October 23: Today in Christian History

October 23, 1126

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

October 23, 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 23, 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 23, 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 23, 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 23, 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 23, 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 23, 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.

October 23, 2003

Yakup Cindilli, a Turkish convert to Christianity was severely beaten for distributing New Testaments in his hometown of Orhangazi in northwestern Turkey. Yakup Cindilli's interest in Christianity had begun when he made a telephone call to "Alo Dua", a prayer hotline ministry organized by Turkish Christians after a devastating 1999 earthquake in their country.