Preview: Two Second-Chance Benedictine Martyrs

On Monday, November 13, we'll continue our series on highlights from Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors For Every Day in the Year looking at two Benedictine Abbots of major English monasteries. One thing Blessed Hugh Faringdon, OSB and Blessed Richard Whiting, OSB have in common is that that took Henry VIII's Oaths of Succession and Supremacy; the other thing they have in common is that they seem to have regretted it. They, with companions, suffered being hanged, drawn, and quartered on November 15, 1539 in sight of their respective abbeys.

Perhaps we should be inspired by their stories to see any dangers to the Faith as soon as possible, and act against them!

I'll be on at my usual time, 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 and/or catch the podcast later here.

For Blessed Hugh Faringdon, Father Bowden offers the title "Guardian of the Sanctuary", noting that as Abbot of Reading he was favorite of Henry VIII, who called him "his own abbot". He was "learned and pious", and enforced "strict discipline in his Abbey." Bowden says, however that Faringdon "compromised himself by supporting the King in his petition for the divorce" and the doctrine of Royal religious supremacy. Faringdon supplied Henry with books supporting his argument that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was invalid in spite of a papal dispensation.

When the time came for the surrender of Reading Abbey, founded by King Henry I in 1121 for the monks to pray for his salvation, that of his ancestors and successors, Faringdon seemed willing to surrender it, although no signed documentation survives.

As British History Online documents:

Apparently some kind of justification for the charge of high treason against Abbot Hugh was devised or forthcoming, but it is impossible now to find out what it was. The abbot was hurried off to the Tower, probably early in the summer, and whilst there Cromwell coolly decided, as we have seen, that he was to be tried and executed at Reading.

So the Abbot was executed--hanged, drawn, and quartered--in front of the Abbey Gates. Father Bowden comments that "On the scaffold, he spoke out boldly, professed his fidelity to the Holy See, which he declared to be the common Faith of those who had the best right to define the true teaching of the English Church." The Pope, not King Henry VIII.

The scripture verse is from Lamentations: "Our heart is sorrowful . . . for Mount Sion, because it is destroyed . . . But Thou, O Lord, wilt remain forever" (5:17-19) Because Reading Abbey was of course left to decay and ruin, and the grave of King Henry I--founder of the Abbey--lost.

The martyrdom of Blessed Richard Whiting follows a similar pattern: he was the 61st and "last abbot of Glastonbury, the most ancient and famous of the great English Benedictine houses. In rank, he stood next to the Abbot of St. Albans" and he was a member of Parliament in the House of Lords. There were one hundred monks in the great abbey, and under his leadership, it was "a religious house of strict observance" and a house of education. Whiting administered the vast land holdings of the abbey for "the relief of the poor and works of charity"--there was no scandal or abuse at Glastonbury.

But there had to be if Henry VIII was to get his hands on that vast wealth for his purposes. But there wasn't any . . . so Abbot Whiting's taking of the Oath of Supremacy didn't matter once he opposed the suppression of Glastonbury Abbey; that was Treason enough. So he was Attainted for Treason in Parliament, denied--like Abbot Faringdon--the trial of his peers in Parliament he was entitled to. He was tried in Wells and taken back to Glastonbury, dragged up the High Tor nearby, and drawn and quartered in sight of that glorious abbey.

Bowden titles his memento "The Watchman on the Hills' with the verse from Isaiah 62:6: "Upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen all the day and all the night: they shall never hold their peace."

Although these two Guardians and Watchmen may have failed at first to see the danger Henry VIII's marital issues and power grab posed to the Catholic faith and to their abbeys and their way of life, they did recognize the danger at last and died martyrs in resistance. They were beatified by Pope Leo XIII on May 13, 1895 in a group of nine martyrs, seven of whom suffered toward the end of the Dissolution of the Monasteries (including John Beche, last abbot of Colchester, John Eynon, Roger James, John Rugg, John Thorne, and these two Abbots).

Blessed Hugh Faringdon, pray for us!

Blessed Richard Whiting, pray for us!

Image credit (Public Domain): Reading Abbey. The south doorway of the Abbey Church, looking along the east walk of the Cloister. Photograph by H. W. Taunt and Company, No. 9014. 1890-1899.

Image credit (Public Domain): View of Arches at Glastonbury, albumen print, by the British photographer Francis Frith. 16.7 cm x 21.1 cm (6 9/16 in. x 8 5/16 in.) Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.