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Christian History

Today in Christian History

January 5

January 5, 1066: Edward the Confessor, the only English king ever canonized a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, dies. Builder of Westminster Abbey, he was buried there January 6.

January 5, 1527: Swiss Anabaptist reformer Felix Manz is drowned in punishment for preaching adult baptism, becoming the first Protestant martyred by other Protestants (see issue 5: Anabaptists).

January 5, 1964: Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Greek Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras meet in Jerusalem, the first meeting of the two offices since 1439, more than half a millennium before (see issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy).

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April 18, 1161: Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, dies. He repeatedly quarreled with his superiors about church appointments and other political questions, but he the influential French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux supported him. Theobald helped strengthen the English church and build the career of Thomas Becket, whom he recommended as chancellor to England's newly crowned King Henry.

April 18, 1587: English Protestant historian John Foxe, author of Actes and Monuments of Matters Happenning to the ...

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