May 14, 1572: Gregory XIII, who reformed the Julian calendar into the calendar used today and celebrated the killing of French Huguenots (Protestants) with a Te Deum (a Latin hymn), is named pope (see issue 71: Huguenots and the Wars of Religion).

May 14, 1607: Robert Hunt holds the first Anglican service in the New World Day after the Virginia Company lands in Jamestown.

May 14, 1759: Anglican evangelical John Berridge preaches his first outdoor sermon. Outdoor preaching became a prominent feature of his ministry, as it did for George Whitefield, John Wesley, and the early Methodist movement as a whole (see issue 2: John Wesley, issue 38: George Whitefield, and issue 69: The Wesleys).

May 13, 1917: Three shepherd children report that the Virgin Mary appeared to them in Fatima, Portugal.

May 13, 1925: Florida’s House of Representatives passes a bill requiring schools to conduct daily Bible readings.

May 13, 1963: A.W. Tozer, Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and devotional author of The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, dies.

May 12, 1543: British Parliament prohibits any "women or artificer's prentices, journeymen, servingmen of the degree of yeoman, or under, husbandmen or labourers to read the New Testament in English."

May 12, 1792: Father of Modern Missions William Carey publishes his highly influential (though deplorably titled) book on the importance of evangelism, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens in which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the practicability of Further Undertakings, are Considered (see issue 36: William Carey).

May 12, 1861: Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," published in the Atlantic Monthly three months earlier, is first performed at Fort Warren, Massachusetts, during a flag-raising ceremony for new Union recruits (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).

May 11, 330: Roman emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor, inaugurates Constantinople as his capital on the site of the Greek city of Byzantium (see issue 57: Converting the Empire).

May 11, 603: Comgall, founder and first abbot of Bangor, dies. Considered the founder of Irish monasticism, by his death he oversaw 3,000 monks—including the famous missionary Columbanus (see issue 60: How the Irish Were Saved).

May 11, 1610: Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, the first Catholic missionary to China, dies. Entering the country as a repairer of clocks, Ricci was criticized for becoming a Confucian scholar and allowing ancestor “worship.” Though the number of his converts was relatively small, it included many influential Chinese scholars and families, who played key roles in the future of Christianity in China (see issue 52: Hudson Taylor).

May 11, 1682: The General Court of Massachusetts repeals two 2-year-old laws: (1) a ban on the celebration of Christmas, and (2) capital punishment for banished Quakers who returned to the colony.

May 11, 1825: The American Tract Society organizes in New York City. A leader in developing printing technology, the nondenominational organization was publishing 30 million tracts a year by its sesquicentennial.

May 10, 1310: In Paris, 54 Knights Templar are burned alive. The Catholic Church created the Templars to protect Holy Land pilgrims from bandits, but the Knights' quick rise in power and wealth made them unpopular. Philip the Fair of France against them trumped up charges of blasphemy and homosexuality to convince Pope Clement to disband the order and persecute its members (see issue 40: The Crusades).

May 10, 1886: Karl Barth, the most important theologian of the twentieth century and opponent of theological liberalism and political fascism (especially under Hitler), is born in Basel, Switzerland. When asked in 1962 (on his one visit to America) how he would summarize the essence of the millions of words he had published, he replied, "Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so" (see issue 65: The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century).

May 9, 1760: Count Nicholaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, founder of the Moravian Brethren and a pioneer of ecumenism and mission work, dies in Herrnhut, Germany. By his death the Moravians (which themselves only numbered in the hundreds) had sent out 226 missionaries around the world (see issue 1: Nicolaus Zinzendorf and the Moravians).

May 9, 1983: Pope John Paul II speaks before a gathering of 200 scientists and apologizes for the suffereing that Galileo Galilei had endured at the hands of the church when he was forced to recant his views of a heliocentric universe under threat of torture in 1633. John Paul II indicated that the church had renewed a review of the matter, which eventually led to a reversal of the Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo in 1992.