Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look and an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

On Easter Day, April the 4th, 1523, Leonard Cop, smuggled a group of nuns that were hiding in barrels

full of herring out of a convent in Nipton.

One of the nuns was Katerina Von Bora, who later became the wife of Martin Luther.

Katerina had lived in convents since she was very young, placed there by her parents, who were

too poor to supply her dowry.

Unhappy there, Katerina found both the opportunity and the inspiration to

escape when the Protestant Reformation began to spread. She and several other nuns secretly

contacted Martin Luther and asked for help to escape the monastery.

Luther obliged.

At first, Luther and Kopp attempted to convince the nuns families to take them back,

but the families refused, possibly, because it was against the law to take in an escape

nun. Instead, they found employment for as many of the nuns as possible, but several others

were married off to students training for the pastorate.

After two years only Katarina remained.

After neither of the two potential marriages that had been arranged for her worked out,

she told Nicholas von Amsdorf, Luther's friend and co-worker, that she would only marry either him or Martin Luther, no one else.

Luther was reluctant to marry, after all he'd been declared an imperial outlaw at the Diet of Worms, so anyone

who found him could legally kill him.

Understandably, he expected his life to end burned at the stake as a heretic.

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