Three Things for Friday

Happy St. Patrick's Day! The real St. Patrick, bishop and evangelist, was not focused on green beer, corned beef and cabbage, parades, and just being Irish. He was focused on Jesus Christ:

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth and His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom. . . .

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

When Blessed John Henry Newman paid tribute in The Idea of the University to how much Catholics in England and Ireland owed to the care of the various popes--since it was Pope Pius IX who was encouraging the foundation of a Catholic University of Ireland--he highlighted St. Patrick's achievement:

I cannot forget how it was from Rome that the glorious St. Patrick was sent to Ireland, and did a work so great that he could not have a successor in it, the sanctity and learning and zeal and charity which followed on his death being but the result of the one impulse which he gave. I cannot forget how, in no long time, under the fostering breath of the Vicar of Christ, a country of heathen superstitions became the very wonder and asylum of all people,—the wonder by reason of its knowledge, sacred and profane, and the asylum of religion, literature and science, when chased away from the continent by the barbarian invaders. I recollect its hospitality, freely accorded to the pilgrim; its volumes munificently presented to the foreign student; and the prayers, the blessings, the holy rites, the solemn chants, which sanctified the while both giver and receiver.

St, Patrick, pray for us!

Also, I wanted to let you know that my review of God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (by Jessie Childs) was published in the March/April 2017 issue of the Saint Austin Review. The cover is a beautiful painting of the Crucifixion by Philippe de Champaigne, the 17th century French artist and portraitist.

And, my latest for the National Catholic Register blog roll is on the use of Latin in Latin Rite English Masses during Lent!

The Merton College Choir at St. Peter's

From Vatican Radio, describing the Anglican Choral Evensong celebrated on Monday, March 13 in Rome:

An ecumenical milestone was marked in the Vatican on Monday as a traditional Anglican Choral Evensong was celebrated for the first time in St Peter’s Basilica.

Cardinal Angelo Comastri, Archpriest of the Basilica, gave permission for the historic event during meetings with Archbishop David Moxon, Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome.

The renowned choir of Merton College, Oxford came to sing music written at the time of the Reformation, as well as contemporary compositions and well-loved Anglican hymns. . . .

Specifically, the choir sang works by William Byrd and used an historical Book of Common Prayer service:

Music by the great English composer William Byrd filled the basilica, as well as some more contemporary works, while the words of the liturgy and readings were those of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

The Anglican News website points out that this musical exchange began with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI:

Merton College Choir followed in the footsteps of Westminster Abbey choir, which has sung previously in Rome with the choir of the Sistine Chapel – a collaboration that has grown out of closer ties between the two traditions, in particular following Pope Benedict XV1’s (sic) visit to London in September 2010.

The date was selected to be closest to the date of Pope St. Gregory the Great's original feast day of March 12, the date of his death in 604. Because that date so often falls in Lent, his feast was moved to September 3, the date of his episcopal consecration in 590. After Evensong, there was a procession to the tomb of St. Gregory. Of course, St. Gregory sent St. Augustine of Canterbury to Kent in 597.

Pope St. Gregory the Great, pray for us! St. Augustine of Canterbury, pray for us!

From The Reformation to the Present Day

AN Wilson reviews Roy Hattersley's The Catholics: The Church and its People in Britain and Ireland, from the Reformation to the Present Day for The Catholic Herald:

So, Hattersley starts with two advantages. One is his own personal involvement with the subject. The second is the fact that this is a history with a beginning and an end. The Church he is describing, and the story which begins with the heroism of the recusants in Tudor times and takes in the romance of Jacobitism and the coming of the 19th century, has really come to an end. Of course, the Church itself has not come to an end – there is still a pope, there are still sacraments and saints. But Catholics really are – more or less – like everyone else. One senses Hattersley’s wistful sadness at this.

He devotes far more time to English recusant and penal times than he does to the 19th century or the modern Church. The story starts with the sacrifice of the martyrs. A gentle intelligence, Hattersley prefers the self-deprecating scholar Fisher to the “celebrity” More, but sees how absolutely key their martyrdom was in inspiring the Catholics to remain true to their faith. His account of the arrest and execution of Campion is haunting. He does not echo the late Auberon Waugh, who called annually upon the pope to canonise Guy Fawkes; but then Hattersley is a distinguished parliamentarian. The martyrdom of Oliver Plunkett in 1681 is told in a way that makes you ashamed to be English.

The dukes of Norfolk do not get much of a look-in to Hattersley’s story. But the 18th century is explored with a pleasing combination of sensitivity and gusto: Bishop Challoner, “the Forty-five” and the Gordon Riots. Was this English Catholicism’s Golden Age?

To put it another way, was the 19th century, seemingly a season of the famous Second Spring, actually sowing the seeds of modern British Catholics’ problems? Wiseman is affectionately evoked here, but did he do the Catholics any favours by setting up an elaborate system of dioceses and (quite often rather cruddy) cathedrals?

Please read the rest there. From the publisher:

The story of Catholicism in Britain from the Reformation to the present day, from a master of popular history - 'a first-class storyteller' The Times

Throughout the three hundred years that followed the Act of Supremacy – which, by making Henry VIII head of the Church, confirmed in law the breach with Rome – English Catholics were prosecuted, persecuted and penalised for the public expression of their faith. Even after the passing of the emancipation acts Catholics were still the victims of institutionalised discrimination.

The first book to tell the story of the Catholics in Britain in a single volume, The Catholics includes much previously unpublished information. It focuses on the lives, and sometimes deaths, of individual Catholics – martyrs and apostates, priests and laymen, converts and recusants. It tells the story of the men and women who faced the dangers and difficulties of being what their enemies still call ‘Papists’. It describes the laws which circumscribed their lives, the political tensions which influenced their position within an essentially Anglican nation and the changes in dogma and liturgy by which Rome increasingly alienated their Protestant neighbours – and sometime even tested the loyalty of faithful Catholics.

The survival of Catholicism in Britain is the triumph of more than simple faith. It is the victory of moral and spiritual unbending certainty. Catholicism survives because it does not compromise. It is a characteristic that excites admiration in even a hardened atheist.

I browsed the Kindle sample was not as impressed as Wilson by Hattersley's "bona fides"--his personal connections to the Church are weak and confused. He does seem to admire the Church rather in spite of himself and the harshness and rigidity he sees in the Church. Hattersley seems to accept that lack of compromise and the "spiritual unbending certainty" as the source of strength for the Catholic martyrs of England and the Church through the centuries. Since he is an atheist--"a hardened atheist" he recognizes the strength he values in himself as the source of the Church's survival. It also means that he cannot be accused of special pleading. If I received a review copy of this book I'd be interested in reading it as a Catholic looking from the outside in, when I am usually looking at Church history from the inside in. The perspective is intriguing.

Music and History: 1554-1555

From Gallicantus and Gabriel Crouch comes another historically themed CD of music at the Court during Queen Mary I's phantom pregnancy of 1554-1555:

Long-awaited news of a Tudor royal birth winged its way to London on 30 April 1555. A male heir had been born: a pledge of dynastic fertility after decades of royal stillbirths, miscarriages and marital misadventures. This was surely a sign of God’s pleasure with Mary I (1516-1558) and a vindication of her mission to restore Catholic religion, reverse the doctrinal experiments of the previous two decades, and return England to its historic place in Europe. The bells of London accordingly rang out while Te Deum laudamus, the traditional hymn of thanksgiving, was sung by the city’s choirs.

The festivities came to an abrupt end on 1 May. Yesterday’s news had been a mere rumour: there was to be no royal birth, not yet at least. ‘It turned out otherwise to the pleasure of God’, wrote the merchant-tailor Henry Machyn, assuring himself that the birth would happen ‘whenever it pleases God’. At thirty-nine years old Queen Mary was superannuated by sixteenth-century obstetric standards, but her pregnancy was generally deemed credible and she had not yet come to term by 1 May. The summer months drew on, but still no news. Long after the original due date, Mary eventually gave up hope, withdrawing from Hampton Court to Oatlands Palace in the first days of August.

There would be no apotheosis in 1555, but it had been tantalizingly imminent. This disc explores the musical traces of an extraordinary year of hopes raised and dashed. The music performed here resonates with the circumstances of the mid-1550s, even if some of the items were composed outside Mary’s own reign; some pieces stemmed from the royal ceremonies in which Mary participated as queen; and some of the music sung here can be directly tied to the specific events of 1554-5, including a newly-reconstructed Litany which was performed during Mary’s assumed pregnancy. The viewpoint shifts from the streets of London and its suburbs, through the ceremonial grandeur of the royal palaces and their chapels, to the intimacy of the queen’s birthing chamber.

You may listen to samples here and read the entire booklet here. Several of the compositions are by John Sheppard, and Hyperion offers this biography:

John Sheppard (c1515–1558) is thought to have been a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral in or around 1530, although information supporting this theory has proved difficult to come by. By Michaelmas 1543 he is known to have been Informator Choristarum (director of music) at Magdalen College Oxford, where he is reputed to have blotted his copybook through various misdeeds. On further investigation, this mistaken allegation has arisen from a misreading of the college’s records: it was Richard Sheppar (and not Sheppard) who was the culprit. Sheppard later appears in the records of the Chapel Royal (from 1547).

Sadly, much of Sheppard’s music has been lost. His compositions survive in partbooks at Christ Church Oxford, and testify to the elaborate style of church music from the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558). . . . 

He is best known today for his Media Vita ("In the midst of life"), an appropriate antiphon for Lent.

A Hymn for Lent from Herebert

Eleanor Parker--the medievalist and blogger, not the actress--writes for The Catholic Herald about William Herebert of Oxford and his hymn translations:

Herebert’s name is not well known today, but his poems, beautiful and distinctive in their own right, also represent an important milestone for English Catholicism: he was one of the first people to turn the Latin hymns of the Church into English poetry.

We don’t have many details about Herebert’s life, but he was probably born in Herefordshire around 1270. He was educated at the universities of Paris and Oxford, where his contemporaries included Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and in 1317 he became master of the Franciscan house in Oxford.

He was evidently a learned man, and his poems show that he gave careful thought to the difficult question of how best to express complex religious ideas in his own language.

Herebert’s poems survive in a manuscript book written in his own hand, noted down along with his Latin sermons and other texts useful for the medieval preacher. There are 23 short poems, arranged roughly according to the cycle of the liturgical year. Some are original compositions, but most are translations or reworkings of Latin or French texts, freely adapted into English. They include the first English verse translations of some well-known hymns, such as Veni Creator Spiritus and the Palm Sunday hymn All glory, laud and honour.

You could go to her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, and see several posts about William Herebert, including this one about a Lenten hymn:

This is a Middle English translation of the Lent hymn 'Audi, benigne Conditor', by the Franciscan friar William Herebert (c.1270-1333):

Lustne, mylde Wrouhte, oure bones wyth wepinge
In þys holy uastinge, vourti dawes lestynge.
Holy secher of monnes þouht, þou wost oure brotelnesse;
To hem þat beth yturnd to þe graunte vorȝyfnesse.
Meche, vorsoht, we habbeht agult; vorȝyf hem þat knoulecheth.
To worshype of þyn oune nome, to sunvol mon be leche.
Graunte ous pyne wyþouteuorth þe body wyth vastinge,
Þat oure gost wyþynneuorth veste vrom sunnynge.
Graunte ous, Holy Trinite, þat in Godhede art on,
Þat þe ȝyft of leyntes vast notfol boe to mon. Amen.

That is:

Hear, merciful Creator, our prayers with weeping
In this holy fasting, forty days lasting.
Holy searcher of man’s thought, thou knowest our brittleness; [frailty]
To them who are turned towards thee, grant forgiveness.
Much, truly, we have sinned; forgive them that acknowledge it.
For the honour of thine own name, be physician to sinful man.
Grant us so to mortify the body outwardly with fasting
That our souls inwardly may fast from sinning.
Grant us, Holy Trinity, who in Godhead art one,
That the gift of Lent’s fast may be beneficial to man. Amen.

Please read the rest there. She posts about her Catholic Herald article here, and promises more poems and hymns from William Herebert!

Lenten Posts: Saints and the Rosary

I haven't kept you up to date on my posts at the National Catholic Register (unless you've been clicking on the Other Publications tab and finding them yourself). Last Monday (March 6), they posted my reflection on the liturgical calendar, especially how the saints's feast days are effected during Lent:

Except for St. Joseph’s, all of the feasts of the saints during the 40 days of Lent are demoted to Commemorations—even St. Patrick’s (outside of Ireland, where it is a Holyday of Obligation). St. Joseph is so special that his feast is a Solemnity, and since March 19 is the Third Sunday of Lent in 2017, his feast has been moved to Monday, March 20. Otherwise, the penitential season of Lent takes precedence over the feasts of the saints. We often refer to a saint’s “feast” day even though the Church has a hierarchy to honor the saints, Our Lady, and especially Our Lord, in different ways. We might be tempted to think that it doesn’t matter, but the Church has reasons for these distinctions. . . .

Violet and White

The USCCB issues a liturgical calendar each year with notes about the adjustments made because of the date of Easter or just how dates fall on the Gregorian calendar vis-à-vis the Liturgical and Sanctoral calendars. When you look at the months of March and April this year until Palm Sunday, the liturgical color designated is Violet nearly every day, except for White on March 20 and March 25 (and the option of Rose on the Fourth Sunday of Lent). Looking at the calendar page in the March issue of Magnificat, you see the words Lenten Weekday predominating with the commemoration of the saints relegated to italics in the righthand column. During Mass for those Lenten Weekdays when there is a saint to be commemorated only the Collect for the saint will be used and the prayers and readings will be for the season.

Please read the rest there--and share if you like!

Just in time for the Second Sunday of Lent with the Transfiguration of Christ as the Gospel, the Register has published my post on praying the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary during Lent:

When Pope St. John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary in 2002, there’s no indication that he saw them as Lenten devotions. He proposed them in an Apostolic Letter on Oct. 10 that year “to bring out fully the Christological depth of the Rosary” by including “the mysteries of Christ's public ministry between his Baptism and his Passion”. In the almost 15 years since their introduction, the Luminous Mysteries have been included in most Rosary devotionals and meditation aids.

Some have resisted the option to use these mysteries for various reasons, some of which Pope John Paul anticipated in his letter: Mary, the Mother of God, is absent in all but one of the mysteries (the second); the addition of five more mysteries breaks the linkage between the 150 Aves and the 150 Psalms, and one of the mysteries is termed hard to meditate upon (the third). The five Luminous Mysteries are: 1) The Baptism of Jesus; 2) The Marriage Feast of Cana; 3) The Proclamation of the Kingdom; 4) The Transfiguration; 5) The Institution of the Eucharist. Pope St. John Paul II provided some guidance for meditation on each of these mysteries in his Apostolic Letter, noting that “we contemplate important aspects of the person of Christ as the definitive revelation of God” because “each of these mysteries is a revelation of the Kingdom now present in the very person of Jesus”.

A Luminous Lent

For Lent this year, I decided to alternate between the Luminous Mysteries and the Sorrowful Mysteries, starting on Ash Wednesday with the Sorrowful. Each of the Luminous Mysteries lends itself to a Lenten interpretation.

Please read the rest there--and Happy Transfiguration Sunday! The illustration is Carl Heinrich Bloch's (1834-1890), “The Transfiguration of Christ” from the Register post.

The Martyr's Beads II: Blessed Thomas Atkinson

Coming the day after St. John Ogilvie's feast, and with another connection to the Rosary, I wanted to highlight Blessed Thomas Atkinson, who was executed on March 11, 1616 in York. He was 70 years old and had been serving in England as a missionary priest since 1588:

Thomas Atkinson, of Yorkshire, England, studied for the priesthood in Reims, France, where he was subsequently ordained in 1588 around the age of forty-two. Returning to England, he traveled about on foot to minister to his fellow Catholics, becoming a special friend of the poor among them. It was only after breaking a leg that the indefatigable priest resorted to traveling by horse instead. His labors in the service of persecuted Catholics became so well known that, to escape arrest by the Protestant authorities, he could only journey safely by night. In the end, he was betrayed by an informer and captured while staying at the home of a Catholic family. Then about seventy, Father Atkinson was led to prison together with the couple that had hosted him, and their children. The “incriminating evidence” found by the government officials in the priest’s possession consisted of Rosary beads and the text of an indulgence. Condemned to death by drawing and quartering, Father Atkinson is said to have faced death “with wonderful patience, courage, and constancy, and signs of great comfort.”

As Nathan Mitchell notes in The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism, the Rosary--the beads of the Rosary--had become a marker "of recusant Catholic identity" and the beads "embodied what it meant to be a practicing Catholic in a time of religious strife and persecution." (p.5) Of course, one does not have to have a set of Rosary beans in hand to pray the Rosary and meditate on the life of Jesus and His Mother, one could use one's fingers! Father Atkinson's possession of an indulgence, which might have been--I don't find this detail in the sources I've looked--a papal document, would have been even more condemning for the court. In his book, Champions of the Rosary, Father Donald Calloway mentions that Father Atkinson was encouraging enrollment in the Confraternity of the Rosary and the the indulgence document he possessed gave details of indulgences obtained by praying the Rosary. Sources I've found also do not indicate whether or not Father Atkinson was offered James I's Oath of Allegiance.

Father Atkinson was beatified by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1987 as one of the Eight-five Martyrs of England and Wales. Obviously, as he had served his Catholic flock quietly for almost three decades he was no danger to the state. But he was captured during a period of James I's reign when fear of Catholicism was heightened and the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, was much in favor of persecuting Catholic priests. I also could not discover what happened to the family arrested with him. They may have been held in prison for some time, but James I did not want to make martyrs of lay people. Except for at the beginning of his reign in the transition from Elizabeth I, laymen or women who aided priests were not executed as often as they were during Elizabeth I's reign. They were fined and imprisoned, but not executed.

Henri Daniel-Rops: A Fight for God

I am reading A Fight for God: 1870-1939 by Henri Daniel-Rops. First he sets out all the dangers to the Catholic Church in that period: atheism, Communism, revolution, secularization, and interference by the State in Church administration (Bismarck's Kulturkampf, etc). Then he examines the personalities and characteristics of the four popes who confronted these problems and others: Pope Leo XIII, Pope Pius X, Pope Benedict XV, and Pope Pius XI. I've read those parts of the book and his history of Pope Leo XIII's reign. I'm reading about Pope Pius X now. This is the penultimate book in his ten volume series on Church History.

Henri Daniel-Rops described his career thus:

Perhaps this is a good time to explain how it happened that while I was an essayist and novelist up to 1939, I then found myself orientated in an entirely new direction, that of religious history. Here again, it was a providential introduction to someone that changed the course of my writing career. In January of 1941, a friend of mine, the historian Octave Aubry, asked me if I would care to write a volume of history for a series he was editing. From the outset I was very interested, but I was uncertain what subject I should choose. This was at the time when the Nazis had forced the Jews to wear the yellow star to distinguish them from the other races. That had made me very angry, especially when I thought of all the Jews who were my friends. And so my answer to Octave Aubry was: "I accept, on condition that I may write a history of Israel." He immediately agreed to my choice of subject.

I must say here that I had long regretted the fact that in our schools we study the Greek and Roman classics but neglect the important if not basic classic of our western civilization, the Bible. At last I was offered the opportunity of making an extensive study of it. And so I wrote l'Histoire Saints (Sacred History). It was published in Paris on July 1, 1943, just twenty days before the Nazis arrived, when it was immediately confiscated by the Gestapo and the plates destroyed, without doubt because Hitler recognized himself in Nabuchodonosor!

From that time on, this historical series became my constant preoccupation. Begun on January 19, 1941--on my fortieth birthday--this series is still in progress and, God willing, it will continue for at least five more years. If anyone had mentioned to me in the beginning that I would write seven thousand pages, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have hesitated to undertake such a task. But, as I said, it was Providence that prompted me; one is guided thus.

Preoccupation, did I say . . . . After l'Histoire Sainte came Jesus et Son Temps, the success of which greatly Surprised me: actually in France alone 400,000 copies have been sold mid the work has been translated into fourteen languages.

Having written of Jesus, was it possible not to be moved to write of the work born of the Son of God and which is His visible sign upon earth, the Church? And so L'Histoire de I'Eglise du Christ came slowly into being. Without being too egotistical, may I say that the response which I have received for this work has been most encouraging for me in the long and arduous writing of the series. I would like at this time to especially acknowledge the kindness of the late Pope Pius XII who often asked me about my writing and who was most generous in counseling me, and also His Holiness Pope John XXIII who likewise conferred a papal honor upon me.

Let me repeat that I am enthused with my work as well as completely immersed in it. In my future there was to be a little book, Missa Est. Under the title of This is the Mass, thanks to the promotion of my American publisher, Hawthorn Books, and the kindly cooperation of the Most Reverend Bishop Fulton Sheen, it has also been very well received.

And there was to come the founding of my monthly review, Ecclesia [similar to The Catholic Digest] in 1949 and so now is more than twelve years old. There was to come, too, L 'Encyclopedie du Catholique au XXeme siècle (The Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism), "Je sais, Je crois." For me to conceive, to organize and to launch this last work fulfilled one of my highest ambitions.

And so you see the apple tree continues to produce its apples. Of what value are these apples it is not for the tree to say. But how can one do other, dear God, than try to produce good fruit, keeping in mind the fig tree of the Gospels which, when it was found to be barren, was fit only to be cast into the fire?

But I have already spoken too long about myself. Nevertheless this backward glance, which I have been asked to make, has enabled me to take stock of what I have tried to do. And I feel that my work will not have been in vain if the reader, after pouring over so many pages, will find in them just one sentence which will influence him for eternity, one sentence which will move him to forgive and forget all that is worthless in them and so destined to disappear some day one sentence which will send him back to the words of the Evangelist who summed it all up: 'To whom shall we go, Lord? You alone have the words of eternal life."

More about Daniel-Rops and his popularity in mid-twentieth century Catholic France here. In the USA, his series on Church history was published by Dent Dutton in hardcover and then by Doubleday Image in paperback.

Don't Forget: St. Ogilvie on EWTN Radio!

If you listen to EWTN Radio early in the morning, the Son Rise Morning Show has an hour broadcast from 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Central time/6:00 to 7:00 a.m. Eastern! The Son Rise Morning Show will include my segment with Anna Mitchell to tell the story of St. John Ogilvie this morning during that hour today! Listen live here.

Here's a prayer for the intercession of St. John Ogilvie, SJ:

God our Father, fountain of all blessing, We thank you for the countless graces that come to us in answer to the prayers of your saints. With great confidence we ask you in the name of your Son and through the prayers of St John Ogilvie to help us in all our needs.

Lord Jesus, you chose your servant St John Ogilvie to be your faithful witness to the spiritual authority of the chief shepherd of your flock. Keep your people always one in mind and heart, In communion with Benedict our Pope, and all the bishops of your Church.

Holy Spirit, you gave St John Ogilvie light to know your truth, wisdom to defend it, and courage to die for it. Through his prayers and example bring our country into the unity and peace of Christ’s kingdom. Amen.

More details about this great Scottish saint and martyr here from yesterday's post!

The Martyr's Beads: St. John Ogilvie

In honor of St. John Ogilvie, SJ, I'll be on the Son Rise Morning today and tomorrow with Annie Mitchell to discuss the life and death of this great Scottish martyr: this morning at 7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central during one of the two local Ohio/Kentucky hours and tomorrow during the national EWTN hour.

The 400th anniversary of St. John Ogilvie's martyrdom was celebrated two years ago in Glasgow. While his mission to Scotland was more difficult than he thought it would be--he left to figure out what to do with his Jesuit superiors and then returned--at the end, through his martyrdom, and his Rosary, he effected a conversion. One of the spectators at his execution was moved first by Ogilvie's dignity in facing a horrible death and then by the seeming coincidence that the martyr's Rosary beads fell on him when he threw them into the crowd.

Baron John ab Eckersdorff described what happened to him on March 10, 1615 in Glasgow, Scotland:

I was on my travels through England and Scotland as it is the custom of our nobility being a mere stripling, and not having the faith. I happened to be in Glasgow the day Father Ogilvie was led forth to the gallows, and it is impossible for me to describe his lofty bearing in meeting death. His farewell to the Catholics was his casting into their midst, from the scaffold, his rosary beads just before he met his fate. That rosary, thrown haphazard, struck me on the breast in such wise that I could have caught it in the palm of my hand; but there was such a rush and crush of the Catholics to get hold of it, that unless I wished to run the risk of being trodden down, I had to cast it from me. Religion was the last thing I was then thinking about: it was not in my mind at all; yet from that moment I had no rest. Those rosary beads had left a wound in my soul; go where I would I had no peace of mind. Conscience was disturbed, and the thought would haunt me: why did the martyr's rosary strike me, and not another? For years I asked myself this question it followed me about everywhere. At last conscience won the day. I became a Catholic; I abandoned Calvinism; and this happy change I attribute to the martyr's beads, and to no other cause those beads which, if I had them now, gold could not tempt me to part with; and if gold could purchase them, I should not spare it.

Pope Paul VI canonized St. John Ogilvie in 1976. The Catholic News Agency recounts his mission to Scotland, his difficulties, and his torture:

John greatly desired to go back to his native country and encourage its return to the Catholic Church. He served for a time as a priest in France, while requesting to be sent back to Scotland. Others within his order made it clear to him that such a mission would be dangerous and unlikely to produce much fruit. In 1613, however, John obtained the assignment he desired.

He soon discovered the truth of the warnings he had received from other Jesuits, about the difficulty of Catholic evangelization in Scotland. Many members of the upper classes were not interested in returning to the Church, though he did carry out pastoral work among a largely poor population of Scots who had kept the faith. After a period in England he returned to France, seeking directions on how to proceed in light of his lack of success.

The French Jesuits ordered John back to Scotland, however, where he resumed his ministry to the underground Church as well as the smaller number of people interested in converting. His arrest came about when one potential “convert” turned out to be an informer, who had John arrested and interrogated.

The first criminal accusation St. John Ogilvie faced was that of celebrating Mass within the King’s realm. Unwilling to incriminate himself, he suffered two months of imprisonment. An iron bar was attached to his feet to prevent him from moving in his cell. Despite this ordeal, he strongly resisted pressure to give evidence against other Scottish Catholics.

Severe torture was then inflicted on John. His hair and fingernails were pulled out, and for a period of nine days he was prevented from sleeping by continual stabbing with sharp stakes. His jailers beat him, flung him to the floor of his cell, and shouted in his ears. Nothing, however, could make him renounce his faith or betray his Catholic countrymen to the authorities.

John’s tormentors were impressed by his fortitude, and by the surprising sense of humor that he showed in the face of the brutal punishments. But they could not spare his life, unless the Jesuit priest gave an acceptable response to a series of questions provided by King James I. John declared his loyalty to the king, but steadfastly rejected James’ claim to supremacy over the Church in religious matters. The priest was eventually convicted on a charge of high treason.

Attempts to ply John with bribery – in exchange for his return to Protestantism, and his betrayal of fellow Catholics – continued even as he was being led to his execution. His own defiant words are recorded: for the Catholic faith, he said, he would "willingly and joyfully pour forth even a hundred lives. Snatch away that one which I have from me, and make no delay about it, but my religion you will never snatch away from me!"

Asked whether he was afraid to die, the priest replied: “I fear death as much as you do your dinner.” 

He had been born into a Calvinist family, but had converted to Catholicism while visiting France, studying for the priesthood, becoming a Jesuit, and being ordained in Paris.