Preview: Saint Philip Howard and the Jesuit Connection

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show asked me to come on their second EWTN hour on Monday, October 18 at my usual time (about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central) to talk about the feasts of St. Philip Howard and of the North American Martyrs on October 19. Please listen live on EWTN Radio or on your local EWTN affiliate.

There is a connection between this English lay martyr in chains in the Tower of London and these Jesuit missionaries in North America: the Jesuit Connection.

St. Philip Howard died on October 19, 1595, condemned to death at a time and date of Queen Elizabeth I's pleasure, found guilty of praying for the success of the Spanish Armada. 

It was the influence of two English Jesuit missionaries--and his own wife's faith--that brought Howard to the Tower and his long imprisonment (1585-1595): St. Edmund Campion, SJ and Father William Weston, SJ.

First, he witnessed one of Saint Edmund Campion's debates with the Anglican divines in the Tower of London in 1581, based on Campion's "Decem Rationes" (Ten Reasons). Campion did so well in proving his case in these debates that he never had the opportunity to go through all his Ten Reasons. Howard was impressed by Campion's brilliance and convinced that the Anglicans, while being unfair (they had books and Campion didn't; they could ask questions and Campion couldn't) hadn't proved the Jesuit wrong. Certainly, Campion had made Howard think about the Catholic Church.

Second, Howard was reconciled to the Catholic Church by Father William Weston, SJ on September 30, 1584 at Arundel Castle in Sussex. At the same time, Howard reconciled with his wife Anne and became a devoted husband.

Howard tried to leave England, knowing that he was not welcome at Court because of his conversion (which showed in his changed behavior). He was arrested at sea in 1585 and imprisoned in the Tower. His wife was pregnant with their second child, the son he would never see.

There's a third Jesuit connection during his imprisonment: another martyr, St. Robert Southwell, SJ, who was Anne's chaplain, wrote An Epistle of Comfort for him. When Southwell was held in the Tower before his execution, Howard and he communicated through messages carried by Howard's dog.

Saint Philip Howard died of dysentery on October 19, 1595. He is now buried in the Cathedral of Our Lady and St. Philip Howard in Arundel. His wife, Anne Howard, the Countess of Arundel died on April 19, 1630 when she was 73 years old. She never remarried after his death and struggled to survive during Elizabeth I's reign; King James I restored her jointure lands, which she'd received as her own when she married, so that solved some of her financial troubles.

As to the Northern American or Canadian Martyrs, they aren't just connected to the Society of Jesus, they are Jesuits:

• Saint Rene Goupil (lay brother), martyred in 1642
• Saint Isaac Jogues and Saint Jean de Lalande, martyred in 1646
• Saint Antoine Daniel, in 1648, 
• Saints Jean de Brebeuf, Noel Chabanel, Charles Garnier, and Gabriel Lalement, in 1649

Unlike the Jesuit priests and martyrs who returned to England after study on the Continent, ministering to hidden Catholics, wearing disguises, sought by authorities for treason, these French Jesuits prepared for missions to the Native Americans, the Algonquins and Hurons, etc. As this panegyric to their efforts proclaims:

Members of the Society of Jesus who dedicated themselves to the conversion of the American Indians took Christ’s words very literally. They journeyed from Renaissance France to the frontiers of North America that they might preach and baptize. After pouring the saving waters of Baptism on a dying Indian child, Saint John de Brebeuf, the great pioneer of this mission, exclaimed with joy, “For this one single occasion I would travel all the way from France; I would cross the great ocean to win one little soul for Our Lord!” And so pleased was God with the genuine zeal and the extraordinary sacrifices of these Jesuit apostles that He bestowed upon Father Brebeuf and seven of his fellow missionaries the glorious crown of martyrdom. . . .

The Society of Jesus had been founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola during the turbulent times following the Protestant Revolution. By the dawning of the seventeenth century the Jesuits had won renown as zealous missionaries and ardent defenders of the Catholic Faith.

The Order was still at the peak of its power, prestige, and holiness when a new mission field began to unfold. France, eldest daughter of the Church, was beginning to colonize North America, and the vast untamed regions of the New World were inhabited by pagan natives who had never before been evangelized.

They achieved some success among the Hurons, learning their language, living with them, and were martyred, mostly, by the Iroquois, who were constant enemies of the Huron, after horrendous torture.

This is beyond the scope of our discussion on Monday, but I should mention here that English Jesuits were still suffering arrest and execution in their native land in approximately the same years as these eight North American martyrs:

Blessed Thomas Holland in 1642

Blessed Ralph Corby in 1644

Saint Henry Morse in 1645

Blessed Peter Wright in 1651

(All at Tyburn.) I don't know if these English and French Jesuits would have ever met on the Continent; the English had separate colleges and seminaries established for them. There's another research topic!

Saint Philip Howard, pray for us!

Saint Rene Goupil, pray for us!

Saint Isaac Jogues, pray for us!

Saint Jean de Lalande, pray for us!

Saint Antoine Daniel, pray for us!

Saint Jean de Brebeuf, , pray for us!

Saint Noel Charbanel, pray for us! 

Saint Charles Garnier, pray for us!

Saint Gabriel Lalement, pray for us!

Lenten Posting and A New Series on the Son Rise Morning Show

Today is Quinquagesima Sunday and I've made some of my plans for Lent.

I'm going to cut back on posting here and on my Facebook pages (personal and book) to exclusively Lenten and English Reformation martyr posts. There are at least 30 (thirty) English Reformation martyrs to remember this Lent (from February 26 to April 8, the Wednesday of Holy Week).

On Monday, March 2, I'll start a new series on the Son Rise Morning Show, offering reflections on sermons and meditations for Lent by St. John Henry Newman in The Tears of Christ: Meditations for Lent.

The book is available from the Augustine Institute and was edited by Christopher O. Blum.

The Tears of Christ is a companion volume to Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Advent and Christmas from the same publisher and editor, which I reviewed for the National Catholic Register in 2018.

To introduce the series, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show this week on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday, February 27, at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern.

Please listen live here; the podcast will be archived here!

Anna Mitchell and I will select a sermon for each Monday's broadcast, and I'll preview it the Friday before. The sermons are all available on-line at the Newman Reader and I'll link the complete sermon from which Blum has excerpted paragraphs in the preview.

I'll be using this volume as part of my Lenten devotions along with listening to a CD I purchased from Aid to the Church in Need (UK): Catholic Meditations with Music for the Season of Lent from the Oxford Oratory:

In this thought-provoking CD, recorded at the Oxford Oratory, Father Jerome Bertram offers reflections for the season of Lent highlighting the importance of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, and the spiritual rewards of the Lenten journey. The meditations are accompanied by responsories taken from the Matins of Lent.

Track listing:

1. Hymn: Ex more docti
2. The Season of Lent: Spring-Cleaning for the Soul, Part One
3. Responsory: Emendemus in melius, quae ignoranter peccavimus
4. The Season of Lent: Spring-Cleaning for the Soul, Part Two
5. Responsory: Pater, peccavi in cælum, et coram te
6. Prayer: Opening our Hearts to God. Part One
7. Responsory: Tribularer, si nescirem misericordias tuas, Domine
8. Prayer: Opening our Hearts to God, Part Two
9. Responsory: Derelinquat impius viam suam
10. Fasting, making space in our life, Part One
11 Responsory: Moyses, famulus Dei, jejunauit quadraginta diebus
12. Fasting, making space in our life, Part Two
13. Responsory: Frange esurienti panem tuum
14. Almsgiving: Showing Christ¹s love to the World, Part One
15. Responsory: Abscondite eleemosynam in sinu pauperum
16. Almsgiving: Showing Christ¹s love to the World, Part Two
17. Responsory: Angelis suis mandavit de te
18. The Rewards of Lent
19. Antiphon: Ave, Regina Caelorum

Father Jerome Bertram of the Oxford Oratory died on October 19, 2019. 

Contemporary Writing about the English Martyrs

I'm still reading this article by Susannah Brietz Monta, "Representing Martyrdom in Tudor England", available for free on the Oxford Handbooks site. I've printed it out for easier reading:

While the scope of English religious persecution pales in comparison with that of the continent, England’s several official changes of religion and its many Catholic martyrs make it a distinct case.9 Still, Tudor martyrdom ought not to be studied in isolation. Foxe’s first Latin martyrology, Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554), was influenced by continental Protestants, such as Matthias Flacius (Illyricus), and the Lutheran martyrologists known as the Magdeburg Centuriators; in turn, the martyrologists Adriaan van Haemstede, Ludwig Rabus, and Jean Crespin made use of the Commentarii.10 Much of Foxe’s second Latin martyrology, Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum (Basle, 1559), was incorporated into Crespin’s Actiones et monumenta martyrum (Geneva, 1560), the title of which influenced that of Foxe’s English martyrology, the Actes and Monuments.11 The fullest Catholic response to Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was written in Latin for a broad audience; the Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholica in Anglia was first published in Trier in 1583 and in subsequent, expanded editions from 1588. Continental interest in English Catholic martyrs was significant.12Diego de Yepez, bishop of Taracona and confessor to Philip II, wrote a history of the English persecution, and numerous works in Latin and vernacular languages commemorated martyrs from Edmund Campion in 1581 to priests executed during the English Civil Wars in the 1640s.13

As affecting, dramatic offerings of religious testimony, martyrologies served important religious and polemical functions.14 Reformation-era martyrologies seek to establish continuity with Christianity’s foundational martyrdom, that of Christ, and to extend and shape subsequent Christian history. The construction of martyrdom concerns the writing of historical narrative, the boundaries of genre, the nature of living tradition, the power of exemplarity, the invocation of reading communities, and practices of imitatio, or imitation, in its literary and devotional forms. The making of martyrs thus depends upon both contemporary literary practices and religious convictions, as this essay hopes to show.

The writer of the essay has also published Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and an edition of Anthony Copley's A Fig for Fortune: A Catholic Response to the Faerie Queene (Manchester University Press, 2016).

I don't know how long this 25 page essay will be available for download and printing, so be forewarned. Also, please note the licensing restrictions!