December 22: Today in Christian History

December 22, 1560

After three years of imprisonment with torture, Julian “The Little” Hernandez is burned to death in Seville, Spain, for distributing Spanish language Bibles and Protestant literature and rejecting fasts and mortifications as a means of salvation.

December 22, 1646

Death of Peter Mogila, Metropolitan of Kiev, who had established an educational program that defended Orthodox teachings and had written many books that would remain influential into the twenty-first century, including a Russian catechism.

December 22, 1838

John Hunt and his wife Hanna Summers arrive in the Fiji Islands as missionaries. Hunt will bring about the conversion of the Fijians and help end the practice of cannibalism.

December 22, 1850

Henry Budd becomes the first person of First Nations ancestry ordained to the Anglican priesthood. He will work a large area of Western Canada and translate the Bible and Prayer Book into the Cree language.

December 22, 1854

Death in Oxford of Martin Joseph Routh, who until three years earlier had been president of Magdalen College. A notable scholar who compiled and published the works of early church fathers, he  was in his hundredth year when he died, but clear-minded—and the owner of a personal library of 16,000 volumes, some very rare.

December 22, 1871

Death in Richmond, Virginia, of James Barnett Taylor, a Baptist clergyman, especially noted for his role in creating and preserving Richmond College. He had also written a biography of Lott Cary.

December 22, 1888

Death in New York City of Isaac Hecker, an influential American convert to Roman Catholicism, who had founded the order of Paulists in the United States and edited Catholic World.

December 22, 1917

Italian-born Francesca Xavier Cabrini, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, dies in Chicago’s Columbus Hospital. In 1946 she will be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, becoming the first American citizen declared a saint. 

December 22, 1994

Gilberto Orellana, an El Salvadorean Christian composer teaching in Morocco, is arrested along with five Muslims he has led to Christ. An international outcry obtains his release after he is sentenced to eight months in prison. His converts also face prison, but three recant.

December 22, 2011

Authorities close a Baptist church in Neftechala, Azerbaijan, saying “without registration you cannot pray.”