Today in Christian History

Dutch Anabaptist reformer Menno Simons wrote in a letter: 'Wherever there is a pulverized and penitent heart, there grace also is, and wherever there is a voluntary confession not gained by pressure, there love covereth a multitude of sins.'

In England, proto-Baptist minister and founder of Rhode Island, 26-year-old Roger Williams married Mary Barnard, daughter of a Puritan clergyman. Two years later, he and his wife sailed from Bristol to Massachusetts.

English revivalist George Whitefield wrote in a letter: 'My brother, entreat the Lord that I may grow in grace, and pick up the fragments of my time, that not a moment of it may be lost.'

British apologist C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter: 'May it please the Lord that...faith unimpaired may strengthen us, contrition soften us and peace make us joyful.'

More than 400 American Roman Catholic theologians charged that the Vatican had been throttling church reforms and imposing "an excessive Roman centralization." They contended that the Vatican had undercut a greater role for women, slowed the ecumenical drive for Christian unity and undermined the collegial functioning of national conferences of bishops.