This Week In Christian History

October 16, 1311: The Council of Vienne opens to decide if the Templars, a military order sworn to protect Christian pilgrims, are heretical and too wealthy. Pope Clement V decided to suppress the order. Its leader was burned and members' possessions taken by the church. That decision was adamantly derided by the poet Dante and by later historians.

October 16, 1555: English reformers Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley are burned at the stake at the order of Roman Catholic Queen Mary Tudor.

October 16, 1701: Unhappy with growing liberalism at Harvard, Congregationalists found Collegiate School, later known as Yale.

October 21, 1555: Finding that the recent martyrdom of bishops Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer had intensified Protestant zeal, Queen Mary launches a series of fierce persecutions in which more than 200 men, women, and children were killed.

October 21, 1663: Virginia colonist John Harlow is fined 50 pounds of tobacco for missing church.

October 21, 1692: William Penn is deposed as governor of Pennsylvania. His grateful overtures to James II for permitting religious freedom for Dissenters from the Church of England led William and Mary to charge Penn with being a papist. They were also troubled by his pacifism.

October 22, 4004 BC:: According to James Ussher, the well-respected and scholarly Anglican primate of the Irish Church in the early seventeenth century, God created the universe on this date at 9:00 a.m. GMT.

October 22, 1811: Pianist Franz Liszt, known for his Romantic orchestras and songs, but also the author of more than 60 religious works (including the song known today as "Fairest Lord Jesus"), is born in Raiding, Hungary