Book Review: Sheila Kaye-Smith's "The End of the House of Alard"

From one English family saga to another! I already had this book, given to me as a Christmas present. To read it right after Josephine Ward's One Poor Scruple didn't invite comparisons as much as highlight how different two novels in same genre can be so different. The title indicates what is going to happen in the novel: a family "house", the hegemony of a family, not just the building of course, is somehow going to come to an end. No heirs, no handing on of the family property or traditions: the end.

How the family's house ends is the story: who are the last members of the house of Alard? What did they do that brought it to its end? That's the story Sheila Kaye-Smith tells as three sons and three daughters deal with the legacy of their land-holding, mortgaged to the hilt, over-taxed (in their opinion), failing, image-conscious family. They have a hard problem to solve in the first place and Kaye-Smith's plot demonstrates how the choices their parents, especially their dictatorial father, and they make contribute to the decline and end of their house.

One reason I was interested in this novel when CUA Press announced its publication was that I had read some of Sheila Kaye-Smith's fiction before: Joanna Godden, Susan Spray--and Superstition Corner, the tragic story of Kate Alard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. 

Kaye-Smith wrote that novel, which I first read in high school, after she and her husband, an Anglo-Catholic minister, were received into the Catholic Church. This novel, about the later Alard family--at least, I presume it's the same family--pre-dates her conversion to Catholicism, but an astute reader sees the sympathy for Catholicism in post-recusant England after World War I. At least three characters are Catholic (including the parish priest), one converts to Catholicism, and another is shaken by what he discovers and desires when he learns just a little bit about the Catholic Church after stepping into the local parish and meeting the priest. The traditional, non-religious Anglicanism of the Alard family in the early twentieth century has little basis to respond to the incarnational, costly and rewarding Catholicism Kaye-Smith describes it--particularly as Gervase describes it to Jenny on page 329:

"But Catholic Christianity stands fast because it belongs to an order of things which doesn’t change. It’s made of the same stuff as our hearts. It’s the supernatural satisfaction of all our natural instincts. It doesn’t deal with abstractions, but with everyday life. The sacraments are all common things—food, drink, marriage, birth and death. Its highest act of worship is a meal—its most sacred figures are a dying man, and a mother nursing her child. It’s traditional in the sense that nature and life are traditional....”

As the publisher's blurb describes the book:

The End of the House of Alard (1922) documents the choices made by the final generation of the aristocratic Alard family and the ways in which they, both willingly and reluctantly, bring the long line of their ancestral blood to a complete and sudden end. For some of them, the end of the Alard line is as painful to enact as it is for others to witness; for others it is welcomed as a necessary modernization or a true realignment toward religious integrity and universal human truth. Some of the family's children yearn for individual liberty; others have it forced upon them. But none of them can find it under the burden of the Alard name and its crumbling estate. The End of the House of Alard is a novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods in order to unite instead with the divine love of Christ. The novel's characters span a breadth of options on this spectrum and their various outlooks on life continue to reflect those available to us today.

That's very accurate summary of the book, and the reader's interest is constantly maintained as the characters make their choices while the omniscient narrator explores their thoughts and feelings. Each of the sons and daughters of Sir John and his wife Lucy (nee Kenyon), Peter, George, Gervase, Doris, Mary, Jenny receive their due attention, as do the women the brothers marry or are in love with: Rose, George's wife; Vera, Peter's wife; and Stella Mount, the doctor's daughter, loved by both Peter and Gervase. 

Except for Ben Godfrey, the men in Mary and Jenny's lives are less important to the plot of the end. 

The crux of the story really is that Peter, demobbed from World War I in 1918, loves Stella Mount, but marries for money as a sacrifice for the Alard family legacy, and although he contends he loves his wife, he just can't let go of his love for Stella. 

Gervase loves Stella too, but he finds a greater love and follows it. The end of the house of Alard comes down to those two men, and I won't spoil the plot, except to say, inscrutably: The end of the end is the only end there could be.

There is verse at the beginning of the novel, lines from G.K. Chesterton's "The Secret People":

We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land . . .

The section titles of the novel are:

Part One: Conster Manor

Interlude

Part Two: Leason Parsonage (George, the Anglican minister deals with his vocation and faith in this section)

Part Three: Fourhouses (Jenny, the youngest daughter, makes her choice in this section)

Part Four: Scarecrow

Again, I highly recommend this novel and my only disappointment is that there's only one more book currently published in this series, The Dry Wood by Caryll Houselander. But there's a consolation to be had there too: Eighth Day Books has two copies!

Book Review: Josephine Ward's "One Poor Scruple"

I could not put this book down Saturday afternoon. I bought it at Eighth Day Books that morning, ran a couple of errands after that, and started reading it at lunch. Finished it at 10:45 p.m., well past my usual bedtime! It was compelling, dramatic, and insightful. The blurb almost invites comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, so I'm going to follow that lead to some extent in my review.

The publisher's blurb:

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world.

First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

Since this is novel about a family, the relationships, good and bad, between the characters are consequential for the plot as Ward has woven it. One of the most crucial of these relationships is the one between the protagonist, the childless widow Marge Riversdale and her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law. Her late husband George, whom his mother idolizes, treated Marge badly (details about infidelity, lavish spending--leaving her in debt--abandonment, and a mysterious death are only hinted at), yet his mother blames Marge for not reforming him. Because of this divide, which even the regard Marge feels for her father-in-law cannot mend, she does not have the moral support she needs as she has entered London society. Even a visit to the Riversdale's home in Lancashire, where she intends to go to Confession after some delay, can't provide her refuge because of this rift (on both sides, of course).

I wish there'd been a family tree: these relationships are a little confusing to me! 

It also must be said that the older Mrs. Riversdale, Helen, has no great sympathy for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, Janet, nee Harding, a convert from Broad Church Anglicanism to Catholicism through Saint John Henry Newman! Helen doesn't trust Newman as a Confessor to Janet because he'd been an Anglican too; and she doesn't like it that Janet is reading George Eliot's Adam Bede, details recounted in the chapter devoted to Janet and her daughter Hilda, who will be coming at the Hunt Ball (that must be delayed!). But Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, also a widow, doesn't figure much in the story, except for sending Hilda first to the family home and then to London, and keeping her there in dangers unbeknownst to her mother.

You can see some parallels to the Flyte family divisions in Brideshead Revisited, I think. One huge difference between the two novels is there is little or no humor--certainly no characters like Rex Mottram to provide ridiculous comic relief. The diversions of the world, the desire for Catholics to fit in British society after centuries of recusancy are dangers to the Faith for the characters in both novels. 

The big issue in One Poor Scruple, as in Brideshead Revisited, is that Marge (like Lord Marchmain and Julia), needs to repent and reconcile with Jesus and the Catholic Church. The problem for Marge is that she contemplates marriage to a divorced Lord Bellasis and that her London friends (?), most notably Lady Cecilia Rupert and Laura, Mrs. Hurstmonceaux plot to enmesh Marge: Laura wants her to marry Lord Bellasis, partly to demonstrate her power and partly to force Marge out the "superstition" of Catholicism, while Lady Cecilia wants Lord Bellasis for herself. Marge is no match for these two plotters, but fortunately, her sister-in-law Mary is (no spoiler!)

It's the web of gossip and double-timing that Laura and Cecilia weave that ensnares Marge, Hilda, Marmaduke Lemerchant, and even Mark Fieldes in great moral dangers. Cecilia's efforts to use Hilda, in London for her first Season, are particularly malign. One thing that Marge vows is to never see Laura Hurstmonceaux again, because she's a "heap" of trouble. The three men, Lord Bellasis, Marmaduke, and Mark, are also wrapped up in these plots as Laura and Cecilia find them useful.

Also unlike Evelyn Waugh's novel, this novel has an omniscient narrator, who knows the characters' thoughts and even interprets, for example, Hilda's efforts to write home to her mother, editing her letters as she writes them.

The denouement in One Poor Scruple is more realistic than Lord Marchmain's signed acquiescence to the Sacrament of Extreme Unction because it relies more on Marge's childhood devotion to Our Lady and her battles with her conscience before agreeing to marry Lord Bellasis. It is not quite as miraculous as that Sign of the Cross, but it is spiritually dramatic. And the aftermath of that intervention is congruent with Marge's character throughout the novel: she still struggles to confess her sins.

As Thomas Woodman comments in his Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature, "No plot summary can do justice to the impressive psychological realism and restraint of this work." (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022 Second Edition, p. 25). Ward also excels in the physical descriptions of these people, their looks and mannerisms: they are embodied in my imagination.

I hope the editors of the Catholic Women Writers series, Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, plan to publish more of Josephine Ward's fiction. She is an excellent novelist, based on this example, sympathetic and yet realistic about her characters, and with an eye for social satire combined with excellent plotting (not like Laura or Cecilia, though!).

The title comes from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 in a speech of Portia's at the trial of the bond:

Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much (2275)
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

Highly recommended.

The Benedictines of Gower, Missouri and Saint Thomas More

I just received the latest CD from the Benedictine nuns in Gower, Missouri, Martyrs at Ephesus, and then heard some amazing news about their growth and expansion--with a Saint Thomas More connection! 

Because two of the nuns are having problems renewing their visas, they have to leave the USA and have found a home in England, in the Birmingham Archdiocese, a former, now vacant convent in Colwich, England named St. Mary's. From the Spring Newsletter from Mother Cecilia, OSB:

Colwich Abbey was founded by Saint Thomas More’s great-great-granddaughter, with nuns once exiled from England during the Elizabethan persecution, and exiled back there during the French Revolution. As I write this, I will be traveling to England tomorrow to visit our Sisters, and to see about the possible purchase of Colwich Abbey as a place of expansion, especially for future foreign vocations to our community. The buildings will need some work, but are certainly liveable as they stand. What a grace it would be to save these beautiful buildings for their intended purpose and historical value. I will be bringing our Sister Katarina from Lithuania with me as a fourth member for our little English band. So we are indeed financially strapped at this time, and we humbly ask you to do whatsoever you can to help us with the final months of construction bills at Ava, as well as for our needs at our new locations. Please don’t forget to stream our music, which can carry on in the background throughout the day and night! Physical copies of our two latest recordings are now available, one in honor of the martyrs and the other in honor of Sister Wilhelmina.

That great-great-granddaughter of Saint Thomas More, I think, was Dame Bridget More, who was Dame Gertrude More's sister. They both lived and died in France, but founded the houses there from which the nuns who were exiled during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror came to England. The nuns who settled at Stanbrook Abbey wore the lay clothing the Blessed (to be canonized) Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne had been wearing before they had to wash them, so that the martyrs were sent to the guillotine wearing their habits! When St. Mary's in Colwich closed in 2020, the two remaining nuns went to Stanbrook.

Through the intercession of Saint Thomas More, may the Benedictines thrive and grow in Colwich, England! 

More about all the CDs from the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of the Apostles, here.

Preview: Newman's Sermon for the Ascension of Christ

Since by then we will have celebrated the Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, either on Thursday, May 9 or Sunday, May 12, it seems appropriate to continue our Son Rise Morning Show Easter Season series with Newman's sermon "Mysteries in Religion" on Monday, May 13.

So I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here and/or catch the podcast later (and sometimes the show does repeat these segments later in the week during the first national hour).

This is sermon number 18 in volume two of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, featuring the verse "It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, Who is even at the right hand of God, Who also maketh intercession for us." (Romans 8:34)

Newman is focused in this sermon on helping his congregation delve more deeply into the mysteries of the Ascension. They've heard this story many times before; they--we--may have begun to take it for granted. Yet the Ascension is not just an event in the past. It influences, or should influence, our lives as Christians centuries after Jesus ascended to the Father and yet promised to remain with us always and intercede for us:

{206} [Note 1] THE Ascension of our Lord and Saviour is an event ever to be commemorated with joy and thanksgiving, for St. Paul tells us in the text that He ascended to the right hand of God, and there makes intercession for us. Hence it is our comfort to know, that "if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins." [1 John ii. 1, 2.] As the Jewish High Priest, after the solemn sacrifice for the people on the great day of Atonement, went into the Holy of Holies with the blood of the victim, and sprinkled it upon the Mercy-Seat, so Christ has entered into Heaven itself, to present (as it were) before the Throne that sacred Tabernacle which was the instrument of His passion,—His pierced hands and wounded {207} side,—in token of the atonement which He has effected for the sins of the world.

Wonder and awe must always mingle with the thankfulness which the revealed dispensation of mercy raises in our minds. And this, indeed, is an additional cause of thankfulness, that Almighty God has disclosed to us enough of His high Providence to raise such sacred and reverent feelings. Had He merely told us that He had pardoned us, we should have had overabundant cause for blessing and praising Him; but in showing us somewhat of the means, in vouchsafing to tell what cannot wholly be told, in condescending to abase heavenly things to the weak and stammering tongues of earth, He has enlarged our gratitude, yet sobered it with fear. We are allowed with the Angels to obtain a glimpse of the mysteries of Heaven, "to rejoice with trembling." Therefore, so far from considering the Truths of the Gospel as a burden, because they are beyond our understanding, we shall rather welcome them and exult in them, nay, and feel an antecedent stirring of heart towards them, for the very reason that they are above us. Under these feelings I will attempt to suggest to you on the present Festival some of the incentives to wonder and awe, humility, implicit faith, and adoration, supplied by the Ascension of Christ.

As Newman lists these reasons for wonder and awe, etc., he confronts the limitations of philosophy and science--and indeed of our intellects and reasoning--to deal with these true mysteries. As an Oxford scholar and Fellow/Tutor, Newman values the human intellect and our ability to reason but he sees our limitations withal.

For example: the fact proved by the bodily Ascension of Our Lord to Heaven that Heaven is a place, is real and fixed:

First, Christ's Ascension to the right hand of God is marvellous, because it is a sure token that heaven is a certain fixed place, and not a mere state. That bodily presence of the Saviour which the Apostles handled is not here; it is elsewhere,—it is in heaven. This contradicts the notions of cultivated and speculative minds, {208} and humbles the reason.

This may seem to contradict science, but Newman offers a means of dealing with this (like Shakespeare's Hamlet admonishing his friend, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."):

And thus we are led on to consider, how different are the character and effect of the Scripture notices of the structure of the physical world, from those which philosophers deliver. I am not deciding whether or not the one and the other are reconcileable; I merely say their respective effect is different. And when we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word, and find the two apparently discordant, this is the feeling I think we ought to have on our {209} minds;—not an impatience to do what is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide, and reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,—but a sense of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and absolute incapacity to contemplate things as they really are; a perception of our emptiness, before the great Vision of God; of our "comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no strength;" a conviction, that what is put before us, in nature or in grace, though true in such a full sense that we dare not tamper with it, yet is but an intimation useful for particular purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the day-break and the shadows flee away," useful in such a way that both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective provinces. And thus while we use the language of science, without jealousy, for scientific purposes, we may confine it to these; and repel and reprove its upholders, should they attempt to exalt it and to "stretch it beyond its measure." In its own limited round it has its use, nay, may be made to fill a higher ministry, and stand as a proselyte under the shadow of the temple; but it must not dare profane the inner courts, in which the ladder of Angels is fixed for ever, reaching even to the Throne of God, and "Jesus standing on the right hand of God."

Secondly, Newman notes that we need to see the Ascension of Jesus as one part of the whole of the Gospel Revelation, one just as mysterious as the whole. Because Jesus, having redeemed us by His Passion and Resurrection, after His Ascension, intercedes for us with the Father in Heaven:

With the same view, let me observe upon the doctrine which accompanies the fact of the Ascension. Christ, we are told, has gone up on high "to present Himself before the face of God for us." He has "entered by His own blood once for all into the Holy Place, having effected eternal redemption." "He ever liveth to make intercession for those who come unto God by Him; He hath a priesthood which will not pass from Him." "We have such an High Priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens; a Minister of the Sanctuary, and of the true Tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man." [Heb. ix. 12, 24, 25; vii. 24, 25; viii. 1, 2.] . . . 

Newman helps us imagine the sight of Jesus interceding for us in Heaven, up to a point, because again: it is beyond us to know everything about it and at the same time it is true and we rely upon it being true:

Shall we therefore explain away its language as merely figurative, which (as the word is now commonly understood) is next to saying it has no meaning at all? Far from it. Clouds and darkness are round about Him. We are not given to see into the secret shrine in which God dwells. Before Him stand the Seraphim, veiling their faces. Christ is within the veil. We must not search curiously what is His present office, what is meant by His pleading His sacrifice, and by His perpetual intercession for us. And, since we do not know, we will studiously keep to the figure given us in Scripture: we will not attempt to interpret it, or change the wording of it, being wise above what is written. We will not neglect it, because we do not understand it. We will hold it as a Mystery, or (what was anciently called) a Truth Sacramental; that is, a high invisible grace lodged in an outward form, a precious possession to be piously and thankfully guarded for the sake of the heavenly reality contained in it. Thus much we see in it, the pledge of a doctrine which reason cannot understand, viz. of the influence {212} of the prayer of faith upon the Divine counsels. The Intercessor directs or stays the hand of the Unchangeable and Sovereign Governor of the World; being at once the meritorious cause and the earnest of the intercessory power of His brethren. "Christ rose again for our justification," "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much," are both infinite mercies, and deep mysteries.

Finally, Newman deals with the question of why Jesus had to leave His Church on earth so the Holy Spirit could come to inspire us:

Now, proud and curious reason might seek to know why He could not "pray the Father," without going to Him; why He must depart in order to send the Spirit. But faith, without asking for one ray of light more than is given, muses over the wonderful system of Providence, as seen {213} in this world, which is ever connecting events, between which man sees no necessary bond. The whole system of what is called cause and effect, is one of mystery; and this instance, if it may be called one, supplies abundant matter of praise and adoration to a pious mind. It suggests to us, equally with the topics which have already come before us, how very much our knowledge of God's ways is but on the surface. What are those deep hidden reasons why Christ went and the Spirit came? Marvellous and glorious, beyond our understanding! Let us worship in silence; meanwhile, let us jealously maintain this, and every other portion of our Creed, lest, by dropping jot or tittle, we suffer the truths concealed therein to escape from us.

Moreover, this departure of Christ, and coming of the Holy Ghost, leads our minds with great comfort to the thought of many lower dispensations of Providence towards us. He, who, according to His inscrutable will, sent first His Co-equal Son, and then His Eternal Spirit, acts with deep counsel, which we may surely trust, when He sends from place to place those earthly instruments which carry on His purposes. . . .

Newman offers this beautiful insight about God's Providence and our beloved dead:

This is a thought which is particularly soothing as regards the loss of friends; or of especially gifted men, who seem in their day the earthly support of the Church. For what we know, their removal hence is as necessary for the furtherance of the very objects we have at heart, as was the departure of our Saviour.

Doubtless, "it is expedient" they should be taken away; otherwise some great mercy will not come to us. They are taken away perchance to other duties in {214} God's service, equally ministrative to the salvation of the elect, as earthly service. Christ went to intercede with the Father: we do not know, we may not boldly speculate,—yet, it may be, that Saints departed intercede, unknown to us, for the victory of the Truth upon earth; and their prayers above may be as really indispensable conditions of that victory, as the labours of those who remain among us. They are taken away for some purpose surely: their gifts are not lost to us; their soaring minds, the fire of their contemplations, the sanctity of their desires, the vigour of their faith, the sweetness and gentleness of their affections, were not given without an object. . . . Let us not forget that, though the prophecies of this sacred book may be still sealed from us, yet the doctrines and precepts are not; and that we lose much both in the way of comfort and instruction, if we do not use it for the purposes of faith and obedience. 

By looking at the mystery of the Ascension of Jesus through the lens of the loss we feel of family, friends, and acquaintances who were so important to us, Newman is demonstrating how effective this mystery is in our lives. This makes it real and personal. We think of both Christ's Ascension and the deaths of family and friends in a different way: God intends both for our good in ways we haven't dared considered before.

Newman concludes by applying the words of Jesus to Saint Thomas the Apostle when he saw and believed to us:

"Blessed," surely thrice blessed, "are they who have not seen, and yet have believed!" We will not wish for sight; we will enjoy our privilege; we will triumph in the leave given us to go forward, "not knowing whither we go," knowing that "this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." [1 John v. 4.] It is enough that our Redeemer liveth; that He has been on earth and will come again. On Him we venture our all; we can bear thankfully to put ourselves into His hands, our interests present and eternal, and the interests of all we love.  . . .

Newman did not "wish for sight" in his famous poem, "The Pillar of the Cloud": "I do not ask to see/The distant scene; one step enough for me. . . . I loved to choose and see my path; but now/Lead Thou me on!"

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Jesus' ascension to Heaven depicted by John Singleton Copley in Ascension (1775)

Image Credit (Public Domain): The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio (c. 1602)

May the Fourth Be With You: The Feast of the ALL the Martyrs of England and Wales

Today, in the dioceses of England and in the Anglican Ordinariates, the Church celebrates the Martyrs of England and Wales on the anniversary of the Protomartyrs, the three Carthusian Priors (Saint John Houghton, Saint Robert Lawrence, and Saint Augustine Webster), Blessed John Haile, the parish vicar from Isleworth, and Saint Richard Reynolds, from the Brigittine House of Syon, brutally executed on May 4, 1535 by being hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Tree. This feast was celebrated on October 25 after Pope St. Paul VI canonized the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales on that date in 1970, but it was moved to May 4 on the Vatican approved the revised Liturgical Calendar for England and Wales in 2010. In the dioceses of Wales, the feast of the Welsh Martyrs and Companions (the English martyrs) is celebrated on October 25.

According to a previously available article from the UK Catholic Herald cited here, today's feast includes all the martyrs:

The feast of the English Martyrs is celebrated on May 4. The 40 martyrs canonised under Paul VI in 1973 (sic: 1970), previously celebrated on October 25, are celebrated with the 85 beatified Martyrs of the Reformation and the other martyrs of the 16th and 17th century. The feast coincides with the Church of England celebration of English saints and martyrs of the Reformation. . . .

The "other martyrs of the 16th and 17th centuries" include those beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and 1895 and by Pope Pius XI in 1929 who have not been canonized and also those declared venerable by Pope  Leo XIII in 1886:

• In 1886, Pope Leo XIII beatified 54 martyrs, including Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher and 11 others who were canonized in 1970 by Pope Paul VI;
• In 1886, Pope Leo also declared 29 English Catholic martyrs to be Venerable (several of these martyrs had died in chains, that is, is prison or because of their treatment in prison);
• In 1895, Pope Leo XIII beatified nine more martyrs;
• In 1929, Pope Pius XI beatified 136 additional martyrs, 29 of whom were later canonized.

Just to complete the sequence of dates:

• In 1935, Pope Pius XI canonized John Cardinal Fisher and Thomas
• In 1970, Pope Paul VI canonized the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales
• In 1987, Pope John Paul II beatified the 85 Martyrs of England and Wales (which did not include any of those declared Venerable in 1886)

These martyrs suffered for different reasons:

The Supremacy martyrs died because they would not swear Henry VIII's Oath of Supremacy and Oath of Succession, which both denied the spiritual, moral, and ecclesiastical authority of the Pope. The Recusant martyrs died during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I because they continued to practice their Catholic faith in England as missionary priests and/or laity in spite of the recusancy and penal laws against them. Some of the early Recusant martyrs (like Saint Edmund Campion and companions) were tried for fictitious plots, anticipating the next group. Finally, the Popish Plot martyrs were executed in the miscarriage of justice called the Popish Plot. Accused of conspiring in a non-existent plot, their Catholicism condemned them: the priests were sometimes found guilty of their priestly presence in England under Elizabethan statutes when no involvement in the Plot could be found.

This blog is replete with the stories of the martyrs! I've discussed their lives and deaths on the Son Rise Morning show for years too!

The Catholic Culture website also has an excellent gathering of resources for today's feast, including the Collect:

God, all-powerful Father, you strengthen our faith and take away our weakness. Let the prayers and example of the Blessed Martyrs of England and Wales help us to share in the passion and resurrection of Christ and bring us to eternal joy with all your saints. Amen.

Holy Martyrs of England and Wales, pray for us!

Preview: An Easter Octave Sermon: "Saving Knowledge"

On Monday, May 6, which is the Monday of Bright Week for our Orthodox brothers and sisters as they celebrated the three holiest days of Holy Week and Easter Sunday from May 2 through 5, we'll continue our series on the Son Rise Morning Show with another of St. John Henry Newman's Easter Season Sermons from his Anglican years. He preached--according to the footnote in the second volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons--"Saving Knowledge" on the Monday of Easter Week. The text he chose for this sermon is "Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments." 1 John 2:3

So I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern. Please listen live here and/or catch the podcast later (and sometimes the show does repeat these segments later in the week during the first national hour).

{151} [Note] TO know God and Christ, in Scripture language, seems to mean to live under the conviction of His presence, who is to our bodily eyes unseen. It is, in fact, to have faith, according to St. Paul's account of faith, as the substance and evidence of what is invisible. It is faith, but not faith such as a Heathen might have, but Gospel faith; for only in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special manner, knowledge. The faith of Heathens was blind; it was more or less a moving forward in the darkness, with hand and foot;—therefore the Apostle says, "if haply they might feel after Him." [Acts xvii. 27.] But the Gospel is a manifestation, and therefore addressed to the eyes of our mind. Faith is {152} the same principle as before, but with the opportunity of acting through a more certain and satisfactory sense. We recognise objects by the eye at once; but not by the touch. We know them when we see them, but scarcely till then. Hence it is, that the New Testament says so much on the subject of spiritual knowledge. For instance, St. Paul prays that the Ephesians may receive "the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Christ, the eyes of their understanding being enlightened;" and he says, that the Colossians had "put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge, after the image of Him that created him." St. Peter, in like manner, addresses his brethren with the salutation of "Grace and peace, through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord;" according to the declaration of our Lord Himself, "This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." [Eph. i. 17, 18. Col. iii. 10. 2 Pet. i. 2. John xviii. 3.] 

Newman then goes to to explain how we have received this knowledge, handed down to us:

It is plain what is the object of spiritual sight which is vouchsafed us in the Gospel,—"God manifest in the Flesh." He who was before unseen has shown Himself in Christ; not merely displayed His glory, as (for instance) in what is called a providence, or visitation, or in miracles, or in the actions and character of inspired men, but really He Himself has come upon earth, and has been seen of men in human form. In the same {153} kind of sense, in which we should say we saw a servant of His, Apostle or Prophet, though we could not see his soul, so man has seen the Invisible God; and we have the history of His sojourn among His creatures in the Gospels.

And then, he turns to the practical effects of the fact that we have this knowledge and what it means to us:

To know God is life eternal, and to believe in the Gospel manifestation of Him is to know Him; but how are we to "know that we know Him?" How are we to be sure that we are not mistaking some dream of our own for the true and clear Vision? How can we tell we are not like gazers upon a distant prospect through a misty atmosphere, who mistake one object for another? The text answers us clearly and intelligibly . . . St. John says, "Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments." Obedience is the test of Faith.

Thus the whole duty and work of a Christian is made up of these two parts, Faith and Obedience; "looking unto Jesus," the Divine Object as well as Author of our faith, and acting according to His will. Not as if a certain frame of mind, certain notions, affections, feelings, and tempers, were not a necessary condition of a saving state; but, so it is, the Apostle does not insist upon it, as if it were sure to follow, if our hearts do but grow into these two chief objects, the view of God in Christ and the diligent aim to obey Him in our conduct. {154}

Newman is concerned that we try either to ignore or to choose between these two parts of our duty:

I conceive that we are in danger, in this day, of insisting on neither of these as we ought; regarding all true and careful consideration of the Object of faith, as barren orthodoxy, technical subtlety, and the like, and all due earnestness about good works as a mere cold and formal morality; and, instead, making religion, or rather (for this is the point) making the test of our being religious, to consist in our having what is called a spiritual state of heart, to the comparative neglect of the Object from which it must arise, and the works in which it should issue. At this season, when we are especially engaged in considering the full triumph and manifestation of our Lord and Saviour, when He was "declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead," it may be appropriate to make some remarks on an error which goes far to deprive us of the benefit of His condescension.

There's a beautiful line in the next paragraph in which Newman speaks of the Gospels as "our principal treasures" and then highlights St. John the Evangelist as also being a Prophet because he both reports and comments of "the Ministry of his Lord", who is "the chief Prophet of the Church" as His Apostles "explain His words and actions":

The like service is ministered to Him by the Creeds and doctrinal expositions of the early Church, which we retain in our Services. They speak of no ideal being, such as the imagination alone contemplates, but of the very Son of God, whose life is recorded in the Gospels. Thus every part of the Dispensation tends to the manifestation of Him who is its centre.

Thus, Newman reminds us, we've been given "a short rule":

"If ye love Me, keep My commandments." [link to Thomas Tallis's great English anthem!] "He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked." "If ye then be risen {156} with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God." [John xiv. 15. 1 John ii. 6. Col. iii. 1.] This is all that is put upon us, difficult indeed to perform, but easy to understand; all that is put upon us,—and for this plain reason, because Christ has done everything else. He has freely chosen us, died for us, regenerated us, and now ever liveth for us; what remains? Simply that we should do as He has done to us, showing forth His glory by good works. Thus a correct (or as we commonly call it), an orthodox faith and an obedient life, is the whole duty of man. 

Not just the Gospels and the Epistles exhort us to follow this "short rule", but the Tradition and history of the Church:

And so, most surely, it has ever been accounted. Look into the records of the early Church, or into the writings of our own revered bishops and teachers, and see whether this is not the sum total of religion, according to the symbols of it in which children are catechized, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.

Then he enters into discussion --which we will certainly not have time for Monday morning--of objections to this simple rule. At the end of that give and take debate within the sermon, he concludes with an example for us to imagine as a model:

Suppose a religious man, for instance, in the society of strangers; he takes things as they come, discourses naturally, gives his opinion soberly, and does good according to each opportunity of good. His heart is in his work, and his thoughts rest without effort on his God and Saviour. This is the way of a Christian; he leaves it to the ill-instructed to endeavour after a (so-called) spiritual frame of mind amid the bustle of life, which has no existence except in attempt and profession. True spiritual-mindedness is unseen by man, like the soul itself, of which it is a quality; and as the soul is known by its operations, so it is known by its fruits. . . .

Then Newman offers the opposite example, the one to avoid:

To conclude. The essence of Faith is to look out of ourselves; now, consider what manner of a believer he is who imprisons himself in his own thoughts, and rests on the workings of his own mind, and thinks of {162} his Saviour as an idea of his imagination, instead of putting self aside, and living upon Him who speaks in the Gospels.

So much then, by way of suggestion [!], upon the view of Religious Faith, which has ever been received in the Church Catholic, and which, doubtless, is saving. . . .

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Image Credit (Public Domain): Saint John the Evangelist in meditation by Simone Cantarini (1612–1648), Bologna

Nostalgia at the Newman Center

Last Friday (April 26) I attended Adoration and Mass at St. Paul's University Parish at Wichita State University, my alma mater. When I was an undergraduate and graduate student, it was known as St. Paul Parish-Newman Center. And on Friday, when I looked at the bulletin, I was reminded even more than I usually am when I'm there of one of the decisive events of my life: The Newman School of Catholic Thought (NSCT) I attended in January 1979.

The reminder last week was that today's 11:45 a.m. Mass is being celebrated for the repose of the soul of Reverend Stephen Almagno, OFM, who was one of the speakers during that great week. I am attending that Mass today, to pray for him in gratitude for his great influence from those five days so many years ago. 

Here is one obituary from Providence, RI where he was born, and one from his conference of the Orders of Friars Minor.

His topic at the January 1979 NSCT was "Newman's Spirituality": I still have my notes from those lectures:

On Tuesday, January 2, his first lecture introduced major themes in his topic, primarily Newman as a champion of forgotten truths, with a sense "that God is and has revealed himself", a sympathetic pastoral sense to help his congregations follow the Faith and live it.

On Wednesday, January 3, Father Almagno spoke on themes like "holiness is wholeness", holiness is the "result of a moral struggle and intellectual understanding", and Newman's spirituality as striving "to come closer to God" while seeking truth in our hearts and our minds, concluding that doctrine and submission to God's revelation were essential.

On Thursday, January 4, he started speaking about Newman and the Fathers of the Church and what he learned from them about handing on the Faith and the truth.

On Friday, January 5, Father Almagno talked more about Newman's conversion and becoming a Catholic, what it cost him but how it was part of his spiritual journey to be closer to God and obedient to the Truth; and Newman's concern for the formation and education of the laity.

Then in his last lecture on Saturday, January 6, he talked about Newman's later years: his efforts to found an Oratory at Oxford for Catholic men to help maintain their Catholic faith; his reactions to the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility; his Grammar of Assent; the late recognition of his efforts: the Honorary Fellowship at Trinity College and the Cardinal's Hat. Father Almagno summed up Newman's spiritual life--in a seeming paradox since we acclaim his scholarship and his influence so highly-- as "being ordinary carried to perfection", especially in those later years as he led the Oratory in Birmingham.

It's interesting that neither of Father Almagno's obituaries mention his interest in St. John Henry Newman, instead highlighting his study of Father Teilhard de Chardin, but memorials are to be sent to National Institute for Newman Studies!

Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord, and may the perpetual light shine upon him. May Father Almagno's soul and the souls of the all the faithful departed rest in peace. May Father Almagno rest in peace. Amen.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!