PrintIt was a day like today.
Eleanor Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962. Following the death of her husband President Franklin Roosevelt and the end of the Second World War, which led to the beginning of the Cold War, Mrs. Roosevelt busied herself with the workings of the newly formed United Nations, just as she had been in the area of civil rights and in opposing lynching. Upon her passing, many eulogized her for her liberal spirit but perhaps none surpassed fellow Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson who was to declare “She would rather light candles than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world.”
On this date in 1837, a pro-slavery mob savagely beat the Reverend E. Lovejoy, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper in Illinois. Following their battery of the parson, they broke his press to smithereens and threw it into the river before firing the building where he had published his broadsheet.
In 1867 on this date was born the co-discoverer of the element radium, Marie Curie, neé Maria Sklodowska, a Polish physicist and chemist scientists and wife of French scientist Pierre Curie. In 1903, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henri Becquerel. Marie was then to receive the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the only woman to receive the prize in two different fields. Her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie was also to receive a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935. Marie was not to see her daughter’s triumph: she died in 1935 from complications of aplastic anemia, which she almost certainly contracted from handling radioactive materials unprotected.
Perhaps heralding more recent judicial decisions on the dress of Muslim women appearing before the bar, a English court today in 1615 made a ruling on the apparel of one Ann Turner, a physician’s widow. When Mrs. Turner appeared before Judge Edward Coke, she was asked to remove her hat. Replying, she said that if she could wear it in front of God whilst in church, surely she could wear it in his court. Coke’s irenic answer was that “…from God no secrets are hid, but it is not so with man whose intellects are weak; and because the countenance is an index to the mind, all covering should be taken away from the face.” The defendant Mrs. Turner doffed her hat but replaced it with a kerchief. The judge found her not guilty.
On this date, Eastern Christians celebrate the feast of St. Lazarus the Wonderworker. St. Lazarus in Lydia, in the city of Magnesium. An educated young man, he became a monk at the monastery of St. Sava, the founder of great ascetic piety in Palestine, and spent ten years within the monastery. Ordained a priest by the Patriarch of Jerusalem himself, St. Lazarus returned to his native land and settled near Ephesus, on desolate Mount Galesius. It was there he saw a wondrous vision: a fiery pillar, rising up to the heavens, encircled by angels singing, "Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered". On the spot where he beheld the vision, he built a church in honor of the Resurrection of Christ and took upon himself the feat of pillar-dwelling. Soon other monks came to imitate and learn from this stylite, establishing a monastery there. After receiving a revelation about his impeding end, he informed his brothers. But, through the tearful prayers of all, the Lord prolonged St. Lazarus’ earthly life for another 15 years. He died at 72 years of age, in 1053 AD, and his fellow monks buried his body at the pillar upon which he had pursued asceticism.
On November 7, 1920 Patriarch Tikhon issued an Encyclical letter ordering that the millions of Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution should organize a church authority outside of Soviet control, thus creating the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. The remaining Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union was organized by the agency that preceded the KGB.
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