#Wu Yushan is consecrated as a Catholic priest at Nanjing

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Today in Christian History

Today is Thursday, August 1st, the 213th day of 2019. There are 152 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

984: Death of Bishop Ethelwold. His emphasis had been to repair the spiritual damage left by Danish invasions, to promote the Benedictine order, and build monasteries and nunneries. The English people consider him a saint because he sold the treasures of the church to feed the poor. Objects could be replaced, he said, but lives are not replaceable.

1252: Death of John of Plano Carpini, emissary of the pope to the Mongols. He had traveled great distances to protest the invasion of Christian lands and assess the strength and goals of the Tatars.

1688: Wu Yushan is consecrated as a Catholic priest at Nanjing by the Chinese bishop Luo Wenzao. Wu’s sermons will become the first collection by a Chinese Christian.

1801: Death in Schenectady, New York, of Jonathan Edwards, Jr., son of the famous Jonathan Edwards and of his vivacious wife, Sarah Pierpont. Edwards had learned the Mohican language, was a strictly orthodox pastor and theologian, and became the president of Union College shortly before his death.

1821: Death of Elizabeth Inchbald, a beautiful actress, who, after the death of her husband, had made her living as a popular dramatist and novelist. Frugal, she had gone cold and hungry herself in order to have enough to help others. Uneasy at publishing a memoir she had written, she accepted the advice of her Roman Catholic spiritual advisor, and destroyed its four volumes for which she had been offered the magnificent sum of £1,000.

1834: Death of missionary Robert Morrison at age 52. The first English Protestant missionary to China, he had translated the Bible into Chinese, constructed a Chinese grammar, founded an Anglo-Chinese college, and edited a six-volume Chinese dictionary.

1893: On his twenty-third birthday, Vladimir Nikolsky becomes a monk in the Russian Orthodox Church, taking the name Andronicus. He will go on to become an archbishop and a martyr under the Soviet regime.

1895: Anglican missionaries Robert Warren Stewart, his wife Louise, their two children and seven other Christians are butchered in China.

1950: Czechoslovakian law says that any priest consecrated without permission of the state is to go to prison for three years—robbing the church of its perogative to choose its own representatives.

1982: Isaiah Ghele Sakpo, a leader, evangelist, and prophet in Nigeria’s Apostolic Church, inaugurates the LAWNA Evangelical Defense Force (LAWNA stands for “Lagos, West and Northern Areas”), a movement whose task is to promote evangelism, prayer, and other spiritual activities among members.