Friday, December 5, 2025

It is the 5th of December 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

In the past, I have noted that the Christmas season used to be a time for ghost stories- a kind of blending of the spooky season of modern Halloween and the festive Advent and Christmas season. In the old holiday his, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” we hear:

There'll be parties for hosting

Marshmallows for toasting

And caroling out in the snow

There'll be scary ghost stories

And tales of the glories of

Christmases long, long ago

And Dickens' A Christmas Carol is formally named “A Christmas Carol: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas”. All of this lets me tie a bit of the spooky into this season with an event- the promulgation of a Papal Bull on this day in 1484- the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus by Pope Innocent VIII. It is the moment we might tag as the beginning of the infamous witch-hunts of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era. Let’s look at the document and what it helped to unleash. 

There has always been a concern in the church of the improper use of magic. It’s not always uniformly defined- some will delineate “white” and “black” magic. The core biblical text is from Samuel 28 and the so-called “witch” or “medium” of Endor that Saul consults. The church has long had prohibitions against the things associated with “witches,” but it is the late Middle Ages when the “witch hunts” kick into high gear (more on the statistics in a minute).

The official papal decree- the Summis Desiderantes Affectibus- proclaimed the following:

It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany, as well as in the provinces, cities, territories, regions, and dioceses of Mainz, Koln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth… etc.. etc…

The list goes on- but the kicker to the Bull is that it names two men- "our beloved sons Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, of the order of Friars Preachers, professors of theology, have been and still are deputed by our apostolic letters as inquisitors of heretical pravity.”

And these men- the Dominican Inquisitors took this bull and made it the front matter for their most famous book- the handbook for the witch craze- the Malleus Maleficarum or “the Hammer of the Witches”. The book became legitimized by the Papal Bull and was aided by the new technology of the printing press.

In the past, the number of witches tried and put to death by fire (typical for heretics) has been exaggerated- there were estimates in the millions before research settled at something like 100,000 trials and some 50,000 put to death between the late 1400s and 1600s. What stands out with the modern research is the parallel between the Reformation and the trials- they were intense in regions torn apart by the Reformation, and they simmered down with the close of the 30 Years' War and the end of the Reformation. While the hunt for heresy was on, witches were usually “discovered”.  The Malleus Maleficarum was eventually discredited, and with the development of the modern nation state, a moratorium on state-sanctioned heresy and witch hunting would be on the wane. In fact, it was a Catholic, Frederich Von Spee, and Pope Gregory XV in the 1600s who would help to tame down the firestorm that was ignited by the book, which was given fuel by the papal Bull, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, by Pope Innocent VIII, issued on the 5th of December in 1484.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary- an Advent reading from Isaiah 30 in the RSV:

19 Yea, O people in Zion who dwell at Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when he hears it, he will answer you. 20 And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. 21 And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. 22 Then you will defile your silver-covered graven images and your gold-plated molten images. You will scatter them as unclean things; you will say to them, “Begone!”

23 And he will give rain for the seed with which you sow the ground, and grain, the produce of the ground, which will be rich and plenteous. In that day your cattle will graze in large pastures; 24 and the oxen and the asses that till the ground will eat salted provender, which has been winnowed with shovel and fork. 25 And upon every lofty mountain and every high hill there will be brooks running with water, in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. 26 Moreover the light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day when the Lord binds up the hurt of his people, and heals the wounds inflicted by his blow.

X This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 5th of December 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who wonders if the Witch of Endor and the Ewoks are in the same expanded universe… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man glad that we didn’t lose Samantha, Morticia, Sabrina, Glinda… I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.