1799 - A Christian Perspective

1799 C.C.

 

A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE

 

AFRICA

 

Johannes van der Kemp, a charismatic figure, arrived in Cape Town (March 31). A Dutch missionary ordained by the Church of Scotland, Van der Kemp would work among the Khoikhoi.

 

Father Pinto turned Lacerda’s expedition back towards Tete.

 

Francisco Joao Pinto was the chaplain for Francisco de Lacerda’s 1798 expedition that left Tete in search of an overland route to the Atlantic.  They reached Kazembe’s capital on the Luapula River, but Lacerda died before seeing him.  Father Pinto took command and was finally granted an audience.  No trade agreements (or even passage rights) were made, however, and after internal quarrels among the Portuguese.  Father Pinto and the remnants of the group turned back in July 1799.  Their return to Tete was beset with confrontations with the Africans, especially the Bisa, and his diary records the value of their guide, Goncalo Pereira.

 

ASIA

 

Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar (1736-1799), the author of Varthamanapusthakam, the first travelogue in the Indian language and the Administrator of the Archdiocese of Cranganore, died (March 20). {See A Humanist Perspective.}

 

EUROPE

 

Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, the newly appointed papal vicar-general of the kingdom of Naples began a counter-revolutionary campaign against the French occupation of the kingdom.  By June, his advancing forces re-captured the city of Naples itself.

 

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Religious Tract Society were founded in London, England.  The CMS was founded by evangelical Anglican clergy as the Society for Missions in Africa and the East.

 

Schleiermacher published his addresses to “the cultured despisers of religion” (Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers).  In his addresses, Schleiermacher defended religion against its Enlightenment critics, arguing that it is a sense of the infinite consisting largely in feeling.

 

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is considered to be nineteenth century Protestantism’s greatest systematic theologian.  It was he who marked the points of the compass for much of subsequent theology and philosophy of religion.  Like Saint Augustine, Schleiermacher desired to know God and the soul, and his place in the history of philosophy is due largely to the fact that he was able to state in modern language and concepts the great Augustinian conviction that religious faith is native to all human experience.  Therefore, the knowledge of God and knowledge of the soul are two orders of knowledge that must be distinguished but cannot be separated.

 

Schleiermacher was first and foremost a preacher and theologian, a church statesman, and an educator.  He carried out his work as a philosopher in the context of the great idealist systems of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, but instead of attempting to imitate these men, he applied himself to the critical analysis of religion, both in its personal and societal manifestations, without reducing such experience to some form of philosophic intuition. 

 

In his earliest published work, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher made ample use of the romantic preoccupation with the nature and value of individuality, but he qualified the world view of German romanticism in two important respects.  First, an individual comes to self knowledge only in the presence of other persons.  Thus, the need to know and to express the self can be fulfilled only by observing and cultivating the morality of human community and communication.  Second, the individual’s cultivation of his own humanity – which the romantic accepted as a self-evident imperative – requires that he acknowledge his religious nature, as well as his aesthetic, scientific, and moral nature, and that he cultivate the religious side of his nature, or his self-consciousness, by seeking out religious community.

 

Schleiermacher’s thesis, from 1799 until his death, was that man is a religious being.  But since the individual must always appropriate his humanity in a fashion that is at once concordant with his generic identity and accordant with his own peculiar identity, religion is as much a problem for the individual as it is a natural endowment. In his mature thinking, as he came to align himself theologically with Augustine and John Calvin, Schleiermacher stressed not only the fact that man is a religious being but also the fact that the most fundamental, pervasive confusion inhibiting human consciousness is religious confusion.  Thus, in his Christian theology, he described sin as the failure to maintain a clear distinction between that upon which men are entirely dependent, God, and that upon which men are only relatively dependent, namely, objects within the world.

 

Pauline-Marie Jaricot (1799-1862), the founder of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith and the Association of the Living Rosary, was born (July 22).

Pauline-Marie Jaricot (b. July 22, 1799, Lyon, France – d.  January 9, 1862, Lyon, France) was a French laywoman who was the founder of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith and the Association of the Living Rosary.

At the age of seventeen, Pauline-Marie began to lead a life of abnegation, and on Christmas Day, 1816, she took a vow of perpetual virginity. She established a union of prayer among pious servant girls, the members of which were known as the "Réparatrices du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus-Christ".

During an extended visit to her married sister at Saint-Vallier, Drôme, she reformed the lives of the numerous girls employed by her brother-in-law. It was among them and the "Réparatrices" that she first solicited offerings for the foreign missions.

Pauline-Marie’s systematic organization of such collections dates back to 1819 when she asked each of her intimate friends to act as a promoter by finding ten associates willing to contribute one cent a week to the propagation of the Catholic faith. One out of every ten promoters gathered the collections of their fellow-promoters.  Through a logical extension of this system, all the offerings were ultimately remitted to one central treasurer.

The Society for the Propagation of Faith at its official foundation (May 3, 1822) adopted Pauline-Marie’s collection method, over opposition. In 1826, she also founded the Association of the Living Rosary. The fifteen decades of the Rosary were divided among fifteen associates, each of whom had to recite daily only one determined decade. A second object of the new foundation was the spread of good books and articles of piety.

Pauline-Marie Jaricot was declared "venerable" [“heroic in virtue” – the step preceding beatification and sainthood] on February 25, 1963.

 

Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger (1799-1890), a Bavarian Catholic church historian, was born (February 28).  Dollinger is known for refusing to accept the dogma of papal infallibility.

 

Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger,  (b. February 28, 1799, Bamberg [now in Germany]  —  d. January 10, 1890, Munich, Germany),  was a German historical scholar and a prominent Roman Catholic theologian who refused to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility decreed by the first Vatican Council (1869–70). He joined the Old Catholics   (Altkatholiken), those who separated from the Vatican after the council but believed they maintained Catholic doctrine and traditions.

Ordained in 1822, Dollinger became professor of canon law and church history at Munich in 1826. From 1835, he was a member of the Bavarian Royal Academy of Sciences and served as its president from 1873. Though he lost his professorship in 1847 for protesting the dismissal of four colleagues by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, he was given posts that made him second to the archbishop of Munich and was reappointed professor of church history in 1849. Döllinger was a brilliant scholar whose embrace of modern historical criticism and whose belief in religious freedom brought him into conflict with papal policy. His opposition to the Ultramontanists, those who supported papal infallibility, led to his designation as the leader of the anti-papal party in Germany.

In 1869 Döllinger wrote a series of articles, later enlarged and published as Der Papst und das Konzil (1869; The Pope and the Council), under the pen name Janus. This book, which criticized the Vatican Council and the doctrine of infallibility, immediately was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books.

After his refusal to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility, Döllinger was ex-communicated (1871) but was elected rector of Munich University in the same year. Döllinger and his colleagues, all ex-communicated, held a congress to oppose the council’s dogmas at Munich on September 22, 1871. It was attended by 300 Old Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran sympathizers. A committee, of which Döllinger was a member, drew up a doctrinal basis and a program for separate organization. According to Döllinger, it was the vocation of the Old Catholic communion to protest the Vatican dogmas, to support a Catholic church free from error, and to reunite Christendom.

Dollinger’s addresses on the reunion of the Churches, delivered at the Bonn Conference of 1872, show that he was by no means hostile towards the newly formed Old Catholic communion, in whose interests these conferences were held. In 1874 and again in 1875, he presided over the Reunion Conferences held at Bonn and attended by leading ecclesiastics from the British Isles and from the Oriental non-Roman Churches, among whom were Bishop Christopher Wordsworth of Lincoln; Bishop Harold Browne of Ely; Lord Plunket, archbishop of Dublin; Lycurgus, Greek Orthodox archbishop of Syros and Tenos; Canon Liddon; and the Russian Orthodox Professor Ossmnine of St. Petersburg. At the latter of these two conferences, when Döllinger was seventy-six years of age, he delivered a series of addresses in German and English, in which he discussed the state of theology on the European continent, the reunion question, and the religious condition of the various countries of Europe in which the Roman Catholic Church held sway. Not the least of his achievements on this occasion was the successful attempt, made with extraordinary tact, ability, knowledge and perseverance, to induce the Orientals, Anglicans and Old Catholics present to accept a formula of concord drawn from the writings of the leading theologians of the Greek Church, on the long-vexed question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit.

This result having been attained, Dollinger passed the rest of his days in retirement, emerging sometimes from his retreat to give addresses on theological questions, and also writing, in conjunction with his friend Reusch, his last book, Geschichte der Moralstreitigkeiten in der römisch-katholischen Kirche seit dem sechszehnten Jahrhundert mit Beiträgen zur Geschichte und Charakteristik des Jesuitenordens (Nördlingen, 1889), in which he deals with the moral theology of St. Alfonso de' Liguori.

Dollinger died in Munich at the age of ninety-one. Even in articulo mortis he refused to receive the sacraments from the parish priest at the cost of submission. The last offices were performed by his friend Professor Friedrich. Dolinger was buried in the Alter Südfriedhof in Munich.

 

Pope Pius VI (1717-1799) died in Valence, France at the age of 81 (August 29). 

 

Pius VI, original name Giovanni Angelo Braschi (b. December 25, 1717, Cesena, Papal States — d. August 29, 1799, Valence, France), was an Italian pope from 1775 to 1799, whose tragic pontificate was the longest of the 18th century.

Giovanni Angelo Braschi held various papal administrative positions before being ordained a priest in 1758. Progressing rapidly, he became treasurer of the apostolic chamber under Pope Clement XIII in 1766, and in 1773 was made cardinal by Pope Clement XIV, after whose death a four-month conclave elected Braschi on February 15, 1775.

The church needed spiritual and institutional reform, and the papacy was nearly stripped of power and influence. The religious orders, the essential medium of papal influence in the church, were under attack by the protagonists of the Enlightenment; and the royal leaders of Catholic Europe, the pope’s traditional allies, were indifferent to papal interests, being concerned only with the possibilities of using the national churches in their schemes for administrative reform.

In October 1781, the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II inaugurated his reforming Edict of Toleration, whereby non-Catholic minorities received considerable religious toleration, “unnecessary” monasteries were dissolved, diocesan boundaries were redrawn, and seminaries were placed under state control. Further detailed reforms were intended to abolish such practices as festivals and superstitious reverences that were not considered in keeping with the Enlightenment. Pius intervened in 1782 by personally visiting Vienna but failed to secure any concessions. Joseph’s application of Febronianism, an ecclesiastical doctrine that advocated restriction of papal power, subsequently became known as Josephinism. Meanwhile, the church in the Habsburg dominions remained wealthy and influential but subordinate to the state.

The French issue was equally overwhelming. Preliminaries to the Revolution were occurring, and the new government turned to the church’s wealth, which it confiscated as a direct backing for its currency. Under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), France intended to force a reform of the French Church, thus causing a major conflict between Rome and the Revolution, whose scheme resembled Joseph’s designs. Pius took no immediate action, but when an oath of fidelity to the new regime was demanded from the clergy, he formally denounced the Civil Constitution and the Revolution on March 10, 1791. The French Church was completely split.

Pius was on good terms with the allies against France in 1793 and felt that he could rely on them, but in 1796 his territory was invaded after the last Austrian defeat by Napoleon, who forced the Pope to sign a peace treaty at Tolentino on February 19, 1797. In the following December, a riot in Rome led to French occupation of that city on February 15, 1798, and the proclamation of a republic by a group of Italian patriots. Aged and frail, Pius VI was seized by the French in March 1799 and died a prisoner in France the following August, having then reigned longer than any Pope (except possibly St Peter).

 

Pius VI's body was embalmed, but was not buried until January 30, 1800 after Napoleon saw political advantage to burying the deceased Pope in efforts to bring the Catholic Church back into France. His entourage insisted for some time that his last wishes were to be buried in Rome, then behind the Austrian lines. They also prevented a Constitutional bishop from presiding at the burial, as the laws of France then required, so no burial service was held. This recrudescence of the investiture conflict was settled by the Concordat of 1801. Pius VI's body was removed from Valence on December 24, 1801 and buried at Rome on February 19, 1802.

Carlo Rezzonico (1724-1799), a Catholic cardinal who defended the Jesuits against the accusations that led to the suppression of the order, died (January 26).

Carlo Rezzonico (April 25, 1724 - January 26, 1799) was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He is sometimes referred to as The Younger to distinguish him from his uncle Pope Clement XIII who also bore the name Carlo Rezzonico. He served as Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church (1758-1763), Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church (1763-1799) and Secretary of the Roman Inquisition (1777-1799). He was also Bishop of Sabina (1773-1776) and Bishop of Porto e Santa Rufina (1776-1799). As Cardinal Camerlengo he participated in the papal conclave, 1769, and the papal conclave, 1774-1775.  He belonged to the Zelanti faction and defended the Society of Jesus against the accusations that finally led to the suppression of this order.

By the mid-18th century of the Christian calendar, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) had acquired a reputation in Europe for political maneuvering and economic exploitation. The common conception was that Jesuits were greedy plotters, prone to meddle in state affairs through their close ties with influential members of the royal court in order to further the special interests of their order and the Papacy.

Monarchs in many European states grew progressively wary of what they saw as undue interference from a foreign entity. The expulsion of Jesuits from their states had the added benefit of allowing governments to impound the Society's accumulated wealth and possessions.

Various states took advantage of different events in order to take action. The series of political struggles between various monarchs, particularly France and Portugal, began with disputes over territory in 1750 and culminated in suspension of diplomatic relations and dissolution of the Society by the Pope over most of Europe, and even some executions. The Portuguese Empire, France, the Two Sicilies, Parma and the Spanish Empire were involved to one degree or another.

The conflicts began with trade disputes, in 1750 in Portugal, in 1755 in France, and in the late 1750s in the Two Sicilies. In 1758, the government of Joseph I of Portugal took advantage of the waning powers of Pope Benedict XIV and deported Jesuits from America after relocating the Jesuits and their native workers, and then fighting a brief conflict, formally suppressing the order in 1759. In 1762 the Parlement Français, (a court, not a legislature), ruled against the Society in a huge bankruptcy case under pressure from a host of groups - from within the Church, but also secular intellectuals and the king's mistress (Madame de Pompadour). Austria and the Two Sicilies suppressed the order by decree in 1767.

After 1815, with the Restoration, the Catholic Church began to play a more welcome role in European political life once more. Nation by nation, the Jesuits became re-established.

The modern view is that the suppression of the order was the result of a series of political and economic conflicts rather than a theological controversy and the assertion of nation-state independence against the Catholic Church. The expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the Roman Catholic nations of Europe and their colonial empires is also seen as one of the early manifestations of the new secularist zeitgeist of the Enlightenment. It peaked with the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. The suppression was also seen as being an attempt by monarchs to gain control of revenues and trade that were previously dominated by the Society of Jesus. Catholic historians often point to a personal conflict between Clement XIII (1758–1769) and his supporters within the church and the crown cardinals backed by France.

 

THE AMERICAS

 

Jose Antonio de Alzate y Ramirez (1737-1799), a Mexican priest, scientist, historian, cartographer and journalist, died (February 2). {See A Pan-Hispanic Perspective.}

 

UNITED STATES

 

Authorities arrested Bailey E. Chaney, a Baptist minister, for conducting services near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

 

Many Russian missionaries died in a shipwreck in Alaska, including Joasaph Bolotov who was returning to Alaska following his consecration as first Russian Orthodox bishop to the New World.

 

James Varick's independent African American Methodist congregation organized as a church in New York. 

 

Richard Allen was ordained a deacon of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

 

Melville Beveridge Cox (1799-1833), an American Methodist Episcopal missionary was born in Hallowell, Maine (November 9). 

 

Melville Cox was born in Hallowell, Maine, on November 9, 1799.  Largely self-educated, he eventually settled in Baltimore in 1827, where he edited a Methodist paper, The Itinerant, until 1829.  In that year, he met Bishop Hedding who challenged him to go to Liberia.  He sailed on November 1832 and arrived on March 8, 1833.  He advocated a need for missions and was the first missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church to Africa.  His time of service was short, as he died four months after his arrival.

Today, there is a College of West Africa, a Methodist high school, in Monrovia, Liberia. The school was opened in 1839 (as the "Monrovia Seminary"), making it one of the oldest European-style schools in Africa. It has produced many of Liberia's leaders and includes among its alumni Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected as president in an African state, and Liberian Vice President Joseph Boakai.

The College of West Africa's main building is named in memory of Melville Cox, a Methodist missionary from Edenton Street United Methodist Church, who was a founder of the College. A historic stained glass window in the College's auditorium reads: "Though a thousand fall, let not Africa be given up".

 

Levi Richards (1799-1876), an early leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), was born (April 14).

 

Levi Richards (April 14, 1799 – June 18, 1876) was an early leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a member of the Council of Fifty and Anointed Quorum and served as a physician for movement founder Joseph Smith, Jr. and others during the years the Latter Day Saints were established in Nauvoo, Illinois. Richards was an older brother of church apostle Willard Richards.

Levi Richards was born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and trained as a botanical physician. He joined the Latter Day Saint church in 1836 and moved to Kirtland, Ohio to join the main gathering of Latter Day Saints.

In the late 1830s, Richards served as a counselor to Joseph Fielding in the presidency of the church's British Mission. In 1840, Richards was still serving as a missionary in the British Mission.

Richards married Sarah Griffith on December 25, 1843, with Brigham Young performing the marriage.

Richards served as a member of the Nauvoo City Council.

Richards served another mission in Britain from 1848 to 1853 along with his wife. They left their only child, Levi W. Richards, in care of family members on the advice of Brigham Young. For part of this mission, the Richards served in Wales, which was where Sarah Griffith had been born. For part of this time, Richards served as the general supervisor of missionary work in Wales, which for all intents and purposes made him the mission president in Wales.

After completing their mission, the Richards returned to the United States and headed to Utah Territory where they joined their son Levi, who was by this time eight years old. Richards lived for several years in downtown Salt Lake City. In the early 1870s, he moved to the Avenues area of Salt Lake City. He became a patriarch in the church in 1873 and died at Salt Lake City.