Preview: Another Confessor: William Cardinal Allen, RIP

After our detour to consider the feast of Saint John Henry Newman on Monday, October 9, we'll return to our exploration of Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors on Monday, October 16 on the Son Rise Morning Show.

Since it's the anniversary of his death in Rome on October 16, 1594 (429 years ago!), we'll focus on William Cardinal Allen, the great founder of the seminaries preparing the missionary priests to return to England. So I'll be on the air about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern, the last segment in the second national hour on EWTN Radio. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Father Bowden has a few entries for Cardinal Allen, who was not a martyr but prepared many priests for the missionary field who became martyrs, and the one I chose for today highlights Allen's regret that he had not been able to offer his own life for the Lord.

The Catholic Encyclopedia provides great evidence for William Cardinal Allen's significance for the recusant/penal/missionary era in England. Born in 1532, 

He was the third son of John Allen of Rossall, Lancashire, and at the age of fifteen went to Oriel College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1550, and was elected Fellow of his College. In 1554 he proceeded M.A., and two years later was chosen Principal of St. Mary's Hall. For a short time he also held a canonry at York, for he had already determined to embrace the ecclesiastical state. On the accession of Elizabeth, and the re-establishment of Protestantism, Allen was one of those who remained most stanch on the Catholic side, and it is chiefly due to his labours that the Catholic religion was not entirely stamped out in England. Having resigned all his preferments, he left the country in 1561, and sought a refuge in the university town of Louvain. The following year, however, we find him back in England, devoting himself, though not yet in priest's orders, to evangelizing his native county. His success was such that it attracted notice and he had to flee for safety. For a while he made himself a missionary centre near Oxford, where he had many acquaintances, and later for a time he sought protection with the family of the Duke of Norfolk. In 1565 he was again forced to leave England, this time, as it turned out, for good. He was ordained priest at Mechlin shortly afterwards. The three years Allen spent as a missioner in England had a determining effect on his whole after life. For he found everywhere that the people were not Protestant by choice, but by force of circumstances; and the majority were only too ready, in response to his preaching and ministrations, to return to Catholicity. He was always convinced that the Protestant wave over the country, due to the action of Elizabeth, could only be temporary, and that the whole future depended on there being a supply of trained clergy and controversialists ready to come into the country whenever Catholicity should be restored.

And authors like Philip Hughes and Eamon Duffy praised the kind of formation Allen designed for the missionary priests--they weren't going to be in parishes and they were probably going to be alone most of the time--they needed to be trained for apologetics with knowledge of Church history including English Church history, the Bible, and Church doctrine. They needed to preach in English, obviously, and he also prepared them carefully for their spiritual life in the missionary field: fasting twice a week for the conversion of England, use of St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, frequent Confession as spiritual development, not merely juridical forgiveness of sins, and other spiritual devotions.

In his book Reformation Divided, which I reviewed several years ago for the St. Austin Review, Duffy concurs with the Catholic Encyclopedia's view: "because of Allen “English Catholicism was given an institutional lifeline to the larger world of Christendom . . . because of him, it survived.” (p. 163)"

With the title "Father of Many Sons" on page 328 and the Scripture verse from 1 Corinthians 4:15: "For if you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, by the gospel, I have begotten you", Father Bowden highlights Cardinal Allen's last months and deathbed:

"Douay," he wrote, a few months before his death, "is as dear to me as my own life, and which hath next to God been the beginning and ground of all the good and salvation which is wrought in England." Created cardinal by Sixtus V, he became the natural protector of the afflicted English Catholics, and, by his writings and influence, powerfully aided their cause. Dying, he said that the greatest pain he suffered was to see that after by God's help he had induced so many to endure imprisonment, persecution, and martyrdom in England, he had deserved by his sins to end his life on that bed--Rome, October 16.

May he rest in the peace of Christ.