This week in persecuted church history (November 1-7)

November 1

• 731?: Pope Gregory III celebrates All Saints Day, a feast day dedicated to remembering those who have died and suffered for the faith, for the first time on November 1 rather than the traditional day of May 13.  This change becomes permanent during the ninth century under Gregory IV.
• 2006: A group of unidentified attackers bomb a Catholic church in Mosul, Iraq destroying the doors and windows.

November 2

• 1533: John Calvin escapes arrest in Paris by lowering himself from a window on bed sheets tied together. The king and church authorities were furious at him for a speech he made at the university calling for the church to return to New Testament ideals and accusing traditional theologians of being nothing but a set of sophists. He spent three years as a fugitive before settling in Geneva.
• 2007: Hindu militants disrupt a prayer service and beat and injure thirteen believers present in the village of Timnar, Chhattisgarh, India. The militants also stole jewellery, food and other possessions from the believers.

November 3

• 1534: The British Parliament passes the Supremacy Act, officially making England Protestant and putting the English monarch at the head of the nation's church.
• 2003: On the first day of his prison sentence in Ping Ding Shan City Lao Dong Jiao Yang Suo, Zhang Yi-nan is badly beaten by other prisoners, at the urging of prison guards. According to an official at the prison camp, guards considered this the first lesson in his "re-education."
• 2007: A Canadian Christian aid worker, Je Yell Kim, who is arrested by North Korean security officials on charges related to "national security" in the city of Rajin while trying to cross the North Korean border to China. He is released in January 2008 following the diplomatic visit of Ted Lipman, Canada's ambassador to South Korea, to the capital of Pyongyang.

November 4

• l646: Massachusetts Puritans pass a law prohibiting their people from denying that the Bible is the Word of God. The penalty for persistence in this error was death. The same act also sets a fine of five shillings for failing to attend church on Sunday.
• 2003: Father Saulo Carreño, 41, and hospital employee Maritza Linares are shot and killed by Marxist guerrillas while driving near Sarare Hospital in Saravena, Colombia when two men approached on a motorcycle and began shooting.
• 2004: Carminalis Ndele, one of the leaders of Pinedapa village near Poso, Indonesia is murdered by an unknown assailant.  His head is found the next day, severed and thrown from a car.  Inside the bag with his head is a note threatening to target the heads of one thousand Christians.  Later that afternoon, his body is found two kilometres from his home.

November 5

• 1858: With his wife, Mary, John Patton arrives on the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides, an island chain northeast of Australia despite the threat of martyrdom at the hands of the natives who were well-known for their cannibalistic practices.

November 6

• 2007: The Eritrean government orders the expulsion of thirteen Catholic missionaries from the country

November 7

• 1570: Jan van den Wege, together with two young women, Janneken van Hulle, and Janneken van Rentegem, are sentenced to death in Flanders. They are tied to a stake, strangled and then burned.
• 1637: Anne Hutchinson is convicted of spreading heresy and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her idea that believers are so united with the Holy Spirit that human categories (like moral law) are irrelevant, and her claim of direct revelation from the Holy Spirit rather than Scripture, caused many of her supporters (including influential minister John Cotton) to withdraw from her.
• 1837: Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois. A newspaper editor whose press was destroyed by vandals three times, he was accused of inciting slaves to revolt when he defended a black man burned at the stake by a mob. When another mob tried to burn down his warehouse, Lovejoy was shot trying to save it. His death helped to galvanize the abolitionist movement.
• 2004: Buildings belonging to two churches in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul suffer extensive damage from explosions.  The churches attacked were an Armenian church and one of the oldest Chaldean churches in the city.
• 2004: A mob numbering 15-20 disrupt a Sunday prayer service in Kodikal, Mangalore, India vandalizing the church and warn the worshippers against taking a part in religious conversions.  The attackers hurl stones and smash windows, chairs, fans, pots and musical instruments.