Western diplomatic missions began violent reactions to Chinese Boxers on this day, starting with the German legation.
Violence started spreading against Chinese Christians.
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Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Western diplomatic missions began violent reactions to Chinese Boxers on this day, starting with the German legation.
Violence started spreading against Chinese Christians.
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Capuchin Friar Blessed Leonard Melki was murdered along with other Christians, including Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, by Ottoman troops at Mardin.
Included in the murdered was Blessed Ignace Maloyan, Armenian Catholic Archbishop of Mardin.
The French advanced 550 yards at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, France.
British and French forces took control of all garrisons around Garua, German Cameroon.
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Canada's largest protestant denomination, the United Church of Canada, was created by the merger of the Methodist Church, Canada and the Congregational Union of Ontario and Quebec, as well as most of the congregations of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the Association of Local Union Churches. The union is surprising in that the base churches had real theological differences.
The Catholic Church is the largest church in Canada overall.
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337 Western troops from the US, Italy, Japan and Russia arrived in Beijing. The entry was not opposed, but not welcome.
The governing body of the Free Church of Scotland voted 592 to 29, to unite with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland creating the United Free Church of Scotland.
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Pope Leo XIII beatified sixty-four Vietnamese Martyrs. The Vietnamese Martyrs, including 53 additional individuals later beatified, were canonized on June 19, 1988.
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Well, at least probably.
It seems fairly clear that the Council convened on this day, and that Emperor Constantine arrived to observe, not to participate, fourteen days later. He had sought the council, however, given the Arian Heresy, which had an extremely widespread following in the Church.
The president of the council seems to have been Hosius of Cordova, assisted by the pope’s legates, Victor and Vincentius.
The creed:
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
This is the birthday of Malcolm Little, known to history as Malcolm X.
I've discussed him to some extent here on this blog before, but I had neglected to enter him as a topic category until today. An extremely intelligent man and the son of a Baptist lay minister, he had undergone a continuing religious evolution and was a Muslim at the time of his murder. I suspect that, had he lived, he would have returned to Christianity.
It is also the birthday of Pol Pot
Pol Pot has featured on this blog a lot recently. Born Saloth Sâr the Cambodian Communist leader would go down in history as one of the greatest mass murderers of all time. Quite well educated, he became a Communist while studying in France after World War Two. He died in exile in 1998.
Casey Stengel played his last major league game.
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Prior to the Vietnam War, very view Vietnamese lived anywhere other than Vietnam. Some lived in France, due to the French colonial association with the country. When the French Indochinese War ended, some Vietnamese in fact relocated to France, with a small number of actually being Vietnamese who were in the French armed forces. It wasn't a large number, however, like it would come to be with Algerians.
The end of the Vietnam War however was different.
Many Vietnamese fled because they legitimately feared Communism, putting the lie to the often stated proposition that the South Vietnamese didn't really care how the war ended. Thousands did, and of those who did, most didn't make it out of Vietnam.
Over 2,000,000 Vietnamese now live in the US, with 60% of those having been born in Vietnam. 37% of them report themselves as being Buddhist, 36% Christian and 23% aren’t affiliated with any religion. Vietnamese Americans are more than three times as likely as Asian Americans overall to identify as Buddhist (37% vs. 11%), but with Buddhism being the "native" religion of the country in American eyes, that numbers if surprisingly low.
Indeed, it gives some credibility to Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's assertion in his biography of murdered South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm that at the time of the his assassination Buddhism was in significant decline.
However it would also reflect that the American understanding isn't really all that correct. While some regard Christianity as "introduced", the fact is that Buddhism is as a well, with it being Indian in origin. Vietnam also has a folk religion which shares many common elements of other Asian "folk" religions, including devotion to ancestors.
Today in Vietnam Buddhists make a 13.3% of the total population, and Christians a declared 7.6% with 6.6% being Catholic. Hoahao Buddhists make up 1.4%, Caodaism followers 1% and followers of other religions including Hinduism, Islam, and the Baháʼí Faith, representing less than 0.2% of the population. Folk religion has experienced a revival since the 1980s, and it's widely believed that the official 7.6% of the population being Christian is in error, and actually over 10% of the population is Catholic. The Catholic faith in Vietnam is so vibrant that it now supplies Priests to the United States, as the nation has a surplus of Priests itself. Looked at this way, Buddhists and Christians are overrepresented in the United States in comparison to Vietnam, but it might actually present a more accurate make up of the Vietnamese religious makeup.
Or perhaps not. One of the groups that most feared a Communist takeover in Vietnam were Catholics, and for good reasons. Catholicism has always been antithetical to Communism and in many instances it was credited with being the only effective force on the Globe opposing it. Elsewhere in the same general region of the world, some credibly credit the CAtholic Church for preventing mid 20th Century Australia from falling into Communism, something the far left in that country still strongly resents. Catholics were well represented in the South Vietnamese government and military, and interestingly some of the leaders of its military converted to teh Faith during the war or even after it.
Buddhism was introduced to Vietnam in the 2nd or 3d centuries BC, so its presence there is very old. Christianity in Vietnam is mostly the story of Catholicism there, and was introduced by the Portuguese, not the French as is so commonly assumed. Vietnam was never part of the Portuguese Empire, but its influence was very long, and very significant. The Vietnamese alphabet was developed by the Portuguese.
The Communist Vietnamese government has always been hostile to religion in general and openly repressive against some. Catholic have notably been oppressed, and the native Cao Đài religion, which originated as late as 1926, was oppressed by both the Republic of Vietnam and Communist Vietnam.
France did of course have all sorts of influences on Vietnam due to its conquest of Indochina which commenced in 1858 and ran to 1885. The very first Vietnamese refugees I met in the US spoke French as well and their native language, reflecting that they had been educated during the French colonial period. Today that number has dropped way off, with their being no need for French in daily life. A much higher percentage of Vietnamese in Vietnam speak English today than French. One of the very first refugees I met, who had been an engineer in Vietnam, but who worked as a city mechanic in the US, struggled with English, but spoke French fluently.
At one time the Vietnamese Diaspora retained a close cultural connection with the defeated Republic of Vietnam and in some places, they still do. Republic of Vietnam flags were prominent in some locations this past month in areas with large Vietnamese populations and they were displayed during commemorations of the fall of Saigon. However, there are a not insignificant number of Vietnamese now who are post war immigrants, and whose association is not as strong or there at all. The Republic of Vietnam itself is officially detested in Vietnam, and often open views about the Republic reflect the same.
Vietnamese in the US often express the hope that someday the separated people can be united somehow, something that's common for diaspora people. But it won't come to be so. As time moves on, the Vietnamese in the US will become more and more American, like Italian Americans are and Irish Americans, and less Vietnamese. Part of that will occur through intermarriage, which is occuring in the US but which interestingly was not a common occurrence during the French occupation of Vietnam or the Vietnam War, with the cultural differences at the time simply being to vast for it to arise frequently.
The 43d Infantry Division captured the Ipoh Dam near Manila. 100,000 gallons of napalm were used in the American effort.
There was hard fighting again on Okinawa.
Aircraft from the USS Ticonderoga attacked targets on Taroa and the Maleolap atoll, encountering limited resistance.
Dutch troops landed on Tarakan Island, reinforcing the Australian forces.
Denmark severed relations with Japan.
French forces landed in Beirut to reassert control of Lebanon.
A British white paper addressed post war independence for Burma.
Archbishop Stepinac of Croatia was arrested for the first time by the incoming Communists in Yugoslavia.
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Thérèse of Lisieux was canonized. She had died in 1897, making her canonization remarkably quick.
Tris Speaker of the Cleveland Indians became the fifth baseball player to accomplish the feat of making 3,000 hits in his career.
Baseball pitcher Buster Ross of the Boston Red Sox set a still standing record, of committing four errors in a single game.
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I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
In the light of the new Pope taking the name Leo XIV, let's revisit a major writing of Pope Leo XIII