March 1

589 Saint David of Wales, bishop and confessor, patron of Wales, died (b. ca. 500).

713 Suitbert, Apostle of Frisia and a Northumbrian priest, died.

1457 The Moravian Church was organized when followers of Jan Hus gathered on the estate of Lititz, about a hundred miles east Prague, in eastern Bohemia.

1546 George Wishart, Scottish reformer, was burned at the stake (b. ca. 1513).

1547 The Council of Trent reaffirmed the Roman Catholic teaching on confirmation as a sacrament and anathematized the Protestant teaching on confirmation. During the month the council was moved to Bologna due to plague.

1562 The Huguenots (French Protestants) were massacred at Vasey, France, by Roman Catholics, thus touching off the first of eight religious wars between the Huguenots and the Roman Catholics in France.

1577 The final revision of the Torgau Book (called the Bergen Book, which forms the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord), was begun by Andreae, Chemnitz and Selnecker at Bergen, near Magdeburg.

1605 Ernst Christoph Homburg, hymnist, was born (d. 2 June 1681, Naumburg, Saxony).

1632 George Herbert (b. 3 April 1593), Anglican poet and clergyman, died.

1638 The first Swedish settlers in America landed in modern-day Delaware. They soon established the first Lutheran congregation in the country.

1820 Richard Redhead, composer, was born at Harrow, England (d. 27 April 1901, Hellingly, England).

1828 Missionary Ephraim Weston Clark (1799–1878) arrived in Honolulu.

1860 The General Conference of Mennonites of North America was formed in Lee County, Iowa.

1861 Carrie E. Rounsefell, New England song evangelist who wrote the hymn tune MANCHESTER ("I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go"), was born in Merrimack, New Hampshire (d. 18 September 1930, Durham, Maine).

1889 William H. Monk, Anglican Church organist and hymnist, died (b. 16 March 1823).

1893 Saint John's College (Winfield, Kansas) was dedicated as a school of the English Missouri Synod.

1915 Peter Laurentius Larsen, president of the Synodical Conference, died (b. 10 August 1833).

1916 Ernst Gustav Hermann Miessler, American Lutheran missionary to the Chippewa Indians, died in Chicago, Illinois (b. 12 January 1826).

1943 Nicolas Coccola, a French Oblate missionary among First Nations in British Columbia, Canada, died (b. 12 December 1854).

1958 Pope Pius XII appointed Samuel Cardinal Stritch (1887–1958; Archbishop of Chicago) to head the Vatican office of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Cardinal Stritch thus became the first American to be appointed to the Papal Curia. On 26 May, less than two months later, Cardinal Stritch died in Rome at the age of seventy.

1967 The Missouri Synod Ministry of Mercy and Service was begun in Seoul, Korea.