The Venerable Bede

709 Saint Aldhelm, English bishop and educator, died (b. ca. 639).

1085 Pope Gregory VII (also known as Hildebrand), whose attempts to reform the church got him banished, died in Salerno (b. ca. 1015).

1261 Pope Alexander IV died (b. ca. 1199).

1521 The Edict of Worms was issued outlawing Martin Luther.

1539 Hernando DeSoto (ca. 1496/97–1542) landed at Tampa Bay, Florida.

1679 Johann Georg Albinus, hymnist, died (b. 6 March 1624).

1778 Claus Harms, German Lutheran theologian who opposed rationalists, was born (d. 1 February 1855). [German Wikipedia article]

1793 Frontier missionary Stephen Badin (1768–1853) became the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States.

1803 The Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society voted to publish a missionary magazine now known as The American Baptist, the oldest surviving religious magazine in U.S.

1805 William Paley (b. July 1743), English theologian, died.

1815 The Basel Evangelical Missionary Society was organized.

1824 The American Sunday School Union was established by the Sunday and Adult Sunday School Union in Philadelphia.

1837 The Franckean Synod was organized in Minden, New York.

1840 Hans Christian Schmidt, General Synod missionary to India, was born at Flensburg, Schleswig (d. 6 March 1911).

1865 John Raleigh Mott, prominent in foreign mission work, born in Livingston Manor, New York (d. 31 January 1955).

1866 John Herman W. Meyer, president of the Minnesota District of the LCMS, was born in Baltimore, Maryland (d. 7 May 1949).

1876 The Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland united with the Free Church of Scotland to form the new Free Church of Scotland. The Reformed Presbytery had been organized in 1743 and the Free Church in 1843 by splits from the Church of Scotland. In 1929 the Free Church again merged with the mother church.

1879 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City was dedicated.

1952 The Missouri Synod mission in Taiwan was formally opened.

1968 Warner Elias Sallman, (b. April 30, 1892) famously known for his painting, “Head of Christ”, died on this date. He first sketched the image in charcoal in 1926, and the painting in 1940. At the time of his death there were over a 100 million copies of the painting.

1986 Ernst H. Stahlke died in New Hope, Minnesota (b. 8 October 1904, Hamburg, Minnesota). He graduated from Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis) in 1928 and served as a pastor in Saskatchewan, Canada, and at Prairie, Gaylor and Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was a member of the Missouri Synod Board of Directors, a circuit counselor, member of the district board of directors, secretary and president of the Minnesota South District. He retired in 1971.