Charles Sumner was caned on the Senate floor in 1856. Sumner, an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, had delivered a speech against slavery and its proponents two days prior. He was attacked by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, whose relative had been in the line of Sumner’s verbal fire. When I first learned of this incident in a junior high school history class in the 1980s, my teacher mentioned that Brooks’s office was soon flooded with canes from his supporters. As I recall, he delivered that coda with something of a chuckle, as if to say, “Can you believe it! Glad we aren’t like that anymore.”
POPE FRANCIS TO CONFER NEW LAY MINISTRIES FOR FIRST TIME IN ST. PETER’S BASILICA
The Vatican has announced that Pope Francis will confer the ministries of catechist, lector, and acolyte upon lay men and
