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April 30
Daniel Berrigan, Emily Stowe, Bessie Coleman, and the Edict of Nantes
David Barnhart
April 30, 2025
View of the castle at Nantes, 2022. Own photo.
On this day in 313, Emperor Constantine ended the persecution of Christians begun under Diocletian. Nearly 1300 years later in 1598, King Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, ending the French wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics and temporarily ending the persecution of the Huguenots.
On April 30, 2016, Father Daniel Berrigan died. He was a Jesuit priest and pacifist whose protest of the Vietnam War (burning draft cards) landed him on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list and, in 1970, in prison. He went to prison again in 1990 for a 1980 action in which he, his brother, and a group of colleagues damaged nuclear warheads and files at a General Electric facility. When a journalist asked how many times he had been locked up, he replied, “Not enough.”
Today also marks the death of Emily Stowe, a Canadian physician and women’s suffrage and women’s health advocate. She was a Quaker and Unitarian, and found creative ways to resist and parody the all-male political establishment of Canada.
Today also marks the death of the aviator Bessie Coleman in 1926, who I wrote about in January.
Reflection:
Daniel Berrigan said:
Every nation-state tends towards the imperial -- that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still, it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, and wastes the earth.
Prayer: God, we sometimes refer to you as “King,” but only by way of metaphor. Our kings are miserly, self-centered, exploitive, and ignorant. Let your reign be present in our hearts in such a way that our world is transformed toward joy and liberation. Amen.