Suffering under persecution – the example of the English Martyrs
Lives of the Saints can sometimes be challenging to read, seeming too distant and foreign to our own. But the English martyrs like Campion and More are our own kin, and almost our contemporaries.
This article was first published in February 2020 in the magazine Calx Mariae and is republished here with permission. The author did not know at that time that within weeks of writing, the power of the state would be turned again to the suppression of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and that we would need once more to draw on the example of the English martyrs and their immense love for the Church and for the true good of the English nation, the precious Dowry of Our Lady.
Introduction
One of the great delusions of the modern age is the presumption that human beings today are in some way “better”, more “enlightened”, more “moral” than people in the past, who were were cruel, or ignorant, or incapable of seeing things which are obvious to “modern man”.
This attitude reveals itself in the frequent use of phrases like “in this day and age” or “in the 21st century”, which carry with them the implication that we are living at the peak of human achievement and that, simply by virtue of the calendar date, things must be better now than in the past.
Another way in which this attitude may be revealed is in the misuse of terms such as “medieval” to imply cruelty or brutality. This is truly absurd given that the modern age is by far the most brutal and bloodthirsty period in human history. Neither the almost unimaginable death tolls – military and civilian – of modern warfare, nor the millions of innocent victims of ideologies such as Nazism and Communism, nor repeated genocides across the globe, seem have the power to shake “modern man” out of his delusional complacency.
This is seen most clearly in the case of abortion. Abortion is the world’s leading cause of death. In 2019 there were an estimated 42.4 million abortions worldwide. More than one billion unborn children have been killed by abortion since the the early twentieth century. Yet “modern man” persists in believing he is uniquely enlightened and uniquely moral.
Part of the remedy for this delusion is reading and learning about the past, because as soon as anybody begins to truly study the past, with openness to whatever one may find, the unchanging nature of human beings becomes clear.
Human nature is exactly the same now as it has ever been. Reading the works that previous generations have left us, listening to the music they have composed, engaging with the art they have created, should make us aware of this, but all too often the same prejudices remain.
For us Catholics too it can sometimes be hard to grasp the full humanity of the saints and martyrs of the past and the way in which they fully shared the same human nature as us. We have very little biographical information about many saints, and this can make it hard us to see the real man or woman behind the saintly image.
The lives of the saints
John Henry Newman wrote of the way in which the lives of the saints can be often more treatises on certain virtues, than biographies which give us a sense of a real person, and how the action of grace transformed and sanctified them:
“An almsgiving here, an instance of meekness there, a severity of penance, a round of religious duties,—all these things humble me, instruct me, improve me; I cannot desire anything better of their kind; but they do not necessarily coalesce into the image of a person. From such works I do but learn to pay devotion to an abstract and typical perfection under a certain particular name; I do not know more of the real Saint who bore it than before… This seems to me, to tell the truth, a sort of pantheistic treatment of the Saints.
I ask something more than to stumble upon the disjecta membra of what ought to be a living whole. I take but a secondary interest in books which chop up a Saint into chapters of faith, hope, charity, and the cardinal virtues. They are too scientific to be devotional. They have their great utility, but it is not the utility which they profess. They do not manifest a Saint, they mince him into spiritual lessons.”1
Newman commented that this can be avoided when we have surviving writings – particularly personal writings – of a saint.
This is the case with some of the English martyrs whose writings can give us real insights into the operations of grace working to sanctify real men.