September 25 – Some important events on this day.
303 👉🏼 On a voyage preaching the gospel, Saint Fermin of Pamplona is beheaded in Amiens, France.
1066 👉🏼 Battle of Stamford Bridge: English army under King Harold II defeat invading Norwegians led by King Harald Hardrada and Harold’s brother Tostig, who were both killed
1396 👉🏼 Battle of Nicopolis: Sultan Bajezid I defeats Crusades armies
1513 👉🏼 Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa crosses the Panama Isthmus becoming first European to see the Pacific Ocean
1555 👉🏼 Freedom of Religion in Augsburg
1789 👉🏼 US Congress proposes the Bill of Rights
1820 👉🏼 French Physicist François Arago announces electromagnetism in his discovery that a copper wire between the poles of a voltaic cell could laterally attract iron filings to itself
1878 👉🏼 British physician Dr. Charles Drysdale warns against the use of tobacco in a letter to The Times newspaper in one of the earliest public health announcements on the dangers of smoking
1906 👉🏼 Leonardo Torres Quevedo successfully demonstrates the Telekino at Bilbao before a great crowd, guiding a boat from the shore, considered the birth of the remote control
1933 👉🏼 The Turin Shroud, supposedly the burial cloth Jesus was wrapped in after his crucifixion, was put on display publicly on this day for the first time in 400 years.
It caused quite a stir at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, where more than 25,000 people were to turn up and gaze in awe at the relic.
The stained cloth, 4.2 metres long, clearly shows the imprint of a body, front and back, and a man’s face with his eyes closed. The crowds of believers who turned up at the cathedral had no doubt about the identity of the figure, convinced that the stains were the blood of Christ. However, the shroud has been controversial since it was first revealed to the public over 600 years ago.
In 1390, French bishop Pierre d’Arcis wrote to Pope Clement VII saying that the shroud was “a clever sleight of hand” by someone “falsely declaring this was the actual shroud in which Jesus was enfolded in the tomb. [The purpose] is to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them.”
Modern carbon dating suggests that the shroud dates to between 1260 and 1390. Jesus is generally believed to have died in the year 33. And in 1979 a panel called the Turin Commission concluded it is likely that the stains are pigments, not blood.
Many studies have concluded that the shroud is not authentic, the last being in 2018 when a group of forensic scientists reported in the Journal of Forensic Science that the shroud was artificially created.
But the Roman Catholic Church has never accepted – or entirely rejected – claims about the shroud. Officially, it considers the shroud to be an icon, not a holy relic.
1939 👉🏼 Andorra and Germany sign a treaty ending WW I, as Versailles Peace Treaty forgot to include Andorra
1975 👉🏼 Pink Floyd’s concept album “Wish You Were Here” reaches No. 1 in the US, goes on to sell 13 million copies