October 30

John Wycliffe, Henry Dunant, and Mother Jones

Author

David Barnhart
October 30, 2025

Madonna and Child, Bolivia, 2008.

Today is a feast day, in the Episcopal Church, USA, for John Wycliffe, who died on December 31, 1384. Wycliffe prefigured the Protestant Reformation in his criticism of the church hierarchy and his belief that the Bible should be available in the common language of his culture. He translated the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate into the English of his day. His feast day is today because tomorrow marks the anniversary of Martin Luther’s action in Wittenberg, which kicked off the Protestant Reformation. 

Today also marks the death, in 1910, of Henry Dunant, who helped found the Red Cross (which we also noted yesterday) and helped establish the Geneva Convention.

Today also marks the death, in 1930, of Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones), union organizer and  activist for economic justice. She helped shift the whole country’s policies on child labor and unsafe conditions for miners.

Reflection: 

Henry Dunant described a story that led him to do advocacy for peace and indiscriminate medical care:  

“In one of the Cremona hospitals, an Italian doctor had said: "We keep the good things for our friends of the Allied Army, and give our enemies the bare necessities. If they die, so much the worse!" and he added, to excuse these barbarous words, that he had heard from some Italian soldiers who had returned from Verona and Mantua, that the Austrians allowed the wounded of the Franco-Sardinian army to die uncared for. A noble lady of Cremona, Countess..., who had heard the doctor's words and had been devoting herself to the hospitals with the utmost zeal, made haste to show her disapproval by declaring that she gave exactly the same attention to the Austrians as to the Allies, and made no difference between friends and enemies. "For, she said, "Our Lord Jesus Christ made no such distinctions between men in well doing."”

John Wycliffe said: 

“I believe that in the end the truth will conquer”

Mother Jones said about partisanship: 

“I don't care about political parties. I went down to the Greenback parties, to the Populist party, in fact I went through them all. I found some of the parties most powerful weapons, but money interest prostitutes them all. Nowhere have you elected a man in this last election that represents your interests. I do not care what political party you put in power because we are of the economical power. We have the power to do and we will do it! They are not going to fool us there. It was not the political party that gained the eight hour day for the railroad man.”

And she wrote: 

“Christ himself would agitate against them. He would agitate against the plutocrats and hypocrites who tell workers to go down on their knees and get right with God. Christ, the carpenter’s son, would tell them to stand up on their feet and fight for righteousness and justice on earth.”

Prayer: God of justice and mercy, we have the capacity to provide medical care for everyone who needs it. Convict us of the sin of our backwards economic ideologies and cause us to build an economy of care instead of an economy of colonialism and wealth extraction. Amen.