Christianity

E.E.Y. Hales profiles Pope Pius IX (1846-78), who saw the end of the Papacy as a temporal power as the opening of a new era in its world-relationships.

Margaret Clitherow, a butcher’s wife from York, was one of only three women martyred by the Elizabethan state. Her execution in 1586 was considered gruesome, even by the standards of the time. 

H.T. Dickinson introduces a Bishop who held many liberal views,  and was much disliked by his brethren.

Derek Severn recounts how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a priest from Bohemia served the Society of Jesus in the more remote parts of Brazil and Peru.

David Lunn explains how, on his death-bed, King Charles II received the sacraments from a priest he had first met some thirty-four years earlier, and at length made his submission to the Roman Catholic Church.

The grandson of the famous scholar Ausonius, Paulinus was a cultivated country gentleman, who lived to see the final breakdown and disintegration of the Roman way of life. By Charles Johnston.

Stuart D. Goulding introduces the founder of the colony, Roger Williams, who returned to England in 1643 and 1651 and had many friends among the English Parliamentarians.

Stephen Clissold explains how, after twenty years of life as a nun, St Teresa began to experience visions and ecstasies which led her to found a reformed Carmelite convent in Avila.

As a ‘common upholder of unlawful meetings and conventicles’, Monica Furlong remembers, the great preacher was imprisoned for twelve years in 1660.

Sherman Johnson unravels the legends surrounding the author of the shortest and, possibly, earliest of the Gospels in the New Testament.