Sigrid Undset and the English Catholic Martyrs

I've almost finished a biographical study of Sigrid Undset by Father Aidan Nichols, OP, published by Ignatius Press: Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts. In the course of his discussion of her conversion to Catholicism, Father Nichols reminded me that she had written about a couple of English Catholic martyrs of the Recusant era, Saint Robert Southwell, poet and Jesuit missionary, and Saint Margaret Clitherow, wife, mother of two Catholic priests, and protector of priests. (Neither had been canonized at the time, however.) He also notes that English Catholic authors had some influence on Undset's conversion.

Father Nichols examines these interests and influences in two chapters, one describing those contemporary English Catholic writers like Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, Hilaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton (chapter 6, "The Thirties, or the Coming of War"). The other (chapter 9, "The Hagiographer") offers some details about how she depicted the lives, not just of Southwell and Clitherow, but also of Saints Edmund Campion and Philip Howard.

We'll be taking up this subject in a series on the Son Rise Morning Show in September, starting 9/14 (after the Labor Day hiatus), looking first at the contemporary English Catholic writers who accompanied Undset as she prepared to become a Catholic and then at those martyrs as she told their stories. English Catholicism, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, was essential to Undset's conversion.

Since Bishop Fredrik Hansen of Oslo declared on July 8 that he would be opening a Cause for Undset's sainthood, she's been getting more attention.

Stay tuned for future updates on this story, as they used to say on the radio!

Father Vincent Blehl, SJ RIP

Father Vincent Ferrer Blehl, SJ died on November 14, 2001. As this obituary in The Independent , noted, his life and academic career had many connections to St. John Henry Newman:

Native of the Bronx, Professor of English Literature, Jesuit of the New York Province, 21-year resident of Europe working for the canonisation of a Londoner – all these facts about Vincent Blehl seem like shards from rather incompatible ciphers until one recognises the indicating number – John Henry Newman – the priest, theologian, poet, preacher, and extraordinary man of God.

Vincent Ferrer Blehl was born in 1921 and at the age of 18 entered the Society of Jesus. His studies were commenced at Woodstock College, Maryland, against an increasingly dark international background (the Roosevelts were near neighbours and Blehl often spoke of their kindness in allowing the young students to use part of their grounds for recreation). An MA in English followed, and Blehl's dissertation had the 19th-century English cardinal Newman for its subject (he had developed a keen interest in Newman's Grammar of Assent when at Woodstock). Blehl's doctoral work at Harvard had the same focus.

Father Blehl worked with Father Charles Stephen Dessain of the Oratory and hoped to work further on Newman's Cause for Canonization, but his superiors had other assignments for him, including the chairmanship of the Department of England at Fordham University. But he finally had his chance to make a great contribution to Newman's Cause:

While Newman's cause had been put firmly on the right track in 1959, the engine had refused to move for 20 years. Those who had been involved were either tied to other commitments, and/or were totally baffled as to how the work might be tackled. In 1979 some exploratory investigations were being undertaken to establish what should be done and how. Learning about this, Blehl was immediately bursting with enthusiasm. He was confident that his superiors would allow him to take early retirement from Fordham and move to Europe and devote himself full time to the work of the cause. The Archbishop of Birmingham constituted a new Historical Commission, with Vincent Blehl as chairman.

Assessing priorities was not always easy at first but by 1984 it was clear what needed to be done and Blehl led those concerned on a rollercoaster which led to the successful completion of the diocesan enquiry in 1986. The cause was then sent on to Rome, and, at this point, Blehl was appointed Postulator, and, as such, was responsible for drawing up the Positio or documentary case for Newman's canonisation. This was finished in 1989 and completed the rounds of the Sacred Congregation's committees of consultors with record speed. In January 1991, Pope John Paul II issued the decree of heroicity of virtue and declared that John Henry Newman was forthwith to be called "Venerable".

He also published several books about Newman or collections of Newman's sermons, letters, and other works. Father Blehl was devoted to making sure that Newman's spirituality and devotion to Jesus Christ were better understood. The White Stone: The Spiritual Theology of John Henry Newman is a great example of this, as is Blehl's introduction to a collection of sermons which includes a foreword by Muriel Spark, whose reading of Newman led her to join the Catholic Church.

Although Father Blehl did not live to see Newman beatified or canonized, his soul surely knows that his work helped the Cause. 

St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!!

Jesuits Land in Virginia: A Spanish Mission

You might remember several years ago the news about graves found in the ruins of the Church of England chapel in the Jamestown Colony: there were indications that one of the men buried there, Captain Gabriel Archer, might have have been a secret Catholic or a crypto-Catholic, as he had what researchers thought was a reliquary. I haven't seen any update to this story or new information about the provenance of that object.

But here's another story about Catholics in Virginia: today is the anniversary of the landing of Jesuit missionaries in the lower Chesapeake Peninsulas to establish the Ajacan Mission in 1570--37 years before the English colony at Jamestown. According to this website the mission was:

Located possibly on the Rappahannock or the Potomac River but more likely between the King and the Queen Creeks where they empty into the York River, this mission was the result of a second attempt by Spain to extend its domination of North America into the Chesapeake Bay, or as they called it, Bahía de Santa María, or Bahía de Madre de Dios.

The first attempt had been made in August 1566, when two Dominican friars and thirty-seven Spanish and Portuguese soldiers sailed to that area, called Ajacán by their guide and interpreter, Don Luis de Velasco, a converted, hispaniolized Algon­quian Indian who had been taken from the area on an earlier voyage in 1561. While searching for a landing site, Don Luis claimed to not recognize the sur­round­ings, and after a strong storm arrived, this first attempt was abandoned.

On 10 September 1570, the members of the second colonizing expedition, after making their first landfall probably at either Cape Henry, Point Comfort, or the southeastern tip of present-day Newport News, decided to disembark at what may have been College Creek, just east of James­town, and travel by smaller boat and foot to their preferred site on the York River. The colonists consisted of two Jesuit priests, including Father Juan Baptista de Segura as leader, one other priest, three Jesuit brothers, three lay catechists, the young son of a Spanish colonist from Santa Elena (present-day Parris Island, South Carolina), and Don Luis de Velasco, once again as guide and interpreter. They arrived at an inopportune time in that the Indians whose territory they chose to settle were experiencing a drought, and food was in short supply. Having to rely on the local inhabitants for sustenance, many of whom had left the area to search for food elsewhere, the Jesuits soon became more of an irritant than an inspiration, especially to Don Luis.

Except for the young son of a Spanish colonist, Alonso de Olmos, the rest of the party was murdered either by Don Luis or the nearby Native American Indians on February 9, 1571. A later Spanish military expedition rescued de Olmos, tried to find Don Luis, and tried & execution some of the Indians for the murder of Jesuits.

After receiving a report from Father Juan Rogel in 1572 about the situation, Jesuit Superior General, Saint Francis Borgia determined not to pursue missions in the area since the Spanish military didn't intend to colonize the region either. That had been an issue when Father de Segura at first wanted to go to Virginia, according to this website, because he did not the military presence to force the Indians to become Catholic (influenced by example of Bartolomé de las Casas):

Segura insisted, against the advice of Florida governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, that the Jesuits did not need military protection on their mission. He instead placed his faith in Don Luís, who promised that the land he called Ajacán would be rich in potential converts and natural resources.

The Cause for Beatification and Canonization for the eight martyrs--Fathers Juan Bautista de Segura, Jesuit vice provincial of Havana, Cuba, and Luis de Quiros, former head of the Jesuit college among the Moors in Spain, three were Jesuit brothers and three novices--was opened in the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, Virginia in 2003. 

Monsignor Knox and King Henry VI

If Henry VII would have had his way, we would be celebrating the feast of Henry VI today. The son of Henry V died on May 21, 1471 in the Tower of London, probably killed at the orders of the newly re-crowned King Edward IV (although Thomas More cites Richard, the Duke of York as the responsible party). The official version was that Henry VI died of melancholy after hearing about the results of the Battle of Tewkesbury, which the House of York won and his son Edward, the Prince of Wales, had been killed.

This blog explains some aspects of the development of Henry VI's cult and cause for canonization, which was of course, cut short by Henry VIII's English Reformation:

The great mystery of Henry VI’s posthumous popularity has been grappled with for centuries. Many distinguished historians have dismissed the cult as a purely political phenomenon, and at first look this explanation is rather appealing. At the time of Henry VI’s oddly suspicious death from “pure displeasure” in that most hospitable of structures, the Tower of London, England had been embroiled in a bloody civil war for twelve long years [1]. The War of the Roses was fought between the House of Lancaster (represented by poor Henry), and the House of York, led by King Edward IV. Likely killed at the hands of his York cousins, rumors quickly spread of Henry’s murder by the creepiest of English uncles, Richard III. Most significantly, the supposedly violent homicide of Henry VI saw him reimagined in popular medieval culture as an innocent martyr. And political martyrdom, in late medieval England, was a particularly transformative process. It turned the unsuspecting victim into an impressively sacred figure, and bestowed the deceased monarch with a legitimacy denied him in life. As such, the initial impetus for Henry’s cult did rely upon his sacred political martyrdom.

Henry VII, who was the Lancastrian King’s half nephew, reinforced and strengthened the political nature of Henry VI’s posthumous cult. Defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, Henry Tudor shamelessly manipulated his uncle’s growing cultic popularity to legitimize his own claim to the throne. Not only was the long reigning “Martir by great Tormernting” continuously referred to in Henry VII’s inaugural pageants [2], the Tudor King also aggressively patronized the widespread cult, and petitioned three successive Popes to have his uncle canonized as a Saint. While Henry VI’s canonization was never secured, the process did produce a remarkable work titled The Miracles of King Henry VI [3]. This 1500 AD compilation of 174 miracle stories left out a staggering 300 accounts, and strongly suggests that Henry’s saintly popularity went much deeper than political manipulation.

The Miracles of King Henry VI demonstrates that the cult began, at least, with popular lay piety and not royal propaganda and patronage:

the English people worshipped Henry for his remarkable gentleness, compassion and leniency. Although odd qualities for a medieval King to possess, Henry’s renowned mercy and benevolence in life rendered him an extremely accessible royal figure. The late monarch was generous to the poor, commonly exempted dangerous criminals, and abhorred violence of any kind. As a Saint, he consequently appealed to those in great need of divine charity, which in bleak medieval times happened to be the majority of the English population. Saintly Henry aided criminals, madmen, plague sufferers, innocent children, lowly servants and stricken noblemen. The common theme in all his miracles was that his followers found themselves in critical emergencies, and yearned for divinely sympathetic intervention.

Henry VI posthumously provided such divine sympathetic intervention, and emerged as the patron saint of tragedy and all worldly suffering. During his catastrophic reign, Henry himself experienced extended bouts of mental illness, physical incapacitation and visible torment. His patent suffering invested the Lancastrian King with a unique saintly power, that of empathy. In The Miracles, Henry saves individuals from fatal fires, cures the terminally blind, and amazingly resurrects children from the dead. As a tormented monarch, Henry embodied both sacred power and profane suffering. His embodiment of sacral power and worldly misery explains much of his posthumous popularity, as Henry VI was never far from the minds of those in serious need.

Ronald Knox, the Catholic convert son of the evangelical Bishop of Manchester, developed a devotion to King Henry VI when he was at Eton, which Henry had founded in 1440 as The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Windsor. In 1923, just six years after he had become a Catholic and five years after becoming a Catholic priest, Cambridge University Press published his translation of The Miracles of King Henry VI. He also preached a sermon, included in the collection published by Ignatius Press, in which he asked the congregation to pray for the beatification of King Henry VI!

Well, even if Henry VII and Monsignor Ronald Knox had had their way and May 21 was the feast of King St. Henry VI, on this May 21, since it is on Monday the day after Pentecost, we would still be celebrating Mary, Mother of the Church, as determined by Pope Francis and the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. In view of the devotion King Henry VI had to Our Lady, he would be most satisfied.

Mater Ecclesiae, ora pro nobis!

St. Margaret Roper?

William McGurn writes in The Wall Street Journal (it's been made available from behind the pay wall on his Facebook page) that St. Thomas More's daughter should be considered for a cause for canonization:

In his biography “A Daughter’s Love,” historian John Guy writes that “without Margaret talking and praying with him as often as she could in that cold, bleak cell, it is far from certain that he would have been able to do what he did.” More knew himself well enough to know this too.

In the end, More embraced the chopping block as liberation from earthly suffering and entry into a better world. But is there no spiritual merit in the suffering of the loved ones left behind? More’s reliance on his daughter does not in the slightest diminish his virtue, his courage, his faithfulness. Should having a famous martyr for a father diminish Margaret’s?

And what of heroic virtue, the defining characteristic of saints?

Margaret may not have died for her faith, but she managed to outwit Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister and her father’s chief nemesis, gaining access to More’s prison cell on the pretext that she would try to persuade him to take the oath—even as her visits stiffened her father’s resolve. She defiantly took his severed head down from its pike on London Bridge after his death. Still later she would let the king’s men know that their threats would not deter her from seeing her father’s writings published, so the world might know the man Thomas More really was.

Why not canonize her? On the one hand, Margaret took the oath her father refused. Still, this is unlikely to be an immovable obstacle, not least because she added the caveat “as far as will stand with the law of God.” Perhaps the more prosaic reason this gentlewoman is not a saint is that the process is time-consuming and costly, and lay men and women generally do not have the benefit of a religious order pushing their cases.

In Rome the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints confirms there is no movement to have this good woman join her father on the calendar of saints. Manifestly, a pronunciamento from the pages of The Wall Street Journal is not the conventional starting point for a journey to canonization. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

Please read the rest there.

A Martyr in Chains? Dean Thomas Raynald or Reynolds

Because he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, Thomas Raynold or Reynolds died in prison on November 24, 1559. A brief biography, which does not describe either his courageous refusal or what he must have suffered in the Marshalsea prison:

THOMAS REYNOLDS, D.D. (Oxon.) 1536: He was Dean of Exeter (1555), Warden of Merton College, Oxford (1545) and Rector of Holsworthy, Devon. He was deprived of all these preferments, and was committed to the Marshalsea September 4, 1559, where he died November 24 following. He had been Rector of Pinhoe, Devon, 1530-7, as Mr Gillow records. He had also been Rector of Lapworth, Warwickshire, 1540-1556. At Queen Mary's death he was bishop-nominate of Hereford.

Dom David Knowles suggests that Thomas Reynolds could have been the brother of St. Richard Reynolds, the "Angel of Syon", one of the protomartyrs of the English Reformation (May 4, 1535). During the reign of Henry VIII, he must have accepted the Oaths required, but he could not accept the oaths required by Elizabeth I's new religious settlement. Did he adopt The Book of Common Prayer during Edward VI's reign?

He is not listed among the dilati (delayed for more information) or the praetermissi (passed over the first time), or as one of the martyrs in chains of those whose causes were introduced in the late nineteenth century after the Restoration of the Hierarchy in England and as research continued in the early twentieth century. The issue, of course, is whether or not he died in prison as a result of odium fidei (hatred of the faith)--or were there other issues contributing to his imprisonment and death?

This just demonstrates how careful the Catholic Church is when we proclaim saints, whether confessors or martyrs. Although his death was obscure, the date was noted. May he rest in the peace of Christ.

From Montmartre to Tyburn

From The Catholic Herald:

The Vatican has agreed to open the Cause for the canonisation of Mother Marie Adele Garnier, the foundress of the Tyburn Nuns.

Mother Garnier, who died in Tyburn Convent, near Marble Arch, London, in 1924, has been given the title “Servant of God” after the Congregation for the Cause of Saints concluded that there were “no obstacles” to her candidacy.

She began her order at Montmartre in Paris at the end of the 19th century, but had to leave France because of the anti-clerical Law of Associations in 1901, which "suppressed nearly all of the religious orders in France and confiscated their property", according to the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on anti-clericalism.

They came first to Notting Hill then in 1903, with the help of a cash gift, purchased a house on the north side of Hyde Park, just yards from the site of the Tyburn gallows, upon which 105 Catholic martyrs perished during the Protestant Reformation.

Today Mother Garnier’s tomb has become a place of pilgrimage for people from across the globe.

Her order of contemplative Benedictine nuns – properly called the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre – has also spread rapidly around the world and in the last few decades has opened new convents in South America, Africa, France and New Zealand.

At the Tyburn convent, the nuns have supported the cause and memory of the Catholics martyred at Tyburn, including the replica of Tyburn Tree seen above, where pilgrims may venerate relics of the martyrs.

More about Servant of God Mother Marie Adele Garnier here. The prayer for canonization:

FATHER, all-powerful & ever-living God,

we give you glory, praise and thanks for the life and virtue

of your beloved daughter, Marie Adele Garnier.


Filled with the riches of your grace

and preferring nothing to the love

of the Heart of Jesus Christ,

she devoted her whole life

to the adoration, praise and glory
 of your Name;


she sacrificed herself by prayer and penance

for the unity & holiness of your Church;

she loved her neighbour with a charity

full of humility and compassion.

Above all, she found the SUN of her life 
in the Holy Mass,

and so was consumed with zeal
 for liturgical worship

and eucharistic adoration,
 and abandoned herself with all her heart

to your most Holy Will in all things.

In your mercy Lord, hearken to our prayer

"Glorify your Servant
Mother Marie Adele Garnier,

that your Servant
 may glorify YOU".

We ask you this through our Lord
 Jesus Christ, Your Son
who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, world without end. AMEN.

Image Credit: John D. Smith, Cwmbran (2011); Used by permission.

Princess Diana's Great-Great-Great Uncle

The Honorable George Spencer, son of the 2nd Earl Spencer, now known as Servant of God Father Ignatius Spencer, is thus the Great-Great-Great-Great Uncle of Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge and his brother Prince Henry (Harry) of Wales. He should be proclaimed Venerable soon, according to the Diocese of Shrewsbury:

The Vatican has taken a key step along the road to declaring a priest related to Princes William and Harry to be a saint.

A 20-year investigation into the life and works of Father Ignatius Spencer has been approved by Vatican historians.

The document, known as a positio, has now been passed over to theologians of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood.

If they decide there is “evidence of sanctity”, they will then ask Pope Francis to declare the Victorian Passionist priest as “Venerable”.

At that point, the Catholic Church will begin the search for two miracles needed first for his beatification – when he will be given the title of Blessed – and then his canonisation, when he will be declared to be a saint.

Fr John Kearns, the British Passionist Provincial, described the development as a “step down the road” to sainthood.

“The positio has been finished and finalised and has been submitted to Rome and has got through the historical commission and is now going to the theologians,” said Fr Kearns . . .

“We would invite people to pray that the sanctity of Father Ignatius Spencer can eventually be recognised by the Church.”

Princes William and Harry are related to Eton-educated Father Spencer through their mother Diana, Princess of Wales.

Members of the aristocratic Spencer family, he was her great great great uncle and also a great uncle of Winston Churchill.

This blog provides his account of his conversion, which must have been as shocking at the time as John Henry Newman's especially since Spencer was a scion of English nobility. He was ordained a minister in the Church of England but then began to have doubts and difficulties with its teachings and even to think about the claims of the Catholic Church to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church founded by Jesus:

It is now time, then, to state the principal steps by which it pleased God gradually to overcome my prejudices against the Catholic Church. In my early education I heard very little about the Catholic Church. I had been taught in general terms, that it was full of errors and superstitions; that at the glorious era of the Reformation, Luther had begun the work of dispelling the darkness with which the spiritual tyranny of the Popes had covered the world; and that England was one of the favoured nations which had shaken of the yoke, and had adopted the most admirable system of faith and worship of any of the Reformed Churches. This is the general statement of the case, which has been handed down from father to son since the days of Queen Elizabeth. If it be asked how people can suffer themselves to be so imposed upon, I can only answer, that men will readily believe what flatters their personal or their national vanity, and therefore the English have received this tale with ready credulity; and hardly one in a thousand stops to doubt what comes confirmed by such a weight of authority, and what he naturally desires to be true. As it was under these impressions that I looked on what I saw of the Catholic religion when I was in Italy ten or twelve years ago, it is no wonder that I went home only confirmed in my prejudices.

After I had taken orders, I began to make theology a study; I read some Protestant Commentaries on the Apocalypse, applying to what are called the errors of Popery what is there revealed of the great defection from the truth to take place in the latter days; and I put it down for certain, that in whatever body of men the truth was to be found, the last place to seek it in was among the Catholics. Protestants, in general; would consider Catholics not only as misguided; but as incorrigible in their errors; and if any of them should entertain the thought of a future healing of the divisions of the Church, and its reestablishment as one united body, they would not look forward to this being to take place by the return of Protestants within the pale of the Catholic Church, after a reformation of her abuses. Their idea is, that God’s people must come out from her; that she is prefigured by the spiritual Babylon, and that her end is not to be corrected, but utterly destroyed.

At one time; perhaps, I should have assented to principles like these; but I did not hold them long, when I began to think for myself. The first circumstance by which it pleased God in some degree to open my eyes, was a correspondence into which I entered with a person who withheld his name; but who professed to be a young man of the Protestant Church, who had been some time in a Catholic town abroad, where conversations he had had with some Catholics, and his observation of their worship and character had led him to doubt the truth of what he had been taught in his childhood about Popery and the Reformation. He professed to be under great suspense and misery, and entreated me, as a well-informed Protestant, to satisfy him on a few questions which he proposed. I entered with joy on this correspondence; which continued for six months. I expected easily to convince him that the Catholic Church was full of errors; but he answered my arguments, and I perceived that he became more and more disposed to join it. I discovered; by· means of this correspondence; that I had never duly considered the principles of our Reformation; that my objections to the Catholic Church were prejudices adopted from the sayings of others, not the result of my own observation. Instead of gaining the advantage in this controversy, I saw, and I owned to my correspondent, that a great change had been produced in myself. I no longer desired to persuade him to keep in the communion of the Protestant Church; but rather determined and promised to follow up the same enquiries with him, if he would make his name known to me, and only pause awhile before he joined the Catholics but I heard no more of him till after my conversion and arrival at Rome, when I discovered that my correspondent was a lady who had herself been converted a short time before she wrote to me.

After Spencer became a Catholic, he studied for the priesthood at the Venerable English College in Rome and met Father, now Blessed, Dominic Barberi, the Passionist who yearned to go to England as a missionary. According to the same blog, he also tried to meet with one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement in Oxford, John Henry Newman:

In August 1832 George returned to England to act as a curate to a church in Walsall where he was given particular care of a chapel in West Bromwich. Here he opened three schools, gave lectures on religion and made many converts, as well as his usual activities in the parish. George’s reputation as a preacher began to grow and soon he was preaching as far afield as St. Chad’s, Manchester and St. Mary’s, Derby. During a visit to France in 1838 George proposed a ‘Crusade of Prayer for the Conversion of England’ to the Archbishop of Paris. Many of George’s influential friends joined this campaign and news of it spread throughout Britain and the Empire. In May 1839 he was appointed spiritual director to the seminarians at Oscott College and in the same month preached at St. Chad’s, Manchester on ‘The Great Importance of a Reunion Between the Catholics and the Protestants of England and the Method of Effecting It.’ In January 1840 George visited John Henry Newman at Oriel College, Oxford to ask Newman to join him in prayer for “unity in truth”, Newman sent him away and refused even to see Spencer, but later apologised for this in his Apologia;

“This feeling led me into the excess of being very rude to that zealous and most charitable man, Mr. Spencer, when he came to Oxford in January, 1840, to get Anglicans to set about praying for Unity. I myself then, or soon after, drew up such prayers; it was one of the first thoughts which came upon me after my shock, but I was too much annoyed with the political action of the members of the Roman Church in England to wish to have anything to do with them personally. So glad in my heart was I to see him when he came to my rooms, whither Mr. Palmer of Magdalen brought him, that I could have laughed for joy; I think I did; but I was very rude to him, I would not meet him at dinner, and that, (though I did not say so,) because I considered him ” in loco apostatx ” from the Anglican Church, and I hereby beg his pardon for it.”

Spencer did become a Passionist and succeeded Blessed Dominic Barberi as leader of the order in England and Belgium:

On January 5 1847 George Spencer received the Passionist habit from the hands of his old friend Father Dominic Barberi who had brought the Congregation to England in 1841. George received the religious name Father Ignatius of Saint Paul, the name he would be known by ever after. Ignatius threw himself into Passionist life and after making his religious profession in 1848 began preaching sermons throughout Britain and Ireland, always calling for prayers for the conversion of England. In August 1849 Ignatius was preaching in Belgium when he heard of Father Dominic’s death, consequently he was now Provincial of the Passionist Congregation in England and Belgium. In 1851 Ignatius set out to Rome to gain the approval of the Pope for his work, on his return he also met with several prominent bishops, as well as with Emperor Franz Josef of Austria.

During a visit to Paris in 2010 I visited the church of Notre Dame des Victoires and noted this large Ex Voto near the shrine of Our Lady of Victory which thanks the Blessed Virgin Mary for three conversions. It also references prayer for the conversion of England encouraged by the "Reverend George Spencer", known as "Father Ignatius" of the Passionists, who had died on October 1, 1864. 

Blessed Dominic Barberi, pray for us!

Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Servant of God Ignatius Spencer, pray for us!

The Last Abbot of Whalley Abbey: John Paslew

On March 10, 1536, Abbot John Paslew, the last abbot of Whalley Abbey was executed in Lancaster for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. According to the British History Online site entry for Whalley Abbey:

Little is known of the state of the abbey on the eve of the Dissolution. John Paslew, the last abbot, was afterwards accused of having sold much of the plate of the house to defray the cost of his assumption of the position of a mitred abbot and of a suit for licence to give 'bennet and collet' in the abbey. (fn. 96) A comparison of its accounts for the years 1478 and 1521 shows a large increase of expenditure in the latter year, especially in the items of meat and drink, though this may possibly have been due, in part at least, to an increase in the number of monks or to some exceptional hospitality. It is noteworthy that the income derived from the appropriated rectories in 1521 exhibits a more than proportionate augmentation. (fn. 97)

Only one of the monks was singled out for immorality by the visitors of 1535. (fn. 98) Cromwell subsequently relaxed in their favour the injunctions laid upon them by the visitors. Some restrictions on their movements were removed and only three divinity lectures a week were insisted on. (fn. 99)

In the autumn of the next year Abbot Paslew became implicated in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The abbey of Sawley, close by, was the centre of the movement in Craven and the adjoining parts of Lancashire. At the end of October, 1536, Nicholas Tempest, one of the Yorkshire leaders of the rising, came to Whalley with 400 men and swore the abbot and his brethren to the cause of the commons. (fn. 100) Paslew is alleged to have lent Tempest a horse and some plate; (fn. 101) Aske, however, said he had no money from the abbot as he had from other abbots and priors, but intended to have. (fn. 102) It may be that Paslew yielded reluctantly to the disaffection by which he was surrounded. A grant by the convent of a rent of £6 13s. 4d. to Cromwell on 1 January, 1537, perhaps marks an attempt to make their peace with the government. (fn. 103) But such offences as theirs were not overlooked. Yet as they were covered by the pardon granted in October there must have been subsequent offences. Shortly after Paslew sent a message to the abbot of Hailes that he was 'sore stopped and acrased.' His letter was intercepted and may have contained something incriminatory. (fn. 104) Doubtless he involved himself in the last phase of the 'Pilgrimage.' (fn. 105) He was tried at Lancaster and executed there on 10 March. (fn. 106) His fellow monk William Haydock shared his fate, but was sent to Whalley for execution. (fn. 107) The Earl of Sussex, royal commissioner with the Earl of Derby, wrote next day to Cromwell the accomplishment of the matter of Whalley was God's ordinance; else seeing my lord of Derby is steward of the house and so many gentlemen the abbot's fee'd men, it would have been hard to find anything against him in these parts. It will be a terror to corrupt minds hereafter. (fn. 108)

The possessions of the house were held to be forfeited by the abbot's attainder, and the king gave orders that as it had been so infected with treason all the monks should be transferred to other monasteries or to secular capacities. He wrote vaguely of a new establishment of the abbey 'as shalbe thought meet for the honour of God, our surety and the benefit of the county,' (fn. 109) but it remained in the hands of the crown until 6 June, 1553, when the site and the manor of Whalley were sold to John Braddyl (to whose custody they had been committed after the forfeiture and who had leased them since 12 April, 1543,) and Richard Assheton. (fn. 110) A partition was at once arranged by which Braddyl took most of the land and Assheton the house.

Abbot Paslew is not among the beatified or canonized martyrs of England. This website argues that Paslew was in some ways representative of the abuses of the monastic orders in England that Henry VIII and Cromwell wanted to eliminate, but the report of only one problem monk and the easing of any restrictions against the house seems to argue against that. His house was well-managed and orderly. The website also notes that Paslew refused the Oath of Supremacy, even if some now judge him as being a reluctant participant in the Pilgrimage of Grace:

Although participating very minimally (and arguably unwillingly) in the Pilgrimage of Grace, one cannot deny the admirable defence of his Catholic faith when it came down to it, as Paslew refused to take the compulsory oath of allegiance to Henry VIII and was executed, with two of his fellow monks, at Lancaster in March 1537. Here, when directly ordered, Paslew finally truly and admirably dissented-he refused to accept Henry as the Supreme Head of Church of England and thus stayed loyal to his faith and the pope. Despite all his faults, he dissented and died faithful to his religion.

If Abbot Paslew refused the Oath of Supremacy, he did more than the three beatified abbots of Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester. The Reverend C.A. (Charles Alfred) Newdigate, SJ, Vice Postulator of the Cause of the English Martyrs at the time wrote in The Tablet on April 14, 1923, that there was a tradition of Paslew being a martyr for the faith, even in the recusant era, as Father Robert Parsons/Persons listed him as a Henrician martyr:

"For that divers godly, learned, and zealous men could not be content to follow the king's affections, as others did, & namely B. Fisher of Rochester, Syr Thomas More, late Chauncelor of England, . . . and other their like, they were content to give their bloud in defence of Cath. unitie against this schisme, as the Abbots of Glastenburie, of Whaley, of Redding, Doctor Forrest, . . . Doctor Powell, and the like." The Abbot of " Whaley " finds himself in good company, and Persons could scarcely have placed him there if he had not held him for a martyr in the highest sense of the word.

If we would know what Paslew's own Order thought of his death we may turn to his commemoration in Henriquez's "Menologium Cisterciense," 1629 :— "Beati Joannis Paslew, Abbatis Whallensis, qui post diuturnos carceres, variosque pro fide catholica toleratos labores, suspensus et in quatuor partes divisus Lancastriae martyrium consummavit." It may be that the historical facts here are somewhat at fault, but there is no mistaking the significance of the title Beati—a title which, it may be remarked parenthetically, would never have been tolerated had it been used after the decree against undue cultus issued only five years later by Urban VIII.

It's interesting to note that  Blessed Sebastian Newdigate, one of the Carthusian priors martyred in 1535 was a "collateral ancestor" of Father Newdigate, whose father Alfred had been an Anglican vicar before becoming a Catholic (with his family joining him) in 1875.

The grounds of Whalley Abbey are now a Church of England retreat center.

February 21: Southwell and Newman

What a remarkable doctrine of the Church is the Communion of Saints! Two great holy men were born this day--one to eternal life, the other to life on earth: St. Robert Southwell was executed on February 21, 1595 and Blessed John Henry Newman was born on February 21, 1801. When I talked to Matt Swaim on the Son Rise Morning Show Friday, I mentioned the things these two men have in common:

~They are both Englishmen
~Both are converts to the Catholic faith from the Anglican church
~Both went to the Continent to study for the priesthood
~Both are order priests: Southwell a Jesuit and Newman an Oratorian
~Both are poets, although Southwell is probably the greater poet (but Newman's The Dream of Gerontius is a great achievement)

Of course, they differ vastly in their deaths and that marks their different status as saints in heaven: St. Robert Southwell was canonized as a martyr, while Newman was beatified--and perhaps soon will be canonized--as a confessor of the faith. Here's an article I wrote describing the differences between martyrs and confessors.

St. Robert Southwell was 33 years old when he was executed at Tyburn on February 21, 1595. When he cited his age during his trial, his torturer Richard Topcliffe mocked him for claiming equality with Jesus Christ. Southwell answered that he was but a worm.

It is hard to be temperate when writing about his arrest, torture and execution--it is obviously a horrendous blot against the Elizabethan "regime". He was betrayed by a woman that Elizabeth's pursuivant Richard Topcliffe had raped and blackmailed--he promised to find her a husband since she was pregnant with his child if she would turn Southwell in; he was tortured--illegally and excruciatingly--numerous times, starting with a visit to Topcliffe's personal torture chamber, while Elizabeth's officials looked on; then he was held in fetid conditions until his father visited him in Westminster's gatehouse and petitioned the queen to put him to death rather than leave him there, in his own filth.

Moved to the Tower of London he was held in greater but solitary comfort, but Queen Elizabeth allowed the sadistic Topcliffe to continue torturing Southwell, who had readily admitted his priesthood. Prior to his trial on February 20 he was moved into a hole called Limbo; the government did not even try to implicate him in any plot against the Queen; he was executed just because he was a Catholic priest. When he was executed on February 21st, the crowds made sure he was dead before the butchery began--and no one cheered when his severed head was displayed to the crowd. Indeed, Elizabeth's government recognized that they had gone too far--there was lull in executions of Catholic priests in London. Lord Cecil even ignored Topcliffe's desires to get started on new victims.

Robert Southwell was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 among the group called The 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. In addition to being a steadfast martyr, he is regarded as one of the great poets of the Elizabethan Age.

Pope St. John Paul II remembered the 200th anniversary of Newman's birth in this 2001 letter to Birmingham:

Newman was born in troubled times which knew not only political and military upheaval but also turbulence of soul. Old certitudes were shaken, and believers were faced with the threat of rationalism on the one hand and fideism on the other. Rationalism brought with it a rejection of both authority and transcendence, while fideism turned from the challenges of history and the tasks of this world to a distorted dependence upon authority and the supernatural. In such a world, Newman came eventually to a remarkable synthesis of faith and reason which were for him "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth" (Fides et Ratio,Introduction; cf. ibid., 74). It was the passionate contemplation of truth which also led him to a liberating acceptance of the authority which has its roots in Christ, and to the sense of the supernatural which opens the human mind and heart to the full range of possibilities revealed in Christ. "Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom, lead Thou me on", Newman wrote in "The Pillar of the Cloud"; and for him Christ was the light at the heart of every kind of darkness. For his tomb he chose the inscription: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem; and it was clear at the end of his life’s journey that Christ was the truth he had found.

But Newman’s search was shot through with pain. Once he had come to that unshakeable sense of the mission entrusted to him by God, he declared: "Therefore, I will trust Him... If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him... He does nothing in vain... He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me. Still, He knows what He is about" (Meditations and Devotions). All these trials he knew in his life; but rather than diminish or destroy him they paradoxically strengthened his faith in the God who had called him, and confirmed him in the conviction that God "does nothing in vain". In the end, therefore, what shines forth in Newman is the mystery of the Lord’s Cross: this was the heart of his mission, the absolute truth which he contemplated, the "kindly light" which led him on.

John Henry Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict in 2010: we are awaiting the confirmation of a second miracle that would lead to his canonization. When he is canonized, he will be the first English saint since 1970 (referring to the canonization of the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales) and the first British saint since 1976 (St. John Ogilvie, SJ, martyred in Scotland). Many Newman devotees hope that he will be declared a Doctor (Teacher) of the Church once he is canonized.

Another Reason for Newman's Canonization

John Allen writes about Blessed John Henry Newman's inspiration for Catholics today:

There are many reasons why religion continues to thrive, but high on the list has been the capacity of a handful of influential religious thinkers to make their ancient traditions relevant to the contemporary situation — to put those traditions in creative conversation with the questions asked by modern women and men.

In that universe, few Catholic figures have packed a stronger punch over the past century than Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century British convert from Anglicanism whose carefully reasoned journey to Catholicism continues to inspire and provoke.

One might describe Newman as Catholicism’s “patron saint of relevance,” in that one can agree or disagree with his conclusions, but it’s impossible to dismiss them as the relic of a medieval mind.

Anyone who reads Newman today, and scores still do, immediately recognizes a very modern voice. It’s no accident that one of his best-known works is called precisely Tracts for the Times.

And Father Dwight Longenecker writes for Aleteia:

A saint, however, is not a saint because of his intellectual accomplishments. Should he be declared a saint, John Henry Cardinal Newman will undoubtedly be up there with St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, St. Edith Stein and St Thomas More as one of the intellectual heavyweights. The galaxy of saints, however, contain stars who are not so bright intellectually. St. John Vianney, St. Joseph Cupertino, St. Therese of Lisieux and many others were not famous for their intellectual prowess or academic accomplishment. If John Henry Newman is a saint, then there is something else about him that we need to consider.

A saint is an ordinary person who has, by God’s grace, reached their full human potential. Therefore if John Henry Newman is to be a saint we must ask whether, by God’s grace, John Henry Newman had become all that John Henry Newman was created to be.

When we look at his life we see that he was gifted with a brilliant mind, a tender heart, and a deep love for God. Each one of those characteristics was fulfilled in his life. It is arguable, therefore, that John Henry Newman used his vast intellectual and spiritual gifts fully to the glory of God. Whether this beautiful soul and beautiful mind are granted the final formal recognition of being a saint is not so much a question of “if” but of “when.”

Since I have read and studied the life and works of Blessed John Henry Newman since I was a sophomore in college, this day of not if but when Newman is canonized is very exciting to me! I'm going to start the month of February off with the daily prayers and meditations from the CTS publication displayed above.

Venerable Mary Ward: Ahead of Her Time

Mary Ward, English nun and recusant, died on January 30, 1645. She was declared Venerable by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, according to this news release from the Sisters of Loretto:

On 19th December 2009 His Holiness Benedict XVI formally promulgated the Decree recognising the ‘heroic virtue’ demonstrated by Mary Ward and thereby conferring on her the title ‘Venerable’. Her cause will now go forward to the next stage in the process towards beatification and eventual canonization.

Mary Ward (1585-1645) was an Englishwoman from Yorkshire who felt called by God to found a congregation of apostolic, non-enclosed religious women along the model of the Society of Jesus. She spent many years in Rome petitioning the Pope to recognise her new congregation, but in 1631 her order was suppressed and Mary Ward herself accused of heresy. No charges were ever brought but she remained under the shadow of the Inquisition in Rome and her congregation was disbanded. Mary Ward’s ideal of an active congregation of religious women serving the needs of the Church was too advanced for her time. She suffered at the hands of authorities who in different circumstances might have recognised the need for such a congregation. Only in 1877 was her congregation recognised by the Church and only in 1909 was Mary Ward allowed to be named as foundress.

The cause for Mary Ward’s canonization was opened in 1929. The historical research was begun by Fr Grisar SJ and completed by Sr Immolata Wetter CJ accompanied by the Postulator Fr Paul Molinari SJ and the Relator Fr Peter Gumpel SJ. This was accepted by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 1995. The theologians completed their investigation in May 2009 and recommended unanimously that Mary Ward demonstrated ‘heroic virtue’ and that her cause should go forward. This was confirmed by the commission of Cardinals and Bishops in November 2009 and subsequently by the Pope.

This essay, by Laurence Lux-Sterritt, published in the Revue de L'Histoire des Religions (vol. 225) in 2008 (see full citation below) explains why Mary Ward's vocation to found an order for women modeled on St. Ignatius of Loyola's Society of Jesus was so fraught with difficulty. It wasn't just that she wanted to form an active, not cloistered, order for women, but that she was using the Jesuits as a model. The entire essay is fascinating in its exploration of the propaganda for and against the Jesuits inside and outside of the Church. The author summarizes the issues thus:

Mary Ward’s institute would fall victim to the complexity of the religious context in which it was born. In the post-Tridentine Church, in which historian Elizabeth Rapley observes “a growing male-female dichotomy, an aggressive antifeminism, an irresistible trend towards patriarchy,”[48] Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in...[48] the Institute of English Ladies was condemned as a new female order that was thought both unacceptable and absurd. But this simple opposition, which was encountered by a number of new feminine movements in the seventeenth century, was exacerbated by the predicament of a more political nature. Specifically, for the Church—torn by the strife that set the secular clergy against the Jesuits—Mary Ward was living proof of the ascendancy that the Society of Jesus enjoyed among devoted Catholics of the period. Besides its contempt for the monastic tradition, the mission of the institute gave the Jesuits no small advantage by entrusting them with the guidance of newly converted families. In the context of the 1620s, such a congregation was bound to incur the disapproval of the enemies of the Society of Jesus.

That was why, in September 1630, the Church ordered the nuncio Pierluigi Carafa to interrogate seven members of the institute at their community in Liege.[49] Wetter, Mary Ward, 38–59.[49] The transcript of the hearing was sent to Rome and studied by Francesco Ingoli, secretary of Propaganda Fide, who was overtly hostile to the Jesuits. He condemned the institute in his report and called for punitive measures. After the deliberations in the congregation, November 21, 1630, Urban VIII remitted the affair to the Inquisition, which decided, in February 1631, to imprison Mary Ward in Munich. The axe fell a little later, when Urban VIII declared the suppression of the so-called “Jesuitesses” in the bull Pastoralis Romani Pontificis. Mary Ward was declared a heretic, and her institute was reduced to the status of a sect in violation of female decency and the prerogatives of the clergy. The supreme pontiff hoped to eradicate “these plants hurtful to the Church.” He ordered they should be “pulled up by the roots, andextirpated”[50] National Library of France, Z Thoisy, 312, items related...[50] since, according to him, the English Ladies threatened the established order far more than they preserved it. 

After her release, Mary Ward retired to England where she continued to serve the recusant community with some of her sisters in a private capacity; she died in Yorkshire in 1645. The institute, however, survived thanks to the elector of Bavaria, Maximilian I (1573–1651), who permitted the English Ladies stationed in Munich to continue to teach, on the strict condition that they no longer claim to be a religious order.[51] See Peters, Mary Ward, 594–97.[51] It was from Munich that renewed effort to obtain papal approval was made. This new institute focused on the instruction of girls, observed enclosure, and did not claim any missionary vocation; it officially had nothing to do with the institute founded by Mary Ward and suppressed in 1631. In 1749, in the bull Quamvis Justo, Benedict XIV recognized it under the name of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Not until June 7, 2003 (nearly four centuries after Mary Ward claimed to have received the divine command “Take the same of the Society”), did the Church permit the vocation of the founder to exist as she would have liked by adapting the rules of Ignatius of Loyola to a congregation of women, who were at last given the right to bear the name Congregation of Jesus.[52] I thank Sophie Houdard (Université de Paris III - Sorbonne...[52]

Laurence Lux-Sterritt, “ Mary Ward et sa Compagnie de Jésus au féminin dans l'Angleterre de la Contre-Réforme ”, Revue de l’histoire des religions 3/2008 (Volume 225) , p. 393-414
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-de-l-histoire-des-religions-2008-3-page-393.htm.

Newman's Second Miracle?

From The Catholic Herald:

The Archbishop of Birmingham has welcomed reports that the Vatican is investigating a possible second “miracle” which may lead to the canonisation of Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman.

Archbishop Bernard Longley said it was a “great joy” to know that the Cause was making progress.

He said the occasion should also spur on Catholics to renew their prayers for the canonisation of Blessed Dominic Barberi, who received Newman into the Catholic faith from the Church of England.

“Blessed Cardinal Newman has left an extraordinarily rich spiritual legacy – not least through the two Oratory communities in Birmingham and Oxford – as well as to the Church nationally and internationally,” Archbishop Longley said.

“It would be a great joy to see him take a step closer to being named among the saints and would be an encouragement to all who have been inspired by him seek the truth by seeking Christ.

“At the same time, and especially during this Jubilee Year of Mercy, I am sure that Blessed John Henry Newman would want us to continue praying for the canonisation of Blessed Dominic Barberi, the Passionist priest who first enabled him to receive the Sacrament of mercy at his reception into full communion with the Catholic Church at Littlemore in 1845 and who gave him a new insight into the merciful love of God.”

The archbishop spoke after the Tablet, a Catholic weekly magazine, revealed that the Archdiocese of Chicago had investigated the inexplicable healing of a young American mother who prayed for the Victorian cardinal’s intercession when she became afflicted by a “life-threatening pregnancy”.

Read the rest here.

The Birmingham Oratory outlines three reasons that Blessed John Henry Newman should be canonized, looking at aspects of his life and work beyond the intellectual and literary:

A fundamental component of Newman’s spirituality is his conviction of the primacy and immediacy of the unseen spiritual world around us. We need this initial conviction as we try to evangelize peoples and cultures that often ignore the reality of the supernatural, or else they take an unhealthy interest in warped versions of supernatural reality – occultism and all its poisonous derivatives.

Newman’s belief that what we see around us is only a tiny part of reality properly understood is at the heart of his theological and spiritual insights, both as an Anglican clergyman and later as a Catholic priest. . . .

Secondly, we should be inspired by the heroic docility with which he followed where the Spirit led. He was not in any way a charismatic in the modern sense of that label. He believed our prayer should always be tranquil and sober. However, by the use of his mind and by a finely tuned self-awareness of his own spiritual sensibilities he persevered step by step under the Spirit’s guidance along the path to truth, a path that led him out of the errors and prejudices which had coloured his earlier beliefs. The convert who in 1845 acknowledged the Roman Catholic Church as the one true fold of the Redeemer was the man who for many years previously had seriously believed that the Pope was antichrist, and the Roman Church a purveyor of idolatry, heresy, and superstition. . . .

Thirdly, we have the example of the fruitful integration within Newman himself of his love for God and his love of neighbour. His harmonious integration of those two great loves shows us that the gift of faith is a gift for the whole person. Newman loved God with the same heart and mind with which he also loved other creatures. His celibate and chaste affective life was not clouded by anything akin to what the post-Freudian world likes to call ‘repression’. His capacity for deep friendship with others, women and men, is well documented. It is charmingly revealed in the attentive and affectionate letters he wrote to his closer friends.

In an age like our own when genuine friendship can so easily be occluded by an obsessive sexualization of human affectivity, Newman reminds us that human love at its best is a pointer towards that supreme love to which we are all called, whatever our state in life and whatever our role in the Church: our personal love for our personal Saviour. John Henry’s human affections were an integral part of his spiritual journey. His friendships brought him closer to God. . . .

Read the rest there.

Controversial Causes: Byles, Chesterton, and Sheen

Father Matthew Pittam writes about some of the more controversial causes of saints in The Catholic Herald. Of Father Thomas Byles, who gave up his place on a lifeboat to another, he comments:

Now more than a century on, the present parish priest of St Helen’s, Fr Graham Smith has been asked by the Bishop of Brentwood s to promote the opening of the Cause for Fr Byles’s beatification. Fr Smith says he considers his predecessor to be “an extraordinary man who gave his life for others”. He now hopes that people in need will invoke Fr Byles and if a miracle occurs the case can go forward to the next stage.

The possibility of Fr Byles Cause being opened has attracted criticism as some feel that his story is merely caught up in the permanent dramatic interest in the unsinkable ship. Despite this, Fr Byles is someone who largely inspires. Parallels have been drawn with St Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz, who also sacrificed his life to save another.

Of Archbishop Sheen, he notices that the controversy is not about Sheen himself but about the rivalry between two Catholic dioceses:

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints scrutinised the evidence of Fulton Sheen’s holiness and then passed their findings on to the Pope. This led to him being identified as someone who lived a life of “heroic virtue” resulting in him being given the title Venerable.

The next stage was the verification of miracles linked to situations where people had invoked Fulton Sheen. Several miracles were identified and the primary case was submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to be examined. The conclusion was that a natural cause could not be determined to explain the miracle.

Up to this point things were progressing well. The next requirement in the process was for the bodily remains of Fulton Sheen to be examined. This is when the unseemly arguments over the body of the great archbishop developed. Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria had requested to have the body exhumed and transferred to his Illinois diocese but this was refused by Cardinal Dolan of New York. The Diocese of Peoria has always claimed that it had been assured that this request would be granted and strong words were issued from both sides at the time.

Following discussion between the New York archdiocese and Rome it was decided that the Sheen Cause would now be placed in the archives of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. This effectively means that the Cause is suspended indefinitely.

And the comments about Chesterton:

Many people, influenced by his writings, have been led into full communion with the Catholic Church and this has created strong support for his Cause. His works range from the well-known Father Brown stories to hagiographies of famous saints. His best known Christian writing, Orthodoxy, is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Some supporters of Chesterton worry that opening the cause will reduce the power and accessibility of the important message that he still communicates. For instance, would the Father Brown stories remain as popular if they were by St Gilbert Keith Chesterton? It could certainly create a barrier to a more secular readership.

As Pope Francis’s interest indicates, Chesterton has a global following. The largest Chesterton Society exists in the United States of America but there are groups in Poland, Mexico and Italy. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens following the submission of the report by Canon Udris. There are reports of miracles but these have yet to be verified.

For several months, our local chapter of the American Chesterton Society has been reading through The Well and the Shallows, a 1935 collection of essays Chesterton wrote for Catholic periodicals. Next month we will discuss "Mary and the Convert", and the concluding paragraph might contradict Father Pittam's comment that Chesterton "was also not devout in the conventional sense":

It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but perhaps especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the collective unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even when not in any rabid sense enemies, give the most curious lists of things which they think make up the Catholic life; an odd assortment of objects, such as candles, rosaries, incense (they are always intensely impressed with the enormous importance and necessity of incense), vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of essentials or unessentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics, penances or the Pope. But even in their bewilderment, they do bear witness to a need which is not so nonsensical as their attempts to fulfil it; the need of somehow summing up "all that sort of thing," which does really describe Catholicism and nothing else except Catholicism. It should of course be described from within, by the definition and development of its theological first principles; but that is not the sort of need I am talking about. I mean that men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian. Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.

Read the rest of the article in The Catholic Herald here, as Father Pittam discusses other causes (Dorothy Day and Antoni Gaudi).

Can You Spell I-R-O-N-Y? Blessed Junipera Serra

From First Things, author Stephen Schwartz places the controversy over the upcoming canonization of Blessed Junipero Serra in context, noting that the moral outrage may be misplaced:

Here in California, the Pope’s intention has reignited an old controversy. Serra has been accused by self-appointed representatives of Native Americans of “genocide.” Most of this polemic is carried out in the media and rests on thin documentation. These allegations of cruelty, exploitation, and mass murder against Serra and other Franciscan and Jesuits in the Californias—Lower and Upper, Baja and Alta—echo Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry, which dominated the United States during the early period of independence. Once California became the object of a Gold Rush, Easterners had every incentive to deny the rights of the colony’s Spanish and Mexican residents, as they did later in acts of violence against “Chilean” and Chinese miners, followed by long-lasting prohibition on other Asian immigrants.

If we wish to study the history of violence against the Indians, we should turn to that later episode, the 1849 gold rush. It’s a history San Franciscans take pride in, even having a football team bearing the 49er name. Meanwhile, the newspaper for which I worked from 1989 to 1999, the San Francisco Chronicle, refuses to print references to the Washington Redskins football team. The editors argue that the name is racist, and the newspaper refers to the franchise only as “the Washington, DC football team.”

Avaricious pioneers like the 49ers committed far worse depredations against the natives than did the missionaries. Two anthropologists, Lowell J. Bean and Sylvia B. Vane, wrote in the 1978 edition of the Handbook of North American Indians: 

Some native Californians were Christianized only by force, [but] others accepted the new religion apparently because the Spanish demonstrated possession of kinds of power that appeared desirable. The acceptance of Christianity did not mean that native religious systems disappeared. Native religious ceremonies persisted alongside Catholicism, often tolerated by the priests under the guide of ‘secular’ events, but sometimes carried out secretly. The extreme decrease in native population in the last part of the nineteenth century and the concomitant ‘melting pot’ philosophy on the part of the Anglo-Americans were more destructive to native religious systems than Catholicism.

It is true that some California natives resisted the missionaries; for example, in 1775 the mission at San Diego was destroyed in a revolt by nine Indian villages. The attackers killed a Mallorcan priest, Fr. Lluís Jaume Vallespir. Serra appealed to the Spanish authorities to spare the perpetrators, however. This call for mercy was successful, and the insurgents were pardoned.

Blessed Junípero Serra stands for a period in history that is unknown by most Americans. How many people could even answer the question of the origin of the name “San Francisco”? Let us hope that his canonization will inspire further and deeper discussion of the arrival of Christianity to the American West.

To paraphrase Pope Francis, "Who is the San Francisco Chronicle to judge?" Seriously, the same trend is popping up in headlines re: Father Serra as for Thomas More during the airing of Wolf Hall: Saint or Sinner? 

When the Church beatifies or canonizes any man or woman, we do not declare that he or she is perfect according to whatever secular standards apply at the time. As G.K. Chesterton wrote "There are saints indeed in my religion: but a saint only means a man who really knows he is a sinner." (from "The High Plains" in Alarms and Discursions a collection of essays Chesterton wrote for the London Daily News from 1901 to 1913). 

A Titanic Saint? Father Thomas Byles

The BBC reports that a cause for canonization of Father Thomas Byles, one of the three Catholic priests on board the Titanic, is under consideration at the parish he served in Essex:

A campaign is under way to have the Catholic priest who stayed on RMS Titanic instead of fleeing on a lifeboat made a saint.

Father Thomas Byles, of St Helen's Church, Chipping Ongar, Essex, boarded the ship at Southampton to attend his younger brother's wedding in New York.

But when it sank in 1912 he twice refused to join a lifeboat and instead remained with passengers to pray.

The current priest at St Helen's Church said Father Byles should be canonised. . . .

His actions before perishing with 1,500 others aboard the Titanic were praised by Pope Pius X.

Father Graham Smith, current priest of St Helen's, said: "He's an extraordinary man who gave his life for others.

"We need, in very old parlance, to raise him to the altar which means that the Vatican will recognise him as a martyr of the church.

"We are hoping and praying that he will be recognised as one of the saints within our canon."

There were two other priests on the Titanic who also refused to leave their flocks, notes this 2012 story from CNS:

Three Catholic priests, including one hailed by Pope Saint Pius X as a martyr for the faith, were among the victims of the Titanic disaster remembered during its 100th anniversary on April 14-15.

All three of the European-born priests – Father Juozas Montvila of Lithuania, Father Josef Peruschitz, O.S.B. of Bavaria, and English rector Father Thomas Byles – are said to have declined lifeboats in order to offer spiritual aid to travelers who perished in the shipwreck, which claimed 1503 lives.

An eyewitness account of the 1912 sinking, published in the Jesuit journal “America,” described how “all the Catholics on board desired the assistance of priests with the greatest fervor.”

The priests led passengers in recitation of the Rosary, and “aroused those condemned to die to say acts of contrition and prepare themselves to meet the face of God.” According to the eyewitness, they were “engaged continuously giving general absolution to those who were about to die.”

Father Byles was a convert to Catholicism, having been born and raised in a Congregationalist family--his father was a minister. Byles attended Balliol College at Oxford and according to this website:

Soon after his arrival at Oxford, he was received into the Church of England. He was quite interested in the writings of the Fathers, apologetics, and ritual. He was also very ascetic, and as such, made a daily meditation and went to "confession" to an Anglican clergyman.

His brother William became a Catholic and soon Byles began to follow Blessed John Henry Newman's path:

The first sign that Roussel was again searching for the truth was in a letter he sent to his brother William on February 24, 1894. The letter began with a birthday greeting, but it ended with the following short paragraph:

"Do you know I have had some trouble lately? The fact is I find myself unable to recognize the Anglican position. I do not, however, feel myself any more satisfied with the Roman position. I have given up going to Anglican communion, and have postponed my ordination as a deacon."

His search for the truth led him, at long last, into the Catholic Church. On May 23, 1894, he was baptized sub conditione at St. Aloysius Church in Oxford by Father Joseph Martin, S.J. His sponsor was Francis Urqhart of Balliol College.

I could not find any information on the diocesan website about any formal setting up of a cause for canonization, which would require the bishop of Brenthood to appoint a postulator and request permission from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to begin the process of gathering information about the deceased.

According to the CNS story quoted above, there is another cause for canonization among the three priests:

The youngest of the three priests, Fr. Juozas Montvila, was born in 1885. Ordained in 1908, he secretly ministered to Eastern Catholics in Lithuania, whose faith had been outlawed by authorities of the Russian Empire.

Under government pressure, Fr. Montvila was forced to leave the country in order to continue his priestly ministry. He boarded the Titanic in Southhampton, England, with the intention of emigrating to the U.S.

Reports from the sinking ship recounted how the Byzantine-rite priest “served his calling to the very end.” Since then, there have been efforts toward his canonization.

King St. Henry VI?

 

Desmond Seward writes about the veneration of Henry VI in spite of his failings as a monarch in the April issue of the BBC History Magazine. According to the article, which is not available free on-line of course, pilgrimage to his tomb at Windsor rivaled and even eclipsed the pilgrimage traffic to Canterbury and St. Thomas a Becket's tomb. He was never canonized even though Henry VII supported his  cause for sainthood and Henry VIII maintained devotion to him. This blog from the College of St. George at Windsor Castle provides some of the same background as Seward highlights:

 

The tomb of Henry VI became the object of veneration and the scene of miracles of healing attracted many pilgrims.  Miracles attributed to the King included those connected with one of his treasured relics – an old hat – the King’s Medicine against Headache.   Relics were kept at Windsor until the Reformation.  The metal collecting box for alms still stands beside the tomb. . . .

Henry VI was not considered a successful king but rather a good and holy man widely regarded as a saint.   His one lasting achievement was in education, founding Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge.  At Windsor we commemorate his birthday with the ceremony of the Lilies and Roses.  Boys from Eton College attend an obit service together with representatives from Eton and King’s to lay lilies and roses on the tomb of Henry VI while special prayers are said.

“Let Thy blessing O Lord, be upon the Colleges of Thy servant King Henry VI and as Thou has appointed unto them diversities of gifts, grant then also the same spirit, so that they may together serve Thee to the welfare of Thy realm, the benefit of all men, and Thy Honour and Glory; through Jesus Christ Our Lord”.

Seward notes that one reason Henry VI was held in veneration was his mistreatment and death: not accused or tried, but simply murdered in the Tower of London. Known for his piety, leniency and charity, Henry's death seemed so undeserved. Although Henry VII may have supported his Lancastrian cousin's cause for political reasons, it seems clear that the source of devotion to Henry was lay piety--at least two men condemned to death prayed to Henry and reported that he prevented their being hanged to death by placing his hand between their necks and the rope!

Although he was a failure as a monarch, Henry VI successfully founded two great institutions: King's College, Cambridge (The King's College of Our Lady and St. Nicholas at Cambridge), and Eton (The King's College of Our Lady at Eton besides Windsor), both in 1441. Seward also describes Henry's devotional life, as he was dedicated to spiritual reading, prayer, and monastic retreat--it seems he might have been a better monk than monarch.

I look forward to the May issue of the BBC History Magazine as it will feature an article by Jessie Childs about recusants during Elizabeth I's reign, based upon her book, God's Traitors!