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John Huss



John Huss (Jan Hus) 1369-1415 was a Czech priest, church reformer, a seminal figure in the Bohemian Reformation and a key predecessor to Protestantism. After John Wycliffe, the theorist of ecclesiastical Reformation, Hus is considered the first Church reformer, as he lived before Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. His teachings had a strong influence on Martin Luther himself.

Hus was burned at the stake  on July 6, 1415, for heresy against the doctrines of the Catholic Church, including those on ecclesiology, statues, the Eucharist (Holy communion continually re-crucifying Christ, unbiblical teaching that it mystically turns into the real body & blood of Christ, etc), and other theological topics.

At the place of execution, he knelt down, spread out his hands, and prayed aloud. The executioner undressed Hus and tied his hands behind his back with ropes, and bound his neck with a chain to a stake around which wood and straw had been piled up so that it covered him to the neck. At the last moment, the imperial marshal, von Pappenheim, in the presence of the Count Palatine, asked Hus to recant and thus save his own life. Hus declined thus:

"God is my witness that the things charged against me I never preached. In the same truth of the Gospel which I have written, taught, and preached, drawing upon the sayings and positions of the holy doctors, I am ready to die today."

Anecdotally, it has been claimed that the executioners had trouble intensifying the fire. An old woman then came to the stake and threw a relatively small amount of brushwood on it. Upon seeing her act, a suffering Hus then exclaimed, "Sancta Simplicitas!". The phrase's Czech Translation, "Holy simplicity!" is still used today when commenting on a person's stupid action and naïveté, in this case, the clumsy Catholic executioners.

It is said that when he was about to expire, he cried out, "Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on us!" Hus' ashes were later thrown into the Rhine River.

Responding with horror to the execution of Hus, the people of Bohemia moved even more rapidly away from Papal teachings, provoking Rome to pronounce a crusade against them (1 March 1420): Pope Martin V issued a Papal bull authorizing the killing of all supporters of reformers like Hus and Wycliffe.

Jan Hus was a key contributor to Protestantism, whose teachings had a strong influence on the states of Europe and on Martin Luther. In New York City, a church in Brooklyn (located at 153 Ocean Avenue), and a church and a theatre in Manhattan (located at 351 East 74th Street) are named for Hus: respectively the John Hus Moravian Church, the Jan Hus Presbyterian Church. A statue of Jan Hus was erected at the Union Cemetery in Bohemia, New York (on Long Island) by Czech immigrants to the New York area in 1893.

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