October 21: Today in Christian History

October 21, 1126

Consecration of the stone church of St. Paul and St. Peter at Armagh, Ireland, at the monastery founded by Imar O’Hagan.

October 21, 1223

Pope Gregory IX instructs cruel inquisitor Conrad of Marburg “Punish if you will the wicked and perverse, but see that no innocent person suffers at your hands.”

October 21, 1528

A tract by Lutheran reformer Johann Brenz against persecution of Anabaptists becomes available. Brenz was a strong defender of persecuted minorities and preferred to see people won by kindness rather than forced by cruelty.

October 21, 1641

English Parliament takes up a bill which will exclude bishops from the House of Lords and remove the clergy from the Commission of the Peace and other positions of governmental authority. Owing to the troubled times, the bill will pass, and King Charles will sign it at the plea of his frightened wife.

October 21, 1773

Death of fifteen-year-old John of Monemvasia (a town on a Grecian island), after suffering two days from a stab wound given because he refused to convert to Islam.

October 21, 1885

James Hannington Dragged away to be Murdered 

October 21, 1866

Gerard Manley Hopkins, having left the Church of England, is received into the Roman Catholic church. He becomes a Jesuit priest who works in the slums. After the posthumous publication of his poems, he will be acclaimed as a poet. 

October 21, 1944 

Alois Kayser (born 1877 in Alsace) died in Chuuk where he had been deported by the Japanese. Kayser was a German Roman Catholic missionary who spent almost 40 years on Nauru and wrote a Nauruan grammar (and possibly a Nauruan dictionary). The government of Nauru had named a technical school after Kayser.

October 21, 1961

Christian political prisoner Armando Valladares and some of his companions escape from a Cuban prison but are soon recaptured because their rescuers fail to take the plan seriously and do not show up.

October 21, 1990

Death of Matilda Schmidt Epp, wife of Theodore H. Epp, the voice of Back to the Bible. She was a soul-winner, Bible teacher, and role model to women apart from the work of her better-known husband.