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Pearl of Great Price
Oct 23, 20213 min read
Oct 10 The First Millenial Saint?
We remember today how in Monza in Italy a 15 year old boy Carlo Acutis died of leukaemia. He was a remarkable young man. He stated that...


Pearl of Great Price
Oct 22, 20213 min read
Oct 9 Father Gabriel Fallopio - Rennaisance Anatomist
Today in 1562 we remember the death of Father Gabriel Fallopio the most illustrious of 16th-century Italian anatomist died. He...


Pearl of Great Price
Sep 21, 20214 min read
Sep 15 Dominic and the miraculous painting
Today in 1530 a supposed 'miraculous' portrait of Saint Dominic appeared in Calabria, in the South of Italy. The image has garnered...


Pearl of Great Price
Aug 29, 20218 min read
Aug 26 Nietzsche and the 'murder' of God
Today in 1900 the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche died. The last ten years of his life had been filled with unhappiness...


Pearl of Great Price
Aug 17, 20213 min read
Aug 16 Operation Baptism
Today we got to 1944 Hungary where a dispatch from Angelo Roncalli to the papal nuncio in Hungary illustrated the intensity of...


Pearl of Great Price
Jul 27, 20215 min read
July 26 Padre Pio
Today in 1919, Dr Amico Bignami conducted an investigation into the strange wounds that had appeared on the body of Francesco Forgione, a...


Pearl of Great Price
Jul 16, 20214 min read
July 16 Innocent III - Papal hard and soft power
Today in 1216 one of the most consequential Popes of the Medieval Era, Pope Innocent III died. As the head of the Catholic Church and...


Pearl of Great Price
Jul 14, 20214 min read
July 14 St Marks Tower collapses in Venice
Today in 1902 the famous Campanile or Bell Tower in St Mark's Square, collapsed, demolishing the loggetta beneath it. No one was injured...


Pearl of Great Price
Jul 4, 20213 min read
July 5 Thomas Cook transforms temperance into tourism
Today we travel to Leicester in England where Thomas Cook organised his first rail excursion for a day out to Loughborough. 500 people...


Pearl of Great Price
Jun 28, 20214 min read
June 29 Poet of the Spirit - Elizabeth Barret Browning
Today we travel to Florence in Italy where the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning died. Married to another poet – Robert Browning,...


Pearl of Great Price
Jun 21, 20214 min read
June 16 John Henry Newman and Lead Kindly Light
In 1833 the young Anglican priest John Henry Newman, while traveling on a ship from Italy to France, wrote the words to the hymn, “Lead...


Pearl of Great Price
May 24, 20216 min read
May 25 The Ecumenical Imperative
it’s the 25th of May and on this day in Christian History we go back to year 1995 and travel to Rome where Ut Unum Sint, the first...


Pearl of Great Price
May 21, 20213 min read
May 22 Papal Rome and the Trevi Fountain
Today the famous Trevi Fountain was finished by Pannini, and was officially opened and inaugurated on this day by Pope Clement XIII. We...


Pearl of Great Price
May 20, 20213 min read
May 21 Attacking the Pieta
Today in St Peters, Rome, a 33 year old man called Lazlo Toth, wielding a geologist's hammer shouted, "I am Jesus Christ — risen from the...


Pearl of Great Price
May 12, 20215 min read
May 13 The Shooting of John Paul II
Today we remember an assassination attempt that shocked the world. Its 1981, the last years of the Cold War, and the early years of the...


Pearl of Great Price
May 10, 20214 min read
May 9 An Assassination tests the Pope's Faith
Aldo Moro's bullet ridden body was found in the trunk of a Renault in the centre of Rome on the 9th of May in 1978. Italy's longest...


Pearl of Great Price
May 5, 20214 min read
May 6 The Ghent Altarpiece - the most stolen work of art
Its been described as the most stolen piece of art, the first great oil painting of the Northern Renaissance. A complex multi-panelled...


Pearl of Great Price
May 4, 20213 min read
May 4 Dividing the 'New World'
Today we remember how in 1493 Pope Alexander VI, in an age of exploration divided the 'New World' between Spain and Portugal. Giving the...


Pearl of Great Price
May 1, 20213 min read
May 2 The Polymath Priest who studied the Plague
The last polymath of the renaissance era was Fr Antanasius Kircher SJ. A giant among seventeenth-century scholars and at the dawn of the...


Pearl of Great Price
Apr 19, 20213 min read
Apr 20 Angelo Secchi, Spectroscopy and the Papal Yacht
Today the Vaticans astronomer Fr Angelo Secchi came aboard the papal yacht on the Azure waters of the Mediterranean to demonstrate his...
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