This Day in History

April 22, 1839

:

A Brave Bishop Leaves Prison

   

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations II: The Making of the Modern World. For ordering information on this text and our other books, please click here. 

  

Clemens August von Droste-Vischering

It was silent night, November 20, 1837. By order of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, troops surrounded the archiepiscopal palace in Köln, on the lower Rhine in Germany. Escorted by police, the governor of the province entered the palace and arrested the 64-year-old archbishop, Clemens August von Droste-Vischering. After being taken from his diocese, the archbishop was imprisoned at the fortress of Minden, about 147 miles northeast of Köln. Such was the price Clemens August had to pay for defending the rights of the Church against the Prussian government.

In Prussia, it had long been the custom in mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants that the mother raised the daughters in her religion while the father raised the sons in his. This seemed an amicable way to deal with a rather difficult issue, but it ignored the fact that religion is about truth. The Catholic Church could not allow the children of a Catholic parent to be raised in what the Church recognized as a false religion. So it was that in 1830, Pope Pius VIII ruled that the Church would not bless any mixed marriages unless the non-Catholic spouse agreed that the children would be raised Catholic. It was because he refused to disobey the pope in this matter that Archbishop Droste-Vischering was imprisoned by the Prussian government in the fortress of Minden. By refusing to submit to the Prussian law, Droste-Vischering was defending not only Catholic marriage practice, but the right of the Church to be free from interference by the state.

Pope Pius VIII

With the pope, Archbishop Droste-Vischering had insisted that children of mixed marriages (between Catholics and Protestants) had to be raised Catholic. The Prussians, who had taken control of the very Catholic Rhineland in 1815, insisted that the Catholic Church in the Rhineland had to follow the Prussian custom. But, no matter how longstanding the custom was, it violated the law of the Catholic Church -- and in a contest between the king and the Church, Archbishop Droste-Vischering knew whom he had to obey.

The imprisonment of Archbishop Droste-Vischering was an inspiration to many German Catholics. It even influenced one young nobleman to change his career plans. The 26-year-old Baron Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler had been preparing to enter the service of the Prussian government; but with the archbishop's arrest and imprisonment, Ketteler decided he could not serve a government that committed such injustices. Instead, he ended up studying theology; and in 1844, he was ordained a priest. Later he was made bishop of Mainz and became a leading voice for social justice in Germany.

A part of the old fortress of Minden

Droste-Vischering's example inspired courage in the hearts of the bishops of Münster and Kolberg, who had at first decided to go along with the Prussian government. They too now refused to follow the Prussian marriage custom. The archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, Martin von Dunin, directly disobeyed the wishes of the Prussian government and told his clergy to follow Catholic marriage practice. For this the government arrested, tried, and deposed him. Although told by the government to remain in Berlin, Dunin disobeyed and secretly returned to his diocese. There he was again arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Colberg. Catholics in Germany rose up in protest against the Prussian government's treatment of Droste-Vischering and Dunin.

It was only after it had slandered him as a traitor that the Prussian government finally released Droste-Vischering, on April 22, 1839. As for Archbishop Dunin, he remained imprisoned until a new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, came to the throne. Upon being freed from prison on August 3, 1840, Dunin returned to Posen and was welcomed by the rejoicing of his flock.

Easter Sunday Mass at Köln Cathedral

This video shows the 2012 Easter Sunday Mass (said in both Latin and German) in the cathedral where Archbishop Droste-Vischering once presided. The celebrant is Droste-Vischering's successor, Archbishop Joachim Cardinal Meisner.

This Day in History

April 17, 1521

:

Luther Before the Diet of Worms

   

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations I: The History of Christian Civilization. For ordering information on this text and our other books, please click here. 

  

Being excommunicated, Luther was given over to the temporal power for punishment. But Luther's prince, the Elector Frederick, had become his protector. The task of bringing Luther to justice fell, therefore, to the newly crowned German emperor, Charles V.

Emperor Charles V, 

sometime after 1515

Charles von Habsburg had become the most powerful ruler in Europe. The son of Juana, a daughter of Isabel and Fernando of Spain, Charles had become king of Spain when Fernando died in 1516. Charles, too, had inherited Flanders from his father, Prince Philip I (the "Handsome"). When Charles's grandfather, Emperor Maximilian I von Habsburg, died in 1519, Charles was elected German emperor -- even though he was not in Germany at that time. Charles V's first journey to Germany did not occur until 1521, when he was to meet with the Imperial Diet at the city of Worms on the Rhine River.

Charles had many questions of imperial importance to address at Worms. The most important had become deciding what to do about the troublesome Augustinian monk, Martin Luther. Elector Frederick persuaded the emperor to summon Luther to Worms under a safe-conduct, for Frederick did not want Charles to condemn Luther unheard.

Martin Luther, 1520

Luther's friends tried to dissuade him from attending the Imperial Diet. Luther, however, insisted that he had to defend himself in person before the emperor. On Luther's journey to Worms, a crowd of university friends and a contingent of German knights accompanied him, and when he reached Worms, crowds thronged the streets to greet him as a popular hero. What the authorities intended to be the treatment of a condemned heretic had become a triumphal procession.

Luther appeared before the diet on April 17, 1521. He was unusually quiet and appeared timid; he asked for another day to consider his reply. The next day, however, Luther stood boldly before the emperor and the assembled princes. Asked to recant his errors, Luther replied, in German, "I neither can nor will recant anything, for it is neither safe nor right to act against one's conscience." According to an old tradition, he then added, "Hier steh ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen!" ("Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.") Luther repeated his statement in Latin. Then, throwing up his arms like a victorious knight, he left the hall.

Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms, 

by Anton von Werner (1843-1915)

The next day, Charles V declared that he would not depart from the traditions of his forebears, the kings of Spain, Burgundy, and Germany who "were all faithful to the death to the Church of Rome, defending the Catholic Faith and the honor of God. A single friar who runs counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong." The young emperor condemned Luther; but, true to his word, Charles allowed him to leave Worms in peace.

Elector Frederick the Wise,
by Albrecht Dürer, 1523

Luther left the diet on April 26, his safe-conduct good for 21 more days. On May 8, a minority of those who had attended the diet approved the Edict of Worms, which condemned Luther's heresy and declared him an outlaw under sentence of death. Luther was to be arrested as soon as his safe-conduct expired. But the Elector Frederick intervened. By his order, a party of soldiers ambushed Luther's party on the night of May 4. They took Luther to a castle called the Wartburg, where he went into hiding, disguised as a knight.

At the Wartburg, Luther, left to himself, underwent terrible doubts and struggles -- was he alone right and the generations of Catholics wrong? He composed bitter attacks against his enemies, especially the papacy, which by then he was calling the Antichrist. Yet, in the course of the year 1522, Luther translated the whole of the New Testament into a forceful, spoken German. (He later translated the Old Testament, as well. The entire German Bible was published in 1534.) Luther's German Bible became an important tool for carrying his reform forward among the common German people. It also became the basis for the modern German language.

Music from Luther's Time

The film that follows depicts Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora (whom he married in 1525) performing pieces from the period in which they lived. The performance tells a story. In the first scene, Katharina von Bora and Luther enter, swathed in cloaks, reminiscent of monastic robes (she had been a nun), and they perform Arnolt Schlick's 1512 hymn to Mary, Maria Zart. The second scene depicts Luther and Katharina's married life, and here the music is decidedly secular in character. The third scene features a performance of Luther's great Reformation hymn, Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott ("A Mighty Fortress is Our God"); and while the music is sacred, the painting of Mary with the Christ child and the infant John the Baptist has given way to the rather profane Cupid Complains to Venus, by Lucas Cranach the Elder. What does it all mean? We shall let you, the viewer and listener, decide.

MARTIN LUTHER: COMPOSER & MUSICIAN

This Day in History

April 12, 1204:

Sack of Constantinople Begins

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations I: The History of Christian Civilization. For ordering information on this text and our other books, please click here. 

  

Fresco of Pope Innocent III,
13th century

Innocent III's goal, when he became pope in 1198, was to continue the reform of the Church as begun by his predecessors on the Throne of Peter. But the failure of the Third Crusade to recover Jerusalem made another crusade to the Holy Land the pope's first priority. In the very year he became pope, Innocent ordered another crusade. Knights from France and Germany, led by Boniface, marquis of Montferrat, pledged to take up the cross.

  

The crusaders' goal was first to conquer Egypt, the center of Turkish Muslim power, and from there to move against Jerusalem. The crusader leaders came to an agreement with the Italian city-state of Venice to transport their army by ship to Egypt. The crusaders, however, could not pay the entire amount the Venetians demanded. Seeing an opportunity, the Venetians said they would forgive the amount the crusaders still owed -- if they helped Venice attack the Christian city of Zara, in Dalmatia, across the Adriatic Sea from Venice. The crusaders agreed and, in November 1202, Zara fell to the combined crusader and Venetian force. Sorrowful at the news of the fall of Zara, Pope Innocent excommunicated the leaders of the crusade for turning their arms against fellow Christians. 

Byzantine Emperor Alexius V
 

In the end, Innocent absolved the crusaders and urged them to set out for Palestine. But the army, instead, sailed toward Constantinople.

  

Alexius -- son of the deposed Byzantine emperor, Isaac Angelus - promised them that if they helped him regain the imperial throne, he would aid them in the crusade. The crusaders and the Venetians reached Constantinople in 1203. The usurper emperor, who had deposed Isaac, fled the city. The crusading army placed Alexius and his father on the imperial throne. 

Alexius, however, was slow in keeping his promises to the crusaders -- and only seven months after he gained the throne, a revolution deposed both him and his father. The crusaders and the Venetians then laid siege to Constantinople. The nobles of Byzantium closed the great gates of the city to these threatening foreigners. The Byzantine army, under the new emperor, put up a strong resistance to the crusaders.

A Byzantine traitor, however, opened the sea-gates to the enemy. The host of crusaders and Venetians slipped into the city, storming it on April 12, 1204. For three days, the crusaders and Venetians looted and burned the ancient capital of the Eastern Christian world. Constan-tinople held the masterpieces of the ancient world. The invaders smashed the statues of the classical heroes and pagan gods and melted down bronze statues to make coins. They even pillaged the city's churches, loading mules with the gold and jewels that adorned the sacred buildings. The plunder of the civilized world's richest city was almost too much to believe.

Crusaders attack Constantinople, from a manuscript of The Conquest of Constantinople of Geoffrey de Villehardouin, ca. 1330

Having conquered Constantinople, the leaders of the crusade claimed the Eastern Roman Empire for their own. Fanning out from Constantinople, crusader forces looted and burned the cities of Greece, confiscated land from ancient families, and allotted territories to individual crusader leaders. Amid the ruins of Constantinople the crusaders established a French feudal state and imposed Latin Christianity on the Greeks. Baldwin, count of Flanders, was chosen as emperor of the Romans.

  

Saint Mark's Basilica in Venice, a church
enriched by the spoils of Constantinople

Innocent III was appalled at the result of his call to crusade. Instead of delivering Jerusalem from the Muslims, the crusaders had conquered and plundered a Christian people. The papacy had, it was true, control of the Church of Constantinople, which had been in schism with the pope since 1054. But the conquest only turned the Greek people against everything having to do with Catholic western Europe, including the papacy. The Fourth Crusade made the schism of 1054 a permanent division, not only between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, but between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches in Greece, the eastern Mediterranean, Russia, and eastern Europe.

Music from East and West 

Byzantine liturgical chant from the the 13th century, performed by Capella Romana.

Cappella Romana: Alleluiarion, 13th century

                                    

Music of Bernart de Ventadorn (1130/1140-1190/1200), a troubadour of south-central France. The knights of the Fourth Crusade very likely were familiar with his music. This performance features period instruments. The male vocalist is a counter-tenor.

   Bernart de Ventadorn : Can l'erba fresch(Ensemble Céladon)

                            

No "Windy and Barren" History

About half the history now taught in schools and colleges is made windy and barren by the narrow notion of leaving out the theological theories... Historians seem to have completely forgotten two facts -- first, that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as well to discover which ideas. - G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton is right. So much of historiography today seeks to explain why human beings have acted as they have by appealing to materialistic causes: economics, the natural environment, greed for power, even genetics.

  

Do these factors influence history? Of course they do. But do they explain the whole of history? No.

  

For instance, the princes of Germany who propelled the Lutheran Reformation to success were indeed motivated by economic considerations (to possess Church lands) and political ambition (to wrest more power from the Holy Roman emperor) -- but the Reformation cannot be explained merely by greed and power mongering. It was an idea, a theological idea, that goaded Martin Luther and inspired his followers to defy Church and state in the name of the Gospel.

  

Nor does the fact that greed and ambition played a part in the Catholic response to "reform" explain the zeal of its chief protagonists -- men such as Pope Pius V, Charles Borromeo, and Peter Canisius. Such men contended for an idea - that of the Catholic Church, which, as they knew, St. Paul had called the "pillar and foundation of the truth."

  

The Catholic faith says that man is more than a mere animal, that he acts for the sake of ideas and ideals, not simply desire. History is driven by what human beings think is the highest good -- and this ultimately has to do with what they think about God. In this way, history is bound up with theological ideas.

  

This is the fuller history our Catholic Textbook Project history series tells. We do not leave out religion, for that would be to distort what man is and how and why he acts and has acted on the world's stage. We are convinced that students need to learn the whole of history - and religion is a central aspect of that history.

  

This Day in History

April 1, 1922

:

Death Comes for an Emperor

   

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations II: The Making of the Modern World. For ordering information on this text and our other books, please click here. 

 

  

Karl and Zita, with their son, Otto, at
their coronation as king and queen of
Hungary,  Budapest, 1916

It was a cold day in late October 1921 when a small airplane from Switzerland landed in western Hungary. The airplane carried Karl, the emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, and his wife, the Empress Zita. Loyal troops of the Hungarian army greeted the royal couple and swore allegiance to them. After hearing an open-air Mass, King Karl, Queen Zita, their generals and troops boarded a train that would take them to Budapest, where Karl hoped to take up once again the government of Hungary.

 

Karl knew this would be no easy task. This was his second journey to Hungary since the end of the war. In March 1921, he, with his loyal followers, had entered Budapest, where he met with Hungary's regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy. But though he claimed to rule in the name of King Karl, Horthy was unwilling to give over the government to him. Karl, who had fallen sick, was forced to leave Hungary -- but he promised he would return.

 

Thousands of Hungarians joyfully greeted the return of the king in October 1921. But though he had an army faithful to him, Karl faced tremendous difficulties. Since Horthy controlled the greater part of the army, he was very powerful. 

Karl von Habsburg-Lotharingen with an honor guard at a
train station in Hungary, October 21, 1921.

The regent also had the support of the British government, which did not want to see a Habsburg return to power anywhere in Europe. Finally, many of Karl's military leaders -- men who had sworn allegiance to him -- proved unfaithful. At last Horthy's army overran the troops faithful to Karl; and he, to avoid further bloodshed, withdrew from Budapest.

 

Karl and Zita were detained at Tihany Abbey in western Hungary until the Allies decided what to do with them. At Tihany, Karl received a visit from Hungary's primate archbishop, Cardinal Czernoch. Czernoch later wrote that at Tihany he had expected to find "a broken, fearful, suffering king," but instead, he discovered that Karl needed no comfort. "I have done my duty, as I came here to do," he told the cardinal. "As crowned king, I not only have a right, I also have a duty. I must uphold the right and the dignity of the crown." The king said "Our Lord and Savior had led me to try to regain the throne."

 

Tomb of Blessed Karl on Madeira

On October 30, Allied authorities removed Karl and Zita from Tihany to a port on the Danube River, where they were placed on a British ship. They did not know their destination, but they would soon learn that it was Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, 535 miles off the coast of Portugal. This would be the place of exile for the royal couple and their children. But Karl's sojourn on Madeira was short. In March, he caught a cold that soon turned to pneumonia. On April 1, 1922, Karl, the last reigning Habsburg emperor, died, while gazing on a crucifix Zita held for him in her hands. The emperor's last words were, "Thy will be done. Yes, yes. As you will it. Jesus!"

 

Karl's title of emperor passed to his eldest son, Otto -- who, as a man, later dedicated himself to work for the good of the peoples over whom his family once had ruled. Yet, though Karl and Zita's family lost the imperial power, a greater honor awaited them. On October 3, 2004, Pope John Paul II declared Karl "blessed" -- the last step before being proclaimed a saint of the Catholic Church. The Church remembers Blessed Karl on October 21, the day he and Zita were married in 1911.

 

An Imperial Burial

 

The burial ritual for those belonging to the Austrian imperial family is a trenchant reminder to the rich and powerful that they are but human and sinners. The clip below shows the burial in 2011 of Otto von Habsburg, the son of Emperor Karl and Empress Zita. Otto's remains are brought to the crypt of the Habsburg imperial family in the Capuchin Church in Vienna. The grand chamberlain, thrice striking a cane on the church doors proclaims that "Otto von Österreich" (Otto of Austria) begs entrance. He then proceeds to read a long list of Otto's imperial titles, only to be met with the response from the priest within: 

 

"We do not know him."

Otto von Habsburg Funeral - Kapuzinerkirche [HD]

Once again the door is struck, and the priest asks, "Who is there?" But this time the chamberlain asks admission for "Doktor Otto von Habsburg" -- telling of his personal accomplishments (including his stint as president of the International Paneuropean Union and a member of the European Parliament). Again, the priest says, "We do not know him."

 

For the third and last time, the chamberlain strikes the door. The priest asks, "Who is there?" The chamberlain says, only, "Otto, a sinful, mortal man."

 

The priest says, "So let him come within."

 

Entombed in the crypt, Otto joined his mother, Zita, Emperor Franz Josef, Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Österreich-Este (whose assassination sparked the First World War), and their ancestors -- all but Blessed Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen, whose body remains on the island of Madeira. To this day, the Austrian government will not allow Karl's remains to rest in the tomb of his ancestors.

 

For those who have the time, here is a link to the entire Requiem Mass for Otto von Habsburg.

Otto Habsburg - Das Requiem - Stephansdom in Wien - 16.7.2011