1085 - Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo, Spain, and brought the Moorish center of science into Christian hands.
1521 - Holy Roman Emperor Charles V pronounced Martin Luther an outlaw and heretic for refusing to recant his teachings while at the Diet of Worms (held the previous month).
1793 - Stephen T. Badin, 25, was ordained in Baltimore, MD ÀÀ the first Catholic priest to be ordained in the newly independent United States of America. Badin afterward served as a frontier missionary, and played a key role in establishing Catholicism in Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee during the early nineteenth century.
1824 - The American Sunday School Union was established in Philadelphia. It pledged itself: (1) to circulate appropriate literature in every part of the land; (2) to secure a unity of evangelistic effort; and (3) to plant a Sunday School wherever there was a population.
1876 - The Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland (org. 1743) united with the Free Church of Scotland (org. 1843) to form the new Free Church of Scotland. (In 1929 the Free Church merged with the Mother Church, afterward retaining the name Church of Scotland.)
© 1987-2011, William D. Blake. Used by permission of the author, from
Almanac of the Christian Church
