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January 3- Fidel Castro excommunicated

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Komnenos View Drop Down
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    Posted: 03-Jan-2006 at 09:26
Not a great day for making history, so only one birth and two excommunications.

On January 3 1892, the English linguist and author, J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfountain, South Africa.

If one trust the various polls held in various countries over the last few years, Tolkien is the author of the most popular book ever written and published, The Lord of the Rings, the epic fantasy trilogy that spawned a whole literary genre, a couple of movies, and a multi-million Dollar merchandising industry.
As the story itself has by now become a pillar of global culture, it doesnt need to retold here and for those who should never have read or even heard of it, the question is, on what planet have lived over the last few decades?
Born as the son of an English bank-manager in South Africa, Tolkien, having returned to Britain, embarked in the early 20s on a life-long academic career as Professor for English, specialising in Anglo-Saxon literature. Whilst teaching at Oxford, his interest in ancient linguistics sparked his creation of a literary mythical universe, inhabited by people that spoke languages invented by Tolkien. His narration of the fictional history of Middle Earth, began with early compositions of creation myths , continued via The Hobbit , and culminated in the detailed account of the War of the Rings in the omnipresent novel The Lord of the Rings.



J.R.R. Tolkien





As promised two excommunications, and not by coincidence, the targets of such drastic papal measures were two of my favourite figures in history.

The first one was none other than Martin Luther himself, the great German Reformator, whose severe criticism of the decadent practices of the Catholic Church in the Renaissance, split Christianity and established the Protestant Churches. In 1521 Pope Leo X issued the Papal Bull Decet Romanum Pontifecem, in which he finally anathemised the rebellious Monk, who not only had ignored the previous bull Exsurge Domine( see my signature), but also had burned his own copy of it to great public acclaim in Wittenberg, the small town in Eastern Germany, where Luther in 1517 had nailed his famous 95 thesis onto the local Churchs door. Although Luther had initially tried to avoid a complete break with the Church authorities, by 1521, the excommunication simply stated the fait accompli, the irrevocable secession of the Lutherian reformatory movement of the Papal Church.

The other and more recent member of the Catholic Church who was expelled, was the great leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, who had fell foul of the Church when he established a Marxist regime on the formerly devout Catholic Caribbean island. Three years after Castros takeover, in 1962 the reigning Pope John XXIII, otherwise a rather progressive Pontifex, excommunicated the Cuban El lider maximo, whose disapointment of not being an official member of the Catholic Church any longer, was probably not that great, considering Fidel, baptised as a Catholic, had become an atheist by then.
Relations between the Cuban government and Vatican remained somewhat disturbed until the 90s, when John Paul II declared the US embargo of Cuba as unethical and even visited the island on one of his many world tours.

Complete list of events:

Wikipedia

Edited by Komnenos
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