A Brief History On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX issued his Apostolic constitution, Ineffabilis Deus, in which he established Catholic doctrine that the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, had been conceived without the ‘original sin’ that every other human is born with. This bit of dogma is not to be confused with the Doctrine of Incarnation, which is the Virgin Birth of Jesus. December 8th is thus celebrated each year as The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a Catholic “holy day of obligation,” and even a national holiday in some predominantly Catholic countries. Digging Deeper Mary, daughter of St.…
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A Brief History On November 25, 2009, almost three inches of rain fell in only four hours on the Western Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah located on the Red Sea. The city was celebrating the Eid al-Adah festival (Feast of the Sacrifice) during the annual Hajj, a Muslim tradition of making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during every Muslim’s life. Double the normal annual rainfall, the downpour created a flash flood that swept away over 3000 cars and killed at least 122 people. Digging Deeper Jeddah, being close to Mecca, is a normal place to pass through on…
A Brief History On October 13, 2013 (too many “13’s” in that date?), 115 Indians were killed and another 110 injured during the Hindu festival of Navratri at the Ratangahr Mata Temple in India when a stampede occurred on a bridge. Today, we list 10 such unhappy times when a religious activity or celebration went terribly wrong. (BTW, Today, October 13, 2017, is Friday the 13th!) Digging Deeper 1. Navratri Festival, 2013. A common Indian Hindu festival held each Autumn for 10 days and 9 nights, the method and reason for celebrating varies from region to region. Dancing, recitals, plays, rituals…
A Brief History On October 9, 2012, 15 year old Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani Muslim girl, was shot in the face by Taliban Islamic extremist terrorists for the “crime” of being a girl that wanted to go to school to learn to read and write. Digging Deeper Despite being well educated for her area in Pakistan, as her parents ran a chain of schools, Malala was smart enough to write under a pseudonym when blogging for the BBC, as Taliban insurgents deemed it un-Islamic for girls to get an education. The Taliban (same religious extremists that ran Afghanistan until the…
A Brief History On September 19, 1846, two shepherd children in La Salette-Fallavaux, France experienced a vision or an encounter with what has officially been recognized by the Catholic Church as a meeting with the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ. The event, known as Our Lady of La Salette became an important influence on religious thought, influencing such theologians as Saint John Bosco, Saint John Vianney, and writer JK Huysmans. Digging Deeper The encounter began as the 2 children, Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat, were returning from a local mountain where they had been tending to their families’ cows. …