June 16, 1846: Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti is named Pope Pius IX. Roman Catholics remember him for his 31-year pontificate—the longest in history—for his declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and for the First Vatican Council’s declaration of the infallibility of the pope.

June 16, 1855: William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, marry, having fallen in love the first night they met. William had escorted Catherine home, and she later wrote, “Before we reached my home, we both felt as though we had been made for each other” (see issue 26: William and Catherine Booth).

June 15, 1215: King John signs the Magna Carta, which begins, “The Church of England shall be free.

June 15, 1520: In the papal encyclical “Exsurge Domine,” Leo X condemns Martin Luther on 41 of counts of heresy, branding him an enemy of the Roman Catholic Church. After the encyclical, Luther’s works were burned in Rome (see issue 34: Luther’s Early Years).

June 14, 1811: Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and daughter of Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, is born in Litchfield, Connecticut. When she met Abraham Lincoln in 1863, he reportedly said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).

June 14, 847: Methodius, an Eastern church leader who fought vigorously for icons to be preserved and venerated, dies of dropsy. He had earlier survived seven years of imprisonment with a decaying corpse, as ordered by officials under iconoclastic Emperor Theophilus. Upon Theophilus's death his wife, Theodora, took Methodius's side, and he was named Patriarch of Constantinople (see issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy).

June 14, 1936: English writer G.K. Chesterton dies at age 62. Authors from T.S. Eliot (who penned his obituary) to H.G. Wells, a longtime friend and debating opponent, expressed their grief. After the funeral, Pope Pius XI declared the rotund writer (a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism) Defender of the Faith (see issue 75: G.K. Chesterton).

June 14, 1954: On flag day in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.

June 14, 1966: The Vatican announces that its "Index of Prohibited Books" (created in 1557 by the Congregation of the Inquisition under Pope Paul IV) no longer carried the force of ecclesiastical law. But the announcement made clear that the Index retains moral force.

June 13, 1231: Anthony of Padua dies at age 36. His mentor, Francis of Assisi, wrote early in his ministry, "It pleases me that you teach sacred theology to the brothers, as long as—in the words of the Rule—you 'do not extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion' with study of this kind." With this blessing, Anthony went on to a life of teaching and preaching, becoming the most popular and effective preacher of his day .

June 13, 1525: German reformer Martin Luther marries Katherine von Bora, 16 years his younger, having sneaked her and several other nuns out of their Cistercian convent in empty herring barrels two years earlier. Many viewed the marriage, which lasted 21 happy years, as a scandal (see issue 39: Luther's Later Years).

June 13, 1893: Dorothy Sayers, English mystery writer and apologist, is born in Oxford, England. "Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something," she once said (see issue 7: C.S. Lewis).

June 12, 1744: David Brainerd, missionary to the New England Indians, is ordained by the Presbyterian Church. Within the next three years, he enjoyed success in his missionary efforts, but he died of tuberculosis at age 29 (see issue 77: Jonathan Edwards).

June 11, 1799: Richard Allen is ordained a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church (issue 62: Bound for Canaan).

June 11, 1850: David C. Cook, a pioneer publisher of Sunday School materials, is born in East Worcester, New York. By his death in 1927, his company was the largest publisher of nondenominational Sunday school literature in the world.