Daily Mass - feast day of the English Martyrs

Mass was offered this morning for the peaceful repose of the soul of Anthony Leckey (+), may he be forever blessed in the Risen Lord. We must also send our best wishes to our neighbouring parish in the deanery, at Alvaston, on their parish feast day. 

When I was a seminary student in London, I used to range out on foot several times a week across the West End and north to Regent Park. That was my favourite walk: Chelsea to Regent's Park, via Hyde Park and Baker Street. One place I often passed old Tyburn square, which is now called Marble Arch. On a small traffic island is a circular stone marking the locations of the old three-post gallows called the Tyburn Tree. You can see a depiction of it in the photograph by Fr. Lawrence OP of a well-known icon of several of the English Martyrs, that band of Catholic men and women who dared to stand up to the increasingly-intolerant protestant English government, and paid the ultimate price for it. Now the phrase 'English Martyrs,' I believe, refers to a particular set of forty persons canonised by the Holy Father Paul VI in 1970, but we may consider a more general number (the Holy Father John Paul II beatified a further few in 1987) as we meditate upon that terrible time, particularly the reign of HM Queen Elizabeth I, when the Catholic Church in England was systematically demolished.

A few weeks ago, as we came up to the end of March and the re-dedication of England as the Dowry of Mary (organised by the Shrine at Walsingham), as my own personal way of honouring the Catholic England that ended abruptly in the sixteenth century, I ran through the Church's calendar of feasts and memorials and pulled out the names of every English Saint I could find. You may find that list on the diocesan website. The most distressing feature of this list is that most of it comes from the latter half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century; at no other time in the history of England was the Church so tortured. And that says very much for the men and women who were dragged to Tyburn Square in London and were executed there, often barbarously, for their adherence to what they called the Old Religion, for the new religion of the government was, in fact, a new religion in comparison. In the north, York too had a Tyburn, and there are some names in the list who were killed in other places, but London and York were principally the sites that were sanctified by the blood of Catholic martyrs.

Today we honour those martyrs. Let us love dearly the things they loved, above all Holy Mass and the Rosary of our Lady. It would be a marvellous thing to be able to look at our martyrs and recognise in them the same light that burns within us, to realise that we love the Church as much as they did, and to realise that we may perhaps be prepared to give up as much as they did for what they loved.