Patrick, missionary to Ireland and the country's patron saint, dies - March 17

Local authorities, frightened by the pope’s threat to interdict the city of Florence, ask Girolamo Savonarola to stop preaching. He will not and soon afterward is executed.

461 (traditional date): Patrick, missionary to Ireland and that country's patron saint dies. Irish raiders captured Patrick, a Romanized Briton, and enslaved him as a youth. He escaped to Gaul (modern France) but returned to Ireland after experiencing a vision calling him back to preach. Patrick enjoyed great success there as a missionary and only the far south remained predominantly pagan when he died. Today St Patrick's Day or the Feast of Saint Patrick, is a cultural and religious holiday celebrated every year in Ireland and by Irish communities around the world.

1479 - Pope Sixtus IV grants the rector and dean of the University of Cologne the authority to censure printers, sellers, and readers of “heretical” books.

1498 - Local authorities, frightened by the pope’s threat to interdict the city of Florence, ask Girolamo Savonarola to stop preaching. He will not and soon afterward is executed.

1780: Thomas Chalmers, pastor, social reformer, and one of the founders of the Free Church of Scotland (FCS), is born. By his death in 1847, he had started missions in hundreds of poor urban settings, and he led a third of the Scottish clergy and a half of the laity of the church of Scotland into FCS in 1843. His chief concern throughout his life was the evangelization of the urban poor.

1840 - Death in Shropshire, England, of Lady Lucy Whitmore, author of prayers and hymns. The most famous of the latter is “Father, again in Jesus’ name we meet.”

1902 - Death in New York City of George W. Warren, an outstanding organist who served at several large Episcopal churches in Albany, Brooklyn, and New York City in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of his hymn tunes is still in use, that to which we sing “God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand.”

– Sources: Christian History Institute, Christianity Today, onthisday.com