Today, October 14, is a long-established U.S. national holiday in honor of the Catholic Italian Explorer Christopher Columbus who was the first to discover and bring settlers to the new world of what just a few centuries later became the United States of America. There’s much more to the story that you and I learned…
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of the German republic, but how could such a man gain such power? Hitler’s message of social justice appealed to workers and the lower middle class. Since Hitler knew what it was to struggle to make a living, they thought they had found in him a…
Napoleon’s victories and his defeat at Leipzig came as distant rumors to Pope Pius VII at Fontainebleau. Because the pope was undergoing a bitter struggle of his own, he had cared little for such news. In January 1813, nine months before the Battle of Leipzig, the pope had received a sudden visit from Napoleon. The…
A Lament for Constantinople The fall of Constantinople in 1453 shocked Christians in the Latin West and Greek East alike. This piece, Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (Lament of the Holy Mother, the Church of Constantinople) by the French composer Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) depicts the Church of Constantinople lamenting before God’s throne for the fall…
