Church (building)
A church building or church house simply called a church, is a building used for Christian religious activities for Christian worship services. The term is used by Christians to refer to the physical buildings where they worship, but it is sometimes used to refer to buildings of other religions. In traditional Christian architecture, the church is arranged in the shape of a Christian cross; when viewed from plan view the longest part of a cross is represented by the aisle and the junction of the cross is located at the altar area. Towers or domes are added with the intention of directing the eye of the viewer towards the heavens and inspiring visitors. Modern church buildings have a variety of architectural layouts; the earliest identified Christian church building was a house church founded between 233 and 256. From the 11th through the 14th centuries, a wave of building of cathedrals and smaller parish churches were erected across Western Europe. A cathedral is a church building Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Oriental Orthodox, housing a cathedra, the formal name for the seat or throne of a presiding bishop.
In Greek, the adjective kyriak-ós/-ē/-ón means "belonging, or pertaining, to a Kyrios", the usage was adopted by early Christians of the Eastern Mediterranean with regard to anything pertaining to the Lord Jesus Christ: hence "Kyriakós oíkos", "Kyriakē", or "Kyriakē proseukhē". In standard Greek usage, the older word "ecclesia" was retained to signify both a specific edifice of Christian worship, the overall community of the faithful; this usage was retained in Latin and the languages derived from Latin, as well as in the Celtic languages and in Turkish. In the Germanic and some Slavic languages, the word kyriak-ós/-ē/-ón was adopted instead and derivatives formed thereof. In Old English the sequence of derivation started as "cirice" Middle English "churche", "church" in its current pronunciation. German Kirche, Scots kirk, Russian церковь, etc. are all derived. According to the New Testament, the earliest Christians did not build church buildings. Instead, they synagogues; the earliest archeologically identified Christian church is a house church, the Dura-Europos church, founded between 233 and 256.
In the second half of the 3rd century AD, the first purpose-built halls for Christian worship began to be constructed. Although many of these were destroyed early in the next century during the Diocletianic Persecution larger and more elaborate church buildings began to appear during the reign of the Emperor Constantine the Great. From the 11th through the 14th centuries, a wave of building of cathedrals and smaller parish churches occurred across Western Europe. In addition to being a place of worship, the cathedral or the parish church was used by the community in other ways, it could serve as a hall for banquets. Mystery plays were sometimes performed in cathedrals, cathedrals might be used for fairs; the church could be used as a place to store grain. Between 1000 and 1200 the romanesque style became popular across Europe. While the name of the romanesque era refers to the tradition of Roman architecture, it was a West- and Central European trend. Romanesque buildings appear rather compact.
Typical features are circular arches, octagonal towers and cushion capitals on the pillars. In the early romanesque era, coffering on the ceiling was fashionable, while in the same era, groined vault was more popular; the rooms became the motivs of sculptures became more epic. The Gothic style emerged around 1140 in spread through all of Europe; the gothic buildings were less compact than they had been in the romanesque era and contained symbolic and allegoric features. For the first time, pointed arches, rib vaults and buttresses were used, with the result that massive walls were not longer needed to stabilise the building. Due to that advantage, the area of the windows became bigger, which resulted in a brighter and more friendly atmosphere inside the church; the nave so did the pillars and the church steeple. The amibition to test out the limits of the architectural possibilities resulted in the collapse of several towers. In Germany and the Netherlands, but in Spain, it became popular to build hall churches, in which every vault has the same height.
Cathedrals were built in a lavish way, as in the romanesque era. Examples for that are the Notre-Dame de Paris and the Notre-Dame de Reims in France, but the San Francesco d’Assisi in Palermo, the Salisbury Cathedral and the Wool Church in Lavenham, England. Many gothic churches contain features from the romanesque era; some of the most well-known gothic churches stayed unfinished for hundreds of years, after the gothic style was not popular anymore. About half of the Cologne Cathedral was for example build in the 19th century. In the 15th and 16th century, the change in e
Eastern Christianity
Eastern Christianity comprises church families that developed outside the Occident, with major bodies including the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Eastern Catholic Churches, the denominations descended from the Church of the East. The Ukrainian Lutheran Church is an Eastern Christian church that uses the Byzantine Rite; the term is used in contrast with Western Christianity, although its scope has been one of continual discussion. Eastern Christianity consists of the Christian traditions and churches that developed distinctively over several centuries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, the Malabar coast of South India, parts of the Far East; the term does not describe religious denomination. Some Eastern churches have more in common and theologically with Western Christianity than with one another; the various Eastern churches do not refer to themselves as "Eastern", with the exception of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East.
The terms "Eastern" and "Western" in this regard originated with geographical divisions in Christianity mirroring the cultural divide between the Hellenistic east and Latin West, the political divide between the Western and Eastern Roman empires. Because the largest church in the East is the body known as the Eastern Orthodox Church, the term "Orthodox" is used in a similar fashion to "Eastern", to refer to specific historical Christian communions; however speaking, most Christian denominations, whether Eastern or Western, consider themselves to be "orthodox" as well as "catholic", as two of the Four Marks of the Church listed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: "One, Holy and Apostolic". There are several liturgical rites in use among the Eastern churches; these are the Alexandrian Rite, the Antiochene Rite, the Armenian Rite, the Byzantine Rite, the East Syriac Rite and the West Syriac Rite. Eastern Christians do not share the same religious traditions, but do share many cultural traditions.
Christianity divided itself in the East during its early centuries both within and outside of the Roman Empire in disputes about Christology and fundamental theology, as well as national divisions. It would be many centuries that Western Christianity split from these traditions as its own communion. Major branches or families of Eastern Christianity, each of which has a distinct theology and dogma, include the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox communion, the Eastern Catholic Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church. In many Eastern churches, some parish priests administer the sacrament of chrismation to infants after baptism, priests are allowed to marry before ordination. While all the Eastern Catholic Churches recognize the authority of the Pope of Rome, some of them who have been part of the Orthodox Church or Oriental Orthodox churches follow the traditions of Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy, including the tradition of allowing married men to become priests.
The Eastern churches' differences from Western Christianity have as much, if not more, to do with culture and politics, as theology. For the non-Catholic Eastern churches, a definitive date for the commencement of schism cannot be given; the Church of the East declared independence from the churches of the Roman Empire at its general council in 424, before the Council of Ephesus in 431, so had nothing to do with the theology declared at that council. Oriental Orthodoxy separated after the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Since the time of the historian Edward Gibbon, the split between the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church has been conveniently dated to 1054, though the reality is more complex; this split is sometimes referred to as the Great Schism, but now more referred to as the East–West Schism. This final schism reflected a larger cultural and political division which had developed in Europe and Southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and coincided with Western Europe's re-emergence from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
The Ukrainian Lutheran Church developed within Galicia around 1926, with its rites being based on the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, rather than on the Western Formula Missae; the Eastern Orthodox Church is a Christian body whose adherents are based in the Middle East and Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, with a growing presence in the western world. Eastern Orthodox Christians accept the decisions of the first seven ecumenical councils. Eastern Orthodox Christianity identifies itself as the original Christian church founded by Christ and the Apostles, traces its lineage back to the early Church through the process of apostolic succession and unchanged theology and practice. Distinguishing characteristics of the Eastern Orthodox Church include the Byzantine Rite and an emphasis on the continuation of Holy Tradition, which it holds to be apostolic in nature; the Eastern Orthodox Church is organized into self-governing jurisdictions along geographical, ethnic or linguistic lines. Eastern Orthodoxy is thus made up of sixteen autocephalous bodies.
Smaller churches are autonomous and each have a mother church, autocephalous. All Eastern O
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Mass (liturgy)
Mass is a term used to describe the main eucharistic liturgical service in many forms of Western Christianity. The term Mass is used in the Catholic Church and Anglican churches, as well as some Lutheran churches, Western Rite Orthodox and Old Catholic churches; some Protestants employ terms such as worship service, rather than the word Mass.. For the celebration of the Eucharist in Eastern Christianity, including Eastern Catholic Churches, other terms such as Divine Liturgy, Holy Qurbana, Badarak are used instead; the English noun mass is derived from Middle Latin missa. The Latin word was adopted in Old English as mæsse, was sometimes glossed as sendnes; the Latin term missa itself was in use by the 6th century. It is most derived from the concluding formula Ite, missa est. However, there have been other explanations of the noun missa, i.e. as not derived from the formula ite, missa est. Fortescue cites older, "fanciful" etymological explanations, notably a latinization of Hebrew matzâh "unleavened bread.
The French historian Du Cange in 1678 reported "various opinions on the origin" of the noun missa "mass", including the derivation from Hebrew matzah, here attributed to Caesar Baronius. The Hebrew derivation is learned speculation from 16th-century philology. Thus, De divinis officiis explains the word as a mittendo, quod nos mittat ad Deo, while Rupert of Deutz derives it from a "dismissal" of the "enmities, between God and men"; the Catholic Church sees the Mass or Eucharist as "the source and summit of the Christian life", to which the other sacraments are oriented. The Catholic Church believes that the Mass is the same sacrifice that Jesus Christ offered on the Cross at Calvary; the ordered celebrant is understood to act in persona Christi, as he imitates the words and gestures of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper. By virtue of the mediation of the Holy Spirit, said to be present in the apostolic church, through the words proffered by the celebrant, similar to the Word of God the Son, there takes place a transubstantiation of: the wine into the Precious Blood, the sacramental bread into the Holy Body of Jesus Christ.
Hence, Roman Catholic and Orthodox believe that the Holy Trinity is in the host, celebrated during the Holy Mass and in the previous context of the Christian consecrations. The Holy Mass renews, makes alive at any time the innocent sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as He is "the Holy One of God", thus the unique door of salvation for the human sins; the term "Mass" is used only in the Roman Rite, while the Byzantine Rite Eastern Catholic Churches use the analogous term "Divine Liturgy" and other Eastern Catholic Churches have terms such as Holy Qurbana. Although similar in outward appearance to the Anglican Mass or Lutheran Mass, the Catholic Church distinguishes between its own Mass and theirs on the basis of what it views as the validity of the orders of their clergy, as a result, does not ordinarily permit intercommunion between members of these Churches. In a 1993 letter to Bishop Johannes Hanselmann of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, Cardinal Ratzinger affirmed that "a theology oriented to the concept of succession, such as that which holds in the Catholic and in the Orthodox church, need not in any way deny the salvation-granting presence of the Lord in a Lutheran Lord's Supper."
The Decree on Ecumenism, produced by Vatican II in 1964, records that the Catholic Church notes its understanding that when other faith groups "commemorate His death and resurrection in the Lord's Supper, they profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and look forward to His coming in glory."Within the fixed structure outlined below, specific to the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, the Scripture readings, the antiphons sung or recited during the entrance procession or communion, certain other prayers vary each day according to the liturgical calendar. The priest enters, with a deacon, if there is one, altar servers. After making the sign of the cross and greeting the people liturgically, he begins the Act of Penitence; this concludes with the priest's prayer of absolution, however, lacks the efficacy of the Sacrament of Penance. The Kyrie, eleison, is sung or said, followed by the Gloria in excelsis Deo, an ancient praise, if appropriate for the liturgical season; the Introductory Rites are brought to a close by the Collect Prayer.
On Sundays and solemnities, three Scripture readings are given. On other days there are only two. If there are three readings, the first is from the Old Testament, or the Acts of the Apostles during Eastertide; the first reading is sung responsorially or recited. The second reading is from the New Testament from one of the Pauline e
Public school (United Kingdom)
A public school in England and Wales is a long-established, student-selective, fee-charging independent secondary school that caters for children aged between 11 or 13 and 18, whose head teacher is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. Public refers to their origins as schools open to any public citizen who could afford to pay the fees. Traditionally, English public schools were all-male boarding schools, but the term now includes co-educational and girls' schools, while many accept day pupils as well as boarders. Public schools have had a strong association with the ruling classes, they educated the sons of the English upper and upper-middle classes. The sons of officers and senior administrators of the British Empire were educated in England while their fathers were on overseas postings. In 2010, over half of Cabinet Ministers had been educated at public schools. Public schools emerged from charity schools established to educate poor scholars—public because access to them was not restricted on the basis of religion, occupation, or home location, that they were subject to public management or control, in contrast to private schools which were run for the personal profit of the proprietors.
The origins of schools in the UK were religious until 1640, when House of Commons invited Comenius to England to establish and participate in an agency for the promotion of learning. It was intended that by-products of this would be the publication of'universal' books and the setting up of schools for boys and girls. Soon after the Clarendon Commission reported in 1864, the Public Schools Act 1868 gave the following seven schools independence from direct jurisdiction or responsibility of the Crown, the established church, or the government: Charterhouse, Eton College, Harrow School, Rugby School, Shrewsbury School, Westminster School, Winchester College. Henceforth each of these schools was to be managed by a board of governors; the following year, the headmaster of Uppingham School invited sixty to seventy of his fellow headmasters to form what became the Headmasters' Conference – the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. Separate preparatory schools developed from the 1830s, which "prepared" younger boys for entry to the senior schools.
According to the Independent Schools Information Service, a consortium set up by British independent schools to promote themselves to the public, public school is applied to describe the 215 independent and boys' secondary schools belonging to the Headmasters' Conference. The name dates back to the time when schools founded for local children went'public' and admitted children from further afield, it is used to describe the some 230 girls' senior schools belonging to the Girls' Schools Association. When the "Education" section of a capsule biography in Who's Who or similar British reference works says "privately", this refers to the person having been educated by personal tutors rather than at a school; the term "public school" in American English and in Scotland, where a state-funded education system began 300 years prior to England's, means something quite different: one administered by the local government to serve the children of that area. Until the late medieval period most schools were controlled by the church and had specific entrance criteria.
The need for professional trades in an secularised society required schools for the sons of the gentry that were independent from ecclesiastical authority and open to all. From the 16th century onward, boys' boarding schools were endowed for public use. Traditionally, most of these public schools were all full boarding; some public schools are old, such as The King's School, The King's School, Rochester, St Peter's School, Sherborne School, Warwick School, The King's School, Ely and St Albans School. These schools were under their complete dominion. Separate preparatory schools for younger boys developed from the 1830s, with entry to the senior schools becoming limited to boys of at least 12 or 13 years old; the first of these was Windlesham House School, established with support from Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School. Many of the schools, including Rugby School, Harrow School and the Perse School fell into decline during the 18th century and nearly closed in the early 19th century. Protests in the local newspaper forced governors of the Perse School to keep it open, a court case in 1837 required reform of the abuse of the school's trust.
A Royal Commission, the Clarendon Commission, investigated nine of the more established schools, including seven boarding schools and two day schools. The Public Schools Act 1868 regulated and reformed these "public schools", for which it provided the first legal definition: schools which were open to the paying public from anywhere in the country, as opposed to, for example, a local school only open to local residents, or a religious school open only to members of a certain church. St Paul's School and the Merchant Taylors' School claimed that their constitutions made them "private" schools, were excluded from the requirements of this legislation. In 1887 the Divisional Court and the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, sometimes referred to as Britain, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world; the Irish Sea lies between Great Ireland. With an area of 242,500 square kilometres, the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world, it is the 22nd-most populous country, with an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017. The UK is constitutional monarchy; the current monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned since 1952, making her the longest-serving current head of state.
The United Kingdom's capital and largest city is London, a global city and financial centre with an urban area population of 10.3 million. Other major urban areas in the UK include Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire conurbations, Greater Glasgow and the Liverpool Built-up Area; the United Kingdom consists of four constituent countries: England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Their capitals are London, Edinburgh and Belfast, respectively. Apart from England, the countries have their own devolved governments, each with varying powers, but such power is delegated by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which may enact laws unilaterally altering or abolishing devolution; the nearby Isle of Man, Bailiwick of Guernsey and Bailiwick of Jersey are not part of the UK, being Crown dependencies with the British Government responsible for defence and international representation. The medieval conquest and subsequent annexation of Wales by the Kingdom of England, followed by the union between England and Scotland in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, the union in 1801 of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There are fourteen British Overseas Territories, the remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in the 1920s, encompassed a quarter of the world's land mass and was the largest empire in history. British influence can be observed in the language and political systems of many of its former colonies; the United Kingdom is a developed country and has the world's fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It has a high-income economy and has a high Human Development Index rating, ranking 14th in the world, it was the world's first industrialised country and the world's foremost power during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The UK remains a great power, with considerable economic, military and political influence internationally, it is sixth in military expenditure in the world. It has been a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council since its first session in 1946.
It has been a leading member state of the European Union and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. The United Kingdom is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Council of Europe, the G7, the G20, NATO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Trade Organization; the 1707 Acts of Union declared that the kingdoms of England and Scotland were "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain". The term "United Kingdom" has been used as a description for the former kingdom of Great Britain, although its official name from 1707 to 1800 was "Great Britain"; the Acts of Union 1800 united the kingdom of Great Britain and the kingdom of Ireland in 1801, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Following the partition of Ireland and the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922, which left Northern Ireland as the only part of the island of Ireland within the United Kingdom, the name was changed to the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
Although the United Kingdom is a sovereign country, Scotland and Northern Ireland are widely referred to as countries. The UK Prime Minister's website has used the phrase "countries within a country" to describe the United Kingdom; some statistical summaries, such as those for the twelve NUTS 1 regions of the United Kingdom refer to Scotland and Northern Ireland as "regions". Northern Ireland is referred to as a "province". With regard to Northern Ireland, the descriptive name used "can be controversial, with the choice revealing one's political preferences"; the term "Great Britain" conventionally refers to the island of Great Britain, or politically to England and Wales in combination. However, it is sometimes used as a loose synonym for the United Kingdom as a whole; the term "Britain" is used both as a synonym for Great Britain, as a synonym for the United Kingdom. Usage is mixed, with the BBC preferring to use Britain as shorthand only for Great Britain and the UK Government, while accepting that both terms refer to the United K
Pope Gregory IX
Pope Gregory IX was Pope from 19 March 1227 to his death in 1241. He is known for issuing the Decretales and instituting the Papal Inquisition in response to the failures of the episcopal inquisitions established during the time of Pope Lucius III through his papal bull Ad abolendam issued in 1184; the successor of Pope Honorius III, he inherited the traditions of Pope Gregory VII and of his cousin Pope Innocent III and zealously continued their policy of Papal supremacy. Ugolino was born in Anagni; the date of his birth varies in sources between c. 1145 and 1170. He received his education at the Universities of Bologna, he was created Cardinal-Deacon of the church of Sant'Eustachio by his cousin Innocent III in December 1198. In 1206 he was promoted to the rank of Cardinal Bishop of Ostia e Velletri, he became Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals in 1218 or 1219. Upon the special request of Saint Francis, in 1220, Pope Honorius III appointed him Cardinal Protector of the order of the Franciscans.
As Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, he cultivated a wide range of acquaintances, among them the Queen of England, Isabella of Angoulême. Gregory IX was elevated to the papacy in the papal election of 1227, he took the name "Gregory" because he formally assumed the papal office at the monastery of Saint Gregory ad Septem Solia. Gregory's Bull Parens scientiarum of 1231, after the University of Paris strike of 1229, resolved differences between the unruly university scholars of Paris and the local authorities, his solution was in the manner of a true follower of Innocent III: he issued what in retrospect has been viewed as the magna carta of the University, assuming direct control by extending papal patronage: his Bull allowed future suspension of lectures over a flexible range of provocations, from "monstrous injury or offense" to squabbles over "the right to assess the rents of lodgings". In 1233 Gregory IX established the Papal Inquisition to regularize the persecution of heresy; the Papal Inquisition was intended as replacing the chaotic and violent episcopal inquisitions, established by Lucius III in 1184.
Gregory's aim was to bring order and legality to the process of dealing with heresy, since there had been tendencies by mobs of townspeople to burn alleged heretics without much of a trial. In 1231 Pope Gregory IX appointed a number of Papal Inquisitors Dominicans and Franciscans, for the various regions of France and parts of Germany; the aim was to introduce due process and objective investigation into the beliefs of those accused to the erratic and unjust persecution of heresy on the part of local ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions. Gregory was a remarkably learned lawyer, he caused to be prepared Nova Compilatio decretalium, promulgated in numerous copies in 1234. This New Compilation of Decretals was the culmination of a long process of systematising the mass of pronouncements that had accumulated since the Early Middle Ages, a process, under way since the first half of the 12th century and had come to fruition in the Decretum and edited by the papally commissioned legist Gratian and published in 1140.
The supplement completed the work. In the 1234 Decretals, he invested the doctrine of perpetua servitus iudaeorum – perpetual servitude of the Jews – with the force of canonical law. According to this, the followers of the Talmud would have to remain in a condition of political servitude until Judgment Day; the doctrine found its way into the doctrine of servitus camerae imperialis, or servitude subject to the Emperor's authority, promulgated by Frederick II. The Jews were thus suppressed from having direct influence over the political process and the life of Christian states into the 19th century with the rise of liberalism. In 1239, under the influence of Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, Gregory ordered that all copies of the Jewish Talmud be confiscated. Following a public disputation between Christians and Jewish theologians, this culminated in a mass burning of some 12,000 handwritten Talmudic manuscripts on 12 June 1242, in Paris. Gregory was a supporter of the mendicant orders which he saw an excellent means for counteracting by voluntary poverty the love of luxury and splendour, possessing many ecclesiastics.
He was a friend of Saint Dominic as well as Clare of Assisi. On 17 January 1235, he approved the Order of Our Lady of Mercy for the redemption of captives, he appointed ten cardinals and canonized Saints Elisabeth of Hungary, Anthony of Padua, Francis of Assisi, of whom he had been a personal friend and early patron. He transformed a chapel to Our Lady in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Gregory IX endorsed the Northern Crusades and attempts to bring Orthodox Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe under Papacy's fold. In 1232, Gregory IX requested the Livonian Brothers of the Sword to send troops to protect Finland, whose semi-Pagan people were fighting against the Novgorod Republic in the Finnish-Novgorodian wars. At the coronation of Frederick II in Rome, 22 November 1220, the emperor made a vow to embark for the Holy Land in August 1221. Gregory IX began his pontificate by suspending the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, for dilatoriness in carrying out the promised Sixth Crusade. Frederick II appealed to the sovereigns of Europe complaining of his treatment.
The suspension was followed by excommunication and threats of deposition. Frederick
Goggin, John Francis; Kelly, Blanche Mary (1912). . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Goggin, John Francis; Kelly, Blanche Mary (1912). 
The dictionary definition of sacristan at Wiktionary
