18th century, was born today at his father’s pub, the Bell Inn, in Gloucester, England. Young George had a talent for acting, but was also keen to get an education, and when he was 18 was able to go to Oxford University as a servitor, where he received free tuition in exchange for serving the students from wealthy families. He soon met Charles and John Wesley and joined their ‘Holy Club’, which set the course for all their lives as pioneering Methodists.
Ivan Fyodorov, one of the earliest known printers in Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, died in Lviv, Poland, today in 1583. He began his career in Moscow, printing books of church liturgy in the Slavonic language – until the city’s scribes, anxious that he was destroying their trade in handwritten work, set fire to his workshop and forced him to flee to Lviv. In the 1580s, Fyodorov printed the Ostrog Bible, a colossal tome of over 1,200 pages which was the first complete Bible in the Cyrillic alphabet. The Bible, translated into Slavonic, had a deep impact in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus, and on the life of the Orthodox Church in those lands.
An 18 year-old became pope today in the year 955 and took the name John XII. The son of a powerful Roman family, he was one of the worst and most loutish popes ever. It is said that he converted the papal palace into a brothel, ordained a 10 year-old bishop, toasted the Devil with wine, seduced his own niece, and sexually assaulted female pilgrims in St Peter’s basilica. He died when he was discovered in bed with someone’s wife; the husband either beating him to death or hurling him out of a window. Ironically, John was the first pope to take a holy-sounding name (his birth name was Octavian), to separate his papal and private lives.
‘They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him; and that he had set fires, girded on a sword, and put on a helmet and cuirass.’ Charges made against Pope John XII, 963
Image: Wellcome Collection / Public Domain