The English Martyrs

Today we celebrate the feast of the English Martyrs, and call to mind not only the forty priests, religious and lay men and women canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970, but the further two hundred and forty-two declared ‘blessed’ and those many unknown Catholics who died defending the faith in a period of around 150 years following the Reformation.

Shrine of the English Martyrs, Holy Cross, Leicester

For most of us practising our faith in this country today, the idea of laying down our lives for the supremacy of the Pope, the unity of the Church, and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, is a remote concept. True the Church here has its struggles – where does it not – but few of us would worry about persecution unto death and it is for this very reason that today’s feast is of such importance. It reminds us of the selfless sacrifice made by so many that the faith might live in England through the shedding of their blood, and of the continuing sacrifice made by so many in others in less tolerant areas of the world today.

Much has been written on the sufferings of these martyrs; they often endured trials that are difficult for us to dwell upon today and yet their sacrifice was not in vain. Quoting Tertullian, Pope Paul VI in his homily at the canonisation of the forty martyrs wrote; “‘The blood of Christians is the seed that is sown.’ As it was with the shedding of Christ’s own blood, so it is with the sacrificial offering of her Martyrs in union with His: a source of life and of spiritual fecundity for the Church and the entire world.”

As it was then, so it is today; the sacrifice of the martyrs, united to the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, goes far beyond the geographical constraints of nation states and the limits of their own time, to provide a rich source of spiritual life and nourishment upon which the Church can draw in times of peace and travail.