Happy St. Julius Day!
Oh, and also Passover
[Pope Julius I depicted in a c. 12th century mosaic]
Happy St. Julius Day! He was Bishop of Rome 337-352 and played a key role in supporting the Athanasians against the Arians in the mind-numbing Christological controversy that convulsed the early Church. That controversy is especially notable today because so much of it took place in lands that, it is now forgotten, were Christian for centuries before being conquered and forcibly Islamized by Muslim invasions. (Look out, Europe!). Thus the Nicene Creed, which Christians throughout the world will recite in church tomorrow, was first formulated at Nicea, which is now Iznik in Turkey.
St. Julius is also credited with advancing the authority of the Pope and setting December 25 as the official birthdate of Jesus—something that occasionally surfaces in the ongoing attempts to deconstruct the festival that make up a key part of the War On Christmas.
Oh, and it's also the first night of Passover.
It has now become a multicultural must to step on Christmas by never mentioning it except in connection with other “holidays,” notably Hanukkah, aptly described by American Heritage's Frederic Schwarz (December 2000) as the “Jewish Kwanzaa.”
Somehow, however, the MSM neglects to provide the nearest Saint's day in the Christian calendar to each year's Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover—there are a lot of Saints! So it became a VDARE.com service (as so often) to fill the gap.
We always wished ALL our readers a Happy. We meant it, although I have reason to think it was sometimes unreciprocated.
And writing this series had the effect of introducing me, brought up as a relatively saint-free Protestant, to the rich and often moving stories of the men and women who, over two thousand years, have given their lives to Christ.
VDARE.com’s Passover series can be accessed here.