1492: Spain issued a royal edict advising Jews to either become Catholics, leave the country or be executed.
1732: Composer Franz Joseph Haydn, known as the “father of the symphony,” was born in Austria. One of his greatest contribution to church music was his 1798 oratorio The Creation. He died in 1809.
1890: The Manitoba legislature passed an act abolishing Catholic public schools.
1959: The Dalai Lama was granted political asylum in northern India after fleeing Chinese-occupied Tibet.
1995: Carl Story, known as the father of bluegrass gospel, died in Greer, S.C., at age 78. He was among the first to merge the traditional rural sound of bluegrass with church music. Story recorded about 65 gospel albums, with such songs as Light at the River.
1548: England’s Parliament ordered the publication of the Book of Common Prayer.
742: Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, was born. Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800, During his reign, Charlemagne appointed and deposed bishops, directed a revision of the text of the Bible, instituted changes to the liturgy, set rules for life in the monasteries, and sent investigators to dismiss priests with insufficient learning or piety.
1877: American evangelist Mordecai Ham was born. It was under Ham’s preaching in the late 1930s that Billy Graham was led into a living faith.
2005: Pope John Paul II died at the age of 84, after a 26-year reign as head of the Roman Catholic Church. The Polish-born John Paul was the first non-Italian pope in over 450 years.
2010: At a solemn Good Friday service, Pope Benedict’s personal preacher, Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the uproar over sex abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church with anti-Semitic persecution. Reaction was swift from two of Canada’s largest Jewish groups. B’nai Brith Canada, called it “a very unwise choice of analogies and verbiage” while the Canadian Jewsih Congress said such comparisons “trivialize the history of the persecution of the Jews.”
1327: Marsilius of Padua and his copyist, John of Jandun, were forced to flee Paris for asylum in Bavaria after the Pope issued a bull denouncing them as “sons of perdition and fruits of malediction.” In his book Defensor pacis, Marsilius had denounced the corruptions of the Roman church leadership and called for a radical reformation of the institution.
1593: Metaphysical poet George Herbert, known for his mastery of metrical form and allegory as well as his themes of Christian devotion, was born in Montgomery Castle, Wales.
1897: German pianist and composer Johannes Brahms died of liver cancer at age 63. A devout Lutheran, he wrote extensively for the church, including his German Requiem which some critics consider to be the greatest major sacred choral work of the 19th century.
1992: The Congregation of Christian Brothers formally apologized to victims of physical and sexual abuse at the Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John’s, Nfld. The apology came nearly two decades after boys first complained of abuse. The congregation also ordered the 94-year-old building razed to the ground, with proceeds from the sale of the land to aid victims.
397: St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, died. Known as the Father of Hymnody, he encouraged the singing of hymns, wrote several and codified the Ambrosian chant for the early church.
1507: Martin Luther was ordained a priest in Erfurt, Germany.
1541: Spanish theologian Ignatius of Loyola was elected the first general of the Jesuit order, or the Society of Jesus, which he had founded the previous year.
1739: The first performance of Handel’s Israel in Egypt was held in London at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket. Second only to The Messiah in popularity, it tells the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt.
1968: American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn. The Baptist minister received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights work. Word of King’s death set off riots in dozens of American cities. Prison escapee James Earl Ray was arrested a few months later in London. He confessed to the shooting and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. But Ray recanted three days later and spent the rest of his life seeking a new trial. He died of liver disease on April 23, 1998 at the age of 70.
1614: In Virginia, Indian chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas married English colonist John Rolfe. She was one of the first North American native converts to Christianity. She went by the name Lady Rebecca.
2004: A firebomb damaged the library of United Talmud Torah, an old Jewish school in Montreal, in an anti-Semitic attack. The library received cash, book donations and support from across Canada, and re-opened in December. Sleiman el-Merhebi, 19, pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced in January 2005, to 40 months in jail. He said he was reacting emotionally to what he had seen on TV about the Middle East.
2005: An estimated one million people waited in line for hours to pay their last respects as the body of Pope John Paul lay in state.
1528: Albrecht Durer, German painter, engraver, and designer of woodcuts, died. His most popular work is Praying Hands.
1830: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the Mormon Church — was founded by Joseph Smith in Fayette, N.Y.
1926: Northern Ireland clergyman and politician Ian Paisley was born. For decades, Paisley, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church, opposed any move he regarded as spreading the control of the Irish Republic or the Catholic Church over Northern Ireland.
2003: Gerald Emmett Carter, the retired cardinal and Archbishop of Toronto, died at the age of 91.