1808 Joseph Bonaparte suppressed the Spanish Inquisition.
1812 Napoleon’s French Grand Army invaded Russia. When Napoleon reached Moscow, the city was in flames. On October the 19th, the Grand Army began its retreat.
1814 Abdication of Napoleon and his exile to Elba. In 1815, he returned, but was defeated and sent as a prisoner to the island of St. Helena.
1814 Ferdinand VII restored the Spanish Inquisition.
1817 Publication of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline.
1820 The Spanish Inquisition was again suppressed.
1830 A twenty-four year old nun named Catherine Laboure in a convent of the Sisters of Charity in Paris reportedly saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. Mary appeared to her standing on a half-globe with a globe topped with a cross in her hands. She commanded Catherine to have a medal struck after the model of the image she had seen. The medal, first produced in 1832, came to be known as the Miraculous Medal.
1834 The Spanish Inquisition again suppressed.
1839 The Marquis de Custine visited Russia. While there, he recorded his observations in a series of letters. These letters provide insight into one nineteenth century Westerner’s blindness toward the central message of Orthodox spirituality:
The Marquis de Custine depicts a Russian prince as attributing Russia's backwardness to the fact that it successfully resisted conquest by the Teutonic Knights: “Think at each step you take in this land of Asiatic people that the influence of chivalry and Catholicism has been missed by the Russians.”
Later, he himself opines: “Separated from the Occident by its adhesion to the Greek schism, Russia has come back after many centuries, with the inconsistency of a disillusioned self-esteem, to ask from the nations formed by Catholicism the civilization that she has been deprived of by an entirely political religion. This Byzantine religion, issued from a palace to help maintain order in a camp, does not satisfy the most sublime needs of the human soul; it helps the police deceive the nation - that is all. It has made these people unworthy of the degree of culture to which they aspire.” The reader is left wondering if de Custine thought of religion solely as a tool for the improvement of civilization. He was plainly oblivious to Orthodox spirituality.
1839 The first French diocese to drop its local breviary in favor of the Roman, Langres, did so in this year. Orleans was the last, in 1875.
1845 Publication of Ferdinand Christian Baur’s Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ). Baur argued that only Galatians, the two Corinthian letters, and Romans were genuine. He held that the relative harmony between Jews and Gentiles portrayed in Acts indicated that it was composed after the apostolic period, when the details of such conflicts had been forgotten. A Hegelian, Baur saw Jewish Christianity (led by Peter) as thesis, Gentile (Pauline) Christianity as antithesis, and the catholic Christianity that emerged as synthesis. This notion of early Christian development is known as the Tubingen theory.
1846 Two children (Melanie Mathieu (14) and Maximin Giraud (11)) herding cattle near La Salette, France, reportedly saw a vision of a lady dressed in white who predicted crop failures and disease in the area if people failed to attend mass regularly and to cease using Jesus’ name as a curse. Subsequently, crops did fail, and cholera struck many children in the region.
1853 The Crimean War began. Lasted through 1856. The war was caused by a French demand that the Turks restore Latin rights in the Holy Land as described in a 1740 treaty. When the Turks complied, they dispossessed the Orthodox Christians of their accustomed rank. The Russian tsar, Nicholas I, reacted by demanding that the Orthodox privileges be restored and, in addition, he be guaranteed a protectorate over all Orthodox Christians (estimated at 12 million) in the Ottoman Empire. It was this demand for a protectorate over the laity, and not the clergy alone, which the Turks, backed by the British and the French, refused to admit, which led to the war.
The Roman Catholic church had a hand in moving the British and French against the Russians. The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Sibor, at the start of the Crimean War, said, “It is a sacred deed, a God-pleasing deed, to ward off the Photian heresy [Orthodoxy], subjugate it and destroy it with a new crusade. This is the clear goal of today's crusade. Such was the goal of all the crusades, even if all their participants were not fully aware of it. The war which France is now preparing to wage against Russia is not a political war but a holy war. It is not a war between two governments or between two peoples, but is precisely a religious war, and other reasons presented are only pretexts.”
Dostoyevsky wrote: “Militant Roman Catholicism savagely takes the side of the Turks. At the moment, there are no more savage haters of Russia than these militant clerics. It was not some prelate but the Pope himself, who loudly and with joy, spoke of the ‘victories of the Turks’ and predicted a ‘fateful future’ for Russia at various Vatican meetings. This dying old man, the ‘head of Christianity’ was not ashamed to admit in public that every time he hears of a Russian defeat he experiences joy.”
1854 On December 8, Pius IX issued Ineffabilis Deus defining the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: “that the most blessed Virgin Mary, in the first moment of her conception, by a special gift of grace from Almighty God, in consideration of the merits of Jesus Christ the Savior of mankind, was preserved pure from all taint of original sin.”
1858 Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year old French girl, claimed to have seen a white figure with a rosary who spoke to her in French, saying, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” The figure showed Bernadette where to find a previously unknown spring of water. Thus began the pilgrimage destination of Lourdes.
1858 A Christian nurse in a Jewish family’s home in Bologna (at that time, within the Papal States), baptized their small son without their consent. The boy was taken from his parents and raised at Rome in a home for converted Jews. Indignation at this act was widespread in Europe, but ineffectual.
1859 Tischendorf discovered Codex Sinaiticus (Aleph) at the Monastery of Saint Catherine, at the foot of Mount Sinai. Aleph is of the Alexandrian text type, with some Western readings. (See 350 for contents, 130 for a remark on the Epistle of Barnabas.)
1859 Charles Robert Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published.
1860 On July 9, a Muslim mob attacked the Christian quarter in Damascus. Over 2500 men were killed, apart from women and children. Many of the latter were sold into slavery. The patriarchal cathedral was burned, and those who had fled there for safety died. Turkish troops were involved in the slaughter.
1861 On February 19, Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs.
1864 Pope Pius IX (1846-78) presented his syllabus of errors. One error is that it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others. The syllabus also disapproves of secular public education and the separation of church and state. Catholics are forbidden to consider that the pope’s conduct may have contributed to the schism between East and West. It is held to be an error that, “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”
1870 The first Vatican Council defined the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.
The statement on papal infallibility, Pastor Aeturnus: “We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith and morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by consent of the church, irreformable.”
Pastor Aeturnus claims to be “in accordance with the ancient and constant faith of the universal church” and to faithfully adhere “to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith.” There is thus no recourse here to Newman’s system of doctrinal development. It teaches also that the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome “is truly episcopal, is immediate; to which all, of whatever rite and dignity, both pastors and faithful, both individually and collectively, are bound.” Those who disagree are assured that “This is the teaching of Catholic truth, from which no one can deviate without loss of faith and salvation.”
The Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV subsequently disclosed, that in the aftermath of the then patriarch's opposition to the definition of Papal infallibility at the first Vatican council, His Beatitude had been forced to the ground before the Papal throne while Pius IX (1846-78) placed his foot on his head.
1871 At Portmain, France, the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to Eugene Barbadette, age 12, his brother Joseph, 10, and two girls: Francoise Richer, 11, and Jeanne-Marie Lebosse, 9. It was thought that the vision was related to the halt of the German army’s advance on Laval.1873 Jerusalem Codex. Philotheos Byrennios, Head Master of the higher Greek school in Constantinople and later Metropolitan of Nicomedia, discovered a collection of manuscripts in the hand of a certain Leon, dated 1056, in the Jerusalem Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. The collection included (1) a summary of the Bible by St. John Chrysostom, (2) The Epistle of Barnabas, (3) the two Epistles of Clement to the Corinthians, (4) The Didache of the Twelve Apostles, (5) The Epistle of Mary of Cassoboli to Ignatius, and (6) Twelve Epistles of Ignatius. The discovery provided the second copy of Barnabas (the first being in Sinaiticus). It completed the text of 2 Clement (the epistles of Clement are included in Alexandrinus, though 2 Clement in that uncial is only 3/5 the length of the same epistle in the Jerusalem Codex.) The Didache was previously unknown.
1879 At Knock, Ireland, several people reportedly saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and (possibly) St. John the Evangelist, all motionless. Some witnesses also saw a lamb, an altar, and a cross in the same scene.
1879 Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) promoted the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas. Before this time, Thomism had been in decline.
1881 Westcott and Hort published their New Testament. Their classification of textual witnesses into four categories - Neutral (Aleph and B), Alexandrian, Western (D, Old Syrian, Old Latin, and the Western Fathers), and Syrian (Ae and the majority of manuscripts) - along with their low regard for the Syrian type, has been criticized in the twentieth century with the discovery of older (papyrus) manuscripts containing Syrian readings. The Westcott and Hort text relies primarily on B (Vaticanus) and Aleph (Sinaiticus).
1883-84 The first three parts of Friedrich Nietsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) were published. (The complete work appeared in 1892.) The work begins with Zarathustra, descending from 10 years’ solitude in the mountains, meeting a saint in the forest. After they part, Zarathustra says to himself, “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!”
1893 Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) published his encyclical On the Study of Holy Scripture. It takes a quite fundamentalist tone in the following passage:
“It is true, no doubt, that copyists have made mistakes in the text of the Bible; this question, when it arises, should be carefully considered on its merits, and the fact not too easily admitted, but only in those passages where the proof is clear. It may also happen that the sense of a passage remains ambiguous, and in this case good hermeneutical methods will greatly assist in clearing up the obscurity. But it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it - this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican. These are the words of the last: ‘The Books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, as enumerated in the decree of the same Council (Trent) and in the ancient Latin Vulgate, are to be received as sacred and canonical. And the Church holds them as sacred and canonical, not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without error; but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author.’ ”
1897 Papyri were discovered at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in an ancient rubbish heap. During the excavation, which continued until 1907, 28 papyri containing portions of the New Testament were unearthed, most of which date between 200 and 400: P1, 5, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 39, 51, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, and 90.
1900 Pope Leo XIII, on the possibility of salvation outside of the Roman Catholic Church, in his Tametsi (1 November 1900): “All who would find salvation apart from the Church, are led astray and strive in vain.”
