New Series on the Son Rise Morning Show: Mementoes of the English Martyrs

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show asked me if I wanted to collaborate on series based on this book recently published by Sophia Institute Press, written by Father Henry Sebastian Bowden of the London Oratory. Since the title of the book is Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors for Every Day in the Year, I said yes. She contacted the publisher and Sophia Institute Press sent me a review copy. 

So we'll start a series of Monday morning conversations about the martyrs and confessors Father Henry Sebastian Bowden selects and highlights on Monday, April 17 on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual hour, around 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central. Please listen live here and subscribe to the daily email for reminders here.

If you are really interested, of course, you could also purchase your own copy of the book!

For this first conversation, however, we're going to focus on the author and the timing of the composition of this book. Father Henry Sebastian Bowden was a priest of the London Oratory (aka "the Congregation of the Oratory of St Philip Neri in London"), a prolific author, and the nephew of Saint John Henry Newman's best friend in Oxford, John William Bowden. Newman and Bowden had been undergraduates together at Trinity College and had worked together on the Tracts for the Times and other Oxford Movement projects. You may read Bowden's biography here; like another of Newman's best friends, Richard Hurrell Froude, Bowden suffered from tuberculosis (consumption, as they referred to it then).

Newman felt great sorrow at Bowden's last illness in September of 1844, particularly because Newman was in Littlemore, struggling with what to do (that is, where to go, ecclesiastically, spiritually, doctrinally, etc). In one letter he writes to John Keble (on September 14 of that year):

He is my oldest friend; I have been most intimate with him for above twenty-seven years. He was sent to call on me the day after I came into residence; he introduced me to college and University; he is the link between me and Oxford. I have ever known Oxford in him. In losing him I seem to lose Oxford. We {392} used to live in each other's rooms as undergraduates, and men used to mistake our names and call us by each other's. When he married he used to make a like mistake himself, and call me Elizabeth and her Newman. And now for several years past, though loving him with all my heart, I have shrunk from him, feeling that I had opinions …

A few days later, after Bowden had died, he continued the letter:

It is a great comfort to all parties that he is here and not at Clifton ... He died and lies in a room I have known these twenty-four years … And there lies now my oldest friend, so dear to me—and I, with so little faith or hope, as dead as a stone, and detesting myself.

[John William Bowden died September 15, 1844. I sobbed bitterly over his coffin to think that he had left me still dark as to what the way of truth was, and what I ought to do in order to please God and fulfil His will.—J. H. N., noted in the Apologia pro Vita Sua] (from Anne Mozley's Letters and Correspondence of Newman to 1845, Volume 2)

The Elizabeth mentioned above was Bowden's wife, the youngest daughter of Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762-1860) of a formerly Catholic recusant and Jacobite family, although her father had conformed to the established Church. She was an aunt of the decadent poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne. She and her children became Catholic in 1847. Both of her sons John & Charles Henry became priests of the London Oratory. Newman was Charles Henry's Godfather. One of her daughters, Marianne (or Mary Anne) entered the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary becoming Sister Mary Dominica in 1852 and Newman preached the sermon at her profession; she died of tuberculosis in 1867. The other daughter, Emily, never married. Mrs. Bowden was the benefactress of the Catholic church in Fulham, St. Thomas of Canterbury, and Newman preached at its dedication in 1848 (Augustus Pugin designed the church). In addition to those four conversions in the John William and Elizabeth Bowden family, Captain Henry Bowden, John William's brother, and his wife, Marianne Catherine, also became Catholic, and their son, Father Henry Sebastian Bowden, is our author. (See this source!)

Now, note the date of the original publication of this book: 1910. At that time, Pope Leo XIII had beatified 54 (fifty-four), including Thomas More and John Fisher, on December 29, 1886 and nine (9) more on May 13, 1895. There were also 29 (twenty-nine) other martyrs declared Venerable in 1886. Sophia Institute Press has not changed Father Bowden's Table of Contents, which presents the titles as of 1910, but they have added footnotes to those martyrs who have been subsequently beatified or canonized, by Pope Pius XI, Pope Paul VI, or Pope John Paul II. 

Also, notice the title: Martyrs and CONFESSORS! Father Bowden includes those who defended the faith, even though they didn't suffer martyrdom (like the Marian era bishops who had sworn Henry VIII's oaths but refused Elizabeth I's) and others, like Margaret Giggs Clement, St. Thomas More's ward, who tried to save the Carthusians from dehydration and starvation. For example, in January, Bowden offers two reflections on John Feckenham, OSB, the last Abbot of Westminster Abbey. 

There's another aspect to Father Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors: he offers multiple memories of many of the saints and heroes of the long English Reformation. The reader will see, for example, many daily reflections devoted to Saint Thomas More throughout the year. (Strangely, More's date of death is noted as March 3rd for the entry "The Daily Sacrifice" on page 79, describing his devotion to daily Mass and also on July 6th for the entry "The Privileges of Martyrdom" on page 221). There is an Index, so one could read all of the brief mementoes of More's life and death starting on his shared feast day with Saint John Fisher until the anniversary of his beheading on Tower Hill. (Strangely, also, the date of Saint John Fisher's execution isn't noted on June 22nd!)

Finally, some comments on Father Bowden's purpose in compiling this book. Catholics in England hadn't even reached the centenary of their Emancipation, nor of the Restoration of the Hierarchy, and still lived under some restrictions. In 1908, the Eucharistic Congress held in London inspired, as one newspaper put it, 

apprehension in respectable quarters, and has given rise to regrettable effusions of bigotry in others. An unfounded idea has been disseminated that the Congress is a move in the campaign for the restoration of the temporal power of the Papacy, and for the re-establishment of direct diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Others regard it as a great proselytizing agency. The visit to England of a Papal Legate, after an interval of three centuries and a half, cannot fail to recall memories of Reginald Pole and his disastrous Mission of Reconciliation; while the triumphant progress of Cardinal Vannutelli from Dover to Westminster, the cheering crowds in the streets, the hoisting of the Papal flag as the Legate crossed the threshold of his archiepiscopal host, have all combined to administer a series of shocks to a people by temperament and conviction distrustful of anything that smacks of "Popery." 

We may presume that the the reaction was similar two years later, on June 28, 1910, when Westminster Cathedral was consecrated. That was certainly an extraordinary event, which also celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy! That event had certainly provoked apprehension, as Punch published a cartoon depicting Cardinal Wiseman as "The Guy Fawkes of 1850, Preparing to Blow Up All England"! Winston Churchill, as the Home Secretary, had to approve the public processions on that occasion, with "timely and careful consideration", according to this article from an Australian newspaper.

And it would not be until 1926 that certain other restrictions on Catholics were not removed from English law, with yet another Roman Catholic Relief Act:

The Act of forbidding the possession of Catholic liturgies and books of devotion and statues, is repealed. The Religious Houses Act, 1559, which declared religious orders to be superstitious, and gifts for their benefit therefore voidable, as being for a superstitious use is also revoked. So is the Act of 1715, above referred to, for appointing commissioners to raise money out of recusants' estates. Then the Relief Act of 1791 was made more fully relieving by removing from it the section which forbade steeples and bells in Catholic churches and prohibited a priest from officiating at funerals in (presumably Protestant) churches or church-yards, or from exercising any rights or ceremonies or wearing the habits of an order out of doors or in a private house where more than five persons in addition to the household were assembled, or from exercising his functions at all unless he had first taken the oath of allegiance and abjuration (a similar prohibition in the Act of 1829 being also removed). From the Act of 1791 was also eliminated the section which prohibited the establishment or endowment of a religious order or school or college by Roman Catholics.

So Westminster Cathedral, with it steeples and bells, was technically in violation of English Law, and those public processions--with priests and bishops and members of religious orders in their vestments and habits "out of doors"--had also violated English Law!

So Father Bowden had good reasons to remind Catholics in England of the heroism and fidelity of the past. He wanted his readers to develop devotion to the martyrs of the 16th and 17th centuries. From his introduction:

May we learn to set a higher value on the Faith as we realize the cost of its inheritance, and may we grasp the truth that faith is to be preserved for ourselves and our children, not by concession or compromise, not by crying peace when there is no peace, or declaring our enemies our surest friends, but by its steadfast and outspoken defense at the sacrifice of every temporal interest, and, if need be, of life itself. (p. 7)

The Publisher's Preface alludes to this theme too: "The inspiration of such daily reminders likewise resounds in our own time, when Catholic doctrine and worship are again facing government censorship and restriction in many lands." (p. 1)

I think this will be a fun series on the Son Rise Morning Show and I look forward to every Monday morning and the preparation the week before too!

Photo of Westminster Cathedral (C) Stephanie A. Mann, 2023. All Rights Reserved.