Jump directly to the Content

Christian History

Today in Christian History

July 6

July 6, 1054: Church legates of the Roman pope march into the church of Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and place a bull on the altar, excommunicating him. So began of the Great Schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox. (See issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy)

July 6, 1415: Jan Hus, Bohemian preacher and forerunner of Protestantism, is burned as a heretic in Constance, Germany (see issue 68: Jan Hus).

July 6, 1535: Sir Thomas More (b. 1478), who had recently resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, is executed for treason. He had sided with the pope against Henry VIII in the matter of the king's divorce. He was sentenced to be hanged, but Henry commuted the sentence to beheading (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).

Read These Next

July 16, 1519: The Disputation of Leipzig, in which Martin Luther argued that church councils had been wrong and that the church did not have ultimate doctrinal authority, ends (see issue 34: Luther's Early Years).

July 16, 1769: Spanish Franciscan friar Father Junipero Serra founds the San Diego de Alcala mission in California, the first permanent Spanish settlement on the west coast of America (see issue 35: Christopher Columbus).

July 16, 1931: Missionary C.T. Studd, one of the famous "Cambridge ...

More from July 16
close