Robert
Southwell. Frontispiece to St. Peter's Complaint. Line engraving by Matthaus Greuter (Greuther) or
Paul Maupin, published 1608. http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/southwell.htm
Saint Robert Southwell Prêtre de la Compagnie de
Jésus et martyr en Angleterre (+ 1595) Né en 1561 dans le Norfolk en Angleterre, poète jésuite ayant étudié en France et à Rome, ordonné en 1585, il devient préfet des études du collège anglais de Rome. De retour en Angleterre en 1586 comme missionnaire au moment de la persécution, il est arrêté en 1592, torturé, il est jugé en 1595 et condamné à être pendu à Tyburn. Canonisé le 25 octobre 1970 par le pape Paul VI pour représenter les catholiques martyrisés en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles entre 1535 et 1679.
À Londres, en 1595, saint Robert Southwell, prêtre de la Compagnie de Jésus et
martyr. Après huit ans de ministère clandestin dans la ville et les alentours,
auteur de divers ouvrages et de poésies spirituelles, il fut arrêté, emprisonné
à la Tour de Londres, soumis au moins neuf fois à la torture et, après trois
ans, condamné à mort comme prêtre et pendu à Tyburn. Martyrologe romain SOURCE : http://nominis.cef.fr/contenus/saint/11469/Saint-Robert-Southwell.html Saint Robert
Southwell, prêtre et martyr Aristocrate né en 1561
dans le Norfolk, Robert est envoyé au collège en exil de Douai, bien que son
père se soit adapté à la nouvelle situation religieuse anglaise. De là, il
entre au collège de Clermont, à Paris où il rencontre des jésuites parmi
lesquels Thomas Darbyshire. Il demande à entrer dans la Compagnie de Jésus,
mais comme on diffère de le recevoir, il se rend à pied à Rome où il est admis
dans la Compagnie en 1578. Il y est ordonné en 1584 et, malgré son jeune âge,
envoyé pour la mission anglaise dès 1586. Pendant six ans et sachant bien qu’il
risque la peine de mort, il déploie un ministère très actif à partir de
Londres, diffusant anonymement lettres et poèmes qui exercèrent une réelle
influence sur la littérature de l’époque. Echappant sans cesse à la vigilance
de ceux qui le traquent, il devient une légende vivante. Finalement découvert
en juin 1592, il est incarcéré à la tour de Londres puis transféré à la prison
de Newgate. Il est si cruellement torturé pendant trois ans que son père
implore vainement la mort de son fils auprès de la reine Elisabeth. Enfin
condamné à mort le 20 février 1595, il est conduit le lendemain à Tyburn Hill
où il est autorisé à parler à la foule : il déclare alors prier pour le
salut de la reine et de son pays. Il est pendu alors qu’il recommande son âme à
Dieu et lorsque sa tête est brandie devant la foule, personne n’ose crier
"traître !", selon l’usage. Saint Robert Southwell
Traducteur: Guy Verhaegen SOURCE : http://www.sjweb.info/saintsBio.cfm?LangTop=2&Publang=2&SaintID=368
Saint
Robert Southwell, S.J. (1561-1595). 25 October as
one of the Forty
Martyrs of England and Wales 29 October as
one of the Martyrs
of Douai 1 December as
one of the Martyrs
of the Venerable English College Profile Raised in a piously Catholic family. Educated at Douai and
at Paris, France.
Joined the Jesuits in 1580.
Prefect of studies in the English
College at Rome, Italy. Ordained in 1584.
Returned to England in 1586 to
minister to covert Catholics,
working with Henry Garnett. Chaplain to Ann Howard, wife of Saint Philip
Howard, in 1589. Wrote a
number of pamphlets on living a pious life. Arrested in 1595 for
the crime of being a priest.
Repeatedly tortured in
hopes of learning the location of other priests.
He was so badly treated in prison that
his family petitioned for a quick trial, knowing that his certain death would
be better than the conditions in which he was housed. He spent three
years imprisoned in
the Tower of London, and was tortured on
the rack ten times; between abuses he studied the Bible and wrote poetry.
He was finally tried and convicted for treason, having admitted that he
administered the Sacraments. One of the Forty
Martyrs of England and Wales. Born 1561 in
Horsham Saint Faith, Norfolk, England hanged,
drawn and quartered on 21
February 1595 in
Tyburn, London, England while hanging, he
repeatedly made the sign of the cross onlookers tugged at his legs
to help him die quicker 8 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI 15
December 1929 by Pope Pius XI 25 October 1970 by Pope Paul
VI Additional
Information Catholic
Tradition in English Literature, by George Carver Illustrated
Catholic Family Annual Mementoes
of the English Martyrs and Confessors, by Father Henry
Sebastian Bowden Saints
of the Day, by Katherine Rabenstein The
Triple Crown: Poet, Priest, Martyr, by B A Moore, SJ An Appreciation of Robert
Southwell, by Sister Rose Anita Morton Poetry by Saint Robert
Southwell Mary
Magdalen’s Complaint at Christ’s Death Of
the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar books A
Calendar of the English Martyrs of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Our Sunday Visitor’s Encyclopedia of Saints other
sites in english Renaissance
English Literature, by Anniina Jokinen images video e-books
on other sites An
Appreciation of Robert Southwell, by Sister Rose Anita Morton Complete
Poems, of Saint Robert Southwell Complete
Works of R Southwell, SJ Poetical
Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell The
Triumphs over Death, by Saint Robert Southwell sitios
en español Martirologio Romano, 2001 edición fonti
in italiano Dicastero delle Cause dei Santi Martirologio Romano, 2005 edition spletne
strani v slovenšcini MLA
Citation “Saint Robert
Southwell“. CatholicSaints.Info. 6 December 2025. Web. 11 March 2026.
<https://catholicsaints.info/saint-robert-southwell/>
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/saint-robert-southwell/  The
Complete poems of Robert Southwell, S.J. - for the first time fully collected
and collated with the original and early editions and mss. (1872)
This
title-page is reproduced from the copy of Saint Peters Complaint at Jesus
College, Oxford, England. Robert Southwell, SJ M
(RM) Born at Horsham Saint
Faith's, Norfolk, England, in 1561 or 1562; died at Tyburn, London, England,
February 21, 1595; beatified in 1929; canonized on October 25, 1970, by Pope
Paul VI as one of the 40 representative martyrs of England and Wales. The Church has been built
on the blood of martyrs--the living stones. Before there were cathedrals, there
were the catacombs; since then objects of value have been piled about our
altars, but the most precious is contained beneath each altar in the mandatory
"tomb"--the shrine with the relics of a martyr--and upon the tomb the
chalice with the precious Blood of Christ. We would do well to recall the many
previous Masses that were celebrated in haste and secrecy--for us, like the
martyrs, each Mass might be the viaticum. Receive the Source of Life with joy,
attention, and thanksgiving. When King Henry VIII
could not induce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, to allow their marriage to be
declared invalid because she was his brother's widow, Henry declared himself
head of the Church in England. He persuaded the Parliament to declare that it
was high treason for anyone to deny Henry's right to this title. On this
account monasteries were closed and Church property confiscated--both real and
monetary, including the innumerable foundations designed to maintain schools
for the people, who were largely illiterate. A long procession of saints and
beati were executed under Henry VIII. (Of course, we should
always remember that Roman Catholics are not alone in being persecuted. While
the English kings and queens hanged and quartered Catholics, Protestants were
burned in France and Spain. There was the difference that Protestants in Spain
and France were trying to destroy the ancient traditions of the people, while
Catholicism in England did not show itself incompatible with the order of
society.) Robert Southwell's
lineage included most of the country gentry of Suffolk and Norfolk, but his
father Richard was born on the wrong side of the sheets though his grandfather,
also Richard, did eventually marry Robert's grandmother, a poor relation of his
first wife. Richard Southwell, Sr.,
had been a courtier to Henry VIII and received his share of the booty from the
pillaging of monasteries, including the ancient Benedictine priory of Horsham
Saint Faith. Richard changed his political and religious affiliations a few
times during the reigns of Edward and Mary of Scotland. The saint's father had
married Queen Elizabeth's governess; thus, Richard Senior's grandson Robert was
born in the old Benedictine priory. Robert is the mystic
among the English martyrs, though circumstances made him a man of action and
bold adventure. Fire, sweetness, purity, and gentleness were features of Robert
Southwell's nature. Once as a child, he was
stolen by gypsies, who were numerous in the great woods surrounding Saint
Faith's. His nurse found him again. Robert referred to this misadventure often.
"What had I remained with the gipsy? How abject, how void of all knowledge
and reverence of God! In what shameful vices, in how great danger of infamy, in
how certain danger of an unhappy death and eternal punishment!" On his
return to England as a missionary, the first person he visited was his old
nurse, whom he tried to lead back to the Roman Catholic Church. His father sent him to Douai
to be educated by the Jesuits, either because he was a Catholic at that time or
because of the reputation of the order's schools. There Robert met John Cotton,
who later operated a safehouse in London. Robert was inspired with
intense enthusiasm for the Society of Jesus and begged entry at once, though he
was too young. He was bitterly disappointed, but on the feast of Saint Faith
(fortuitously on October 17, 1578) he was received into the order in Rome as a
novice. He spent his novitiate in Tournai, but took his vows and, in 1584, was
ordained to the priesthood in Rome, where for a time he was prefect in the
English College. At this time he began to
attract a good deal of attention by his poems. He corresponded with Mr.
Parsons, the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. He was worried that many
who had been faithful Catholics were now sliding into the Church of England to
avoid the fine for every service from which they absented themselves. Many
families held out until they were financially ruined; then they would attempt
to make their way to the continent and live on alms. Though Robert Southwell
knew how his journey to England would end, with Father Henry Garnet, he
returned in 1586 to serve among those Catholics who were still willing to venture
life and welfare by hearing a Mass and receiving the Sacraments. Before his
departure he wrote to the general of hte Jesuits, Claudius Acquaviva, "I
address you, my Father, from the threshold of death, imploring the aid of your
prayers . . . that I may either escape the death of the body for further use,
or endure it with courage." Most of the remaining
Catholics were to be found in the countryside. Most were content to long for
better days and hope that a priest could be smuggled into their sickroom before
their deaths. On the other hand, among the actively militant there was a
wonderful cohesion and a mutual helpfulness and affection that recalled the
days of the primitive Church. But thes little congregations that assembled
before dawn in a secret room of some remote manor house never knew if a traitor
might be in their midst. Southwell rode about the
countryside in disguise, saying Mass, hearing confessions, celebrating
marriages, baptizing, re-admitting apostates, giving the Sacraments to the dying.
He even managed to visit Catholics in prison and say Mass there. Time after
time he miraculously managed to elude his pursuers. Much of Southwell's
correspondence during this period has been preserved and provides many insights
into the events and attitudes of hte period. These were hard times. In one
letter he requests permission to consecrate chalices and altar slabs (usually
reserved to the bishop)--so much had been taken away in the constant searching
of the homes of Catholics that such things were becoming scarce. His letters home also
reveal Robert's anxiety about the salvation of his father and one of his
brothers, Thomas. The soul of the poet is evident when he writes his brother:
"Shrine not any longer a dead soul in a living body: bail reason out of
senses' prison, that after so long a bondage in sin, you may enjoy your former
liberty in God's Church, and free your thought from servile awe of uncertain
perils. . . . Weigh with yourself at how easy a price you rate God, Whom you
are content to sell for hte use of your substance. . . . Look if you can upon a
crucifix without blushing; do not but count the five wounds of Christ once over
without a bleeding conscience." Thomas was won back to
the faith and died in exile in the Netherlands. His father died in prison after
Robert's martyrdom, but it is unknown whether he, too, suffered for the faith. As chronicled in Robert's
letters, the persecution intensified after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Captured Catholics used their trials in defense of the faith. Robert tried to
remain at large for as long as possible by adopting disguises and using the
alias of Mr. Cotton--a poor, unkempt, and socially awkward young man. Robert was a priest in
London from 1584 to 1592. About 1590, Robert Southwell became chaplain to Anne,
countess of Arundel, wife of the imprisoned Saint Philip Howard, who was being
told lies about her now-faithful husband. To Southwell, Earl Philip wrote from
prison that his greatest sorrow was that he would never see his wife again.
"I call Our Lord to witness that as no sin grieves me so much as my
offenses to that party [Anne], so no worldly things makes me loather to depart
hence than that I cannot live to make that party satisfaction, according to my
most ardent and affectionate desire. Afflictio dat intellectum (affliction
gives understanding)." During the time that Fr.
Southwell was concealed in Arundel House in London, he corresponded with Philip
Howard because of their mutual affection for Anne Dacre and because of their
shared faith and shared interest in poetry. Southwell holds a place in English
literature as a religious poet. Ben Jonson remarked to Drummond that
"Southwell was hanged, yet so he [Jonson] had written that piece of his
'The Burning Babe' he would have been content to destroy many of his."
Many of Southwell's poems, apologetic tracts, and devotional books were
published on a private printing press installed at Arundel House. At Arundel House, the
soon-to-be martyr also found himself often lost in mystical experiences that
are later revealed in his poetry. There is an unforgettable power in his poetic
image of Christ as the unwearied God throughout eternity supporting the earth
on His fingertip and enclosing all creation in the hollow of His hand, but Who,
in His humanity, breaks down and falls beneath the weight of a single person's
sin. Robert Southwell was
betrayed by Anne Bellamy. After giving her absolution during her confinement
with a family in Holborn, he told her that he would offer Mass in the secret
room in her father Richard's home in Harrow on June 20, 1592. She reported this
to Richard Topcliffe, one of the most notorious for hunting down priests.
Robert Southwell was arrested while still wearing his vestments. Southwell was
immediately tortured upon arrival at Topcliffe's Westminster home--for two days
he was hung up by the wrists against a wall, so that he could barely touch the
floor with the tips of his toes. When he was at the point
of death, his tormentors revived him, hung him up again, and prodded him to
reveal the names of other priests and for information to condemn Lady Arundel.
All he would confess was that he was a Jesuit priest. He gave no information,
not even the color of the horse on which he had riden, that would allow them to
find other Catholics. Southwell's steadfastness led several of the witnesses,
including the Treasurer Sir Robert Cecil, to whisper that he must indeed be a
saint. He was taken from
Topcliffe's house to a filthy cell in the Gatehouse and left for a month. His
father, seeing him covered with lice, begged the queen to treat his son as the gentleman
he was. She obliged by having Southwell moved to a cleaner cell and permitting
his father to send him clean clothes and other necessities, including a Bible
and the writings of Saint Bernard. Robert Southwell was
moved to the Tower of London, where he was imprisoned for three years and
tortured 13 times (according to Cecil). Many of his poems on death, including
"Saint Peter's Complaint," were written in the Tower. Not once was he
given the opportunity to confess his sins or say Mass. He was allowed only one
visit--from his sister. Communication with Saint Philip Howard was limited to
notes smuggled between their cells. Because Arundel's dog would sometimes
follow the warder into Southwell's cell, the lieutenant of the Tower mocked
that he supposed the dog had gone to get the priest's blessing. Howard replied,
"Marry! it is no news for irrational creatures to seek blessings at the
hands of holy men. Saint Jerome writes how those lions which had digged with
their paws Saint Paul the Hermit's grave stood after waiting with their eyes
upon Saint Antony expecting his blessing." Finally, Southwell
entreated Cecil to bring him to trial or permit him visitors. To which Cecil
answered, "if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have
his desire." Shortly thereafter he was taken to Newgate Prison and placed
in the underground dungeon called Limbo before being brought to trial at
Westminster on February 20, 1595. He was condemned for being a priest. When the
Lord Chief Justice Popham offered the services of an Anglican priest to prepare
him for death, he declined saying that the grace ofGod would be more than
sufficient for him. Like many martyrs before
him, Southwell drew the admiration of the crowds because he walked as though he
whole being were filled with happiness at the prospect of being executed the
next day. On the morrow, the tall, slight man of light brown hair and beard was
taken to the "Tyburn Tree," a gallows, where the custom was for the
condemned to be drive underneath the gallows in a cart, a rope secured around
his neck, and the cart driven from under him. According to the sentence, the
culprit would hang until he was dead or cut down before reaching that point. Standing in the cart,
Father Southwell began preaching on Romans 14: "Whether we live, we live
unto the Lord: or whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Therefore, whether we
live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. . . . I am brought hither to perform
the last act of this miserable life, and . . . I do most humbly desire at the
hands of Almighty God for our Savior Jesus' sake, that He would vouchsafe to
pardon and forgive all my sins. . . ." He acknowledged that he was a
Catholic priest and declared that he never intended harm or evil against the
queen, but always prayed for her. He end with "In manus tuas, Domine (into
Your hands, Lord), I commend my spirit." Contrary to the sentence, he was
dead before he was cut down and quartered (Benedictines, Delaney, Undset). SOURCE : http://www.saintpatrickdc.org/ss/0221.shtml Venerable Robert
Southwell Poet, Jesuit, martyr;
born at Horsham St. Faith's, Norfolk, England,
in 1561; hanged at Tyburn, 21 February, 1595. His grandfather, Sir Richard
Southwell, had been a wealthy man and a prominent courtier in the reign
of Henry
VIII. It was Richard Southwell who in 1547 had brought the poet Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, to the block, and Surrey had vainly begged to be
allowed to "fight him in his shirt". Curiously enough their
respective grandsons, Father Southwell and Philip,
Earl of Arundel, were to be the most devoted of friends and
fellow-prisoners for the Faith. On his mother's side the Jesuit was
descended from the Copley and Shelley families,
whence a remote connexion may be established between him and the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Robert Southwell was brought up a Catholic,
and at a very early age was sent to be educated at Douai,
where he was the pupil in philosophy of
a Jesuit of
extraordinary austerity of life, the famous Leonard
Lessius. After spending a short time in Paris he
begged for admission into the Society
of Jesus--a boon at first denied. This disappointment elicited from the boy
of seventeen some passionate laments, the first of his verses of which we have
record. On 17 Oct., 1578, however, he was admitted at Rome,
and made his simple vows in
1580. Shortly after his noviceship,
during which he was sent to Tournai,
he returned to Rome to
finish his studies, was ordained priest in
1584, and became prefect of studies in the English College. In 1586 he was sent
on the English mission with Father
Henry Garnett, found his first refuge with Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and was
known under the name of Cotton. Two years afterwards he
became chaplain to
the Countess of Arundel and thus established relations with her imprisoned husband, Philip,
Earl of Arundel, the ancestor of the present ducal house of Norfolk, as
well as with Lady Margaret Sackville, the earl's half-sister. Father
Southwell's prose elegy, "Triumphs over Death", was addressed to the
earl to console him for this sister's premature death, and his "Hundred
Meditations on the love of God", originally written for her use, were
ultimately transcribed by another hand, to present to her daughter Lady
Beauchamp. Some six years were spent in zealous and
successful missionary work, during which Father Southwell lay hidden in London,
or passed under various disguises from one Catholic house
to another. For his better protection he affected an interest in the pursuits
of the country gentlemen of his day (metaphors taken from hawking are common in
his writings), but his attire was always sober and his tastes simple. His
character was singularly gentle, and he has never been accused of taking any
part either in political intrigues or in religious disputes of a more domestic
kind. In 1592 Father Southwell was arrested at Uxendon Hall, Harrow, through
the treachery of an unfortunate Catholic girl,
Anne Bellamy, the daughter of the owner of the house. The notorious Topcliffe,
who effected the capture, wrote exultingly to the queen: "I never did take
so weighty a man, if he be rightly used". But the atrocious cruelties to
which Southwell was subjected did not shake his fortitude.
He was examined thirteen times under torture by members of the Council, and was
long confined in a dungeon swarming with vermin. After nearly three years
in prison he
was brought to trial and the usual punishment of hanging and quartering was
inflicted. Father Southwell's
writings, both in prose and verse, were extremely popular with his
contemporaries, and his religious pieces were sold openly by the booksellers
though their authorship was known. Imitations abounded, and Ben Jonson declared
of one of Southwell's pieces, "The Burning Babe", that to have
written it he would readily forfeit many of his own poems. "Mary
Magdalene's Tears", the Jesuit's earliest
work, licensed in 1591, probably represents a deliberate attempt to employ in
the cause of piety the
euphuistic prose style, then so popular. "Triumphs over Death", also
in prose, exhibits the same characteristics; but this artificiality of
structure is not so marked in the "Short Rule of Good Life", the
"Letter to His Father", the "Humble Supplication to Her
Majesty", the "Epistle of Comfort" and the "Hundred
Meditations". Southwell's longest poem, "St. Peter's Complaint"
(132 six-line stanzas), is imitated, though not closely, from the Italian
"Lagrime di S. Pietro" of Luigi Tansillo. This with some other
smaller pieces was printed, with license, in 1595, the year of his death.
Another volume of short poems appeared later in the same year under the title
of "Maeoniae". The early editions of these are scarce, and some of
them command high prices. A poem called "A Foure-fold Meditation",
which was printed as Southwell's in 1606, is not his, but was written by his
friend the Earl
of Arundel. Perhaps no higher testimony can be found of the esteem in which
Southwell's verse was held by his contemporaries than the fact that, while it
is probable that Southwell had read Shakespeare,
it is practically certain that Shakespeare had
read Southwell and imitated him. Transcription. This
article was transcribed for New Advent by Janet Grayson. Ecclesiastical
approbation. Nihil Obstat. July 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York. Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Knight.
Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
SOURCE : http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14164a.htm Mementoes
of the English Martyrs and Confessors – Venerable Robert Southwell, S.J., 1595 Article Of an old Norfolk family,
he was stolen by a gipsy as an infant, but the theft was speedily discovered,
and Southwell proved his gratitude to his rescuer by seeking out and converting
the woman who detected the theft when he returned to England as a Jesuit priest
in 1584. He laboured on the Mission with great success, in which his mastery of
the English tongue stood him in good service. His poems, in their directness
and force, their antitheses, and terseness, in beauty of conception and
fidelity of expression, rank with those of the finest Elizabethan sonneteers.
His lyre, however, was tuned to no mere amorous strains, but to show how
“virtue and verse suit together.” The divine beauty of Jesus and Mary, the
operations of grace, the deformity of sin, the nature of contrition, contempt
of the world, the brevity of life, all these are told with a charm and a grace
in verses now little, alas! known, and are set forth with equal power in his
letters. He was shamefully betrayed by a woman, once his penitent, was ten
times tortured, and, after three years confinement in the Tower in a filthy
hole, was brought out, covered with vermin, at the age of thirty-three to
receive his martyr’s crown. “We have written many
letters, but it seems few have come to your hands. We sail in the midst of
these stormy waves with no small danger; from which nevertheless it has pleased
our Lord hitherto to deliver us. We have altogether with much comfort renewed
the vows of the Society, according to our custom. I seem to see the beginnings
of a religious life in England, of which we now sow the seeds with tears, that
others hereafter may with joy carry in the sheaves to the heavenly granaries.
We have sung the Canticles of the Lord in a strange land, and in this desert we
have sucked honey from the rock and oil from the hard stone. But these joys
ended in sorrow, and sudden fears dispersed us into different places; but in
fine we were more afraid than hurt, for we all escaped. I, with another of ours
seeking to avoid Scylla, had like to have fallen into Charybdis, but by the
mercy of God we passed be twixt them both. In another of mine I gave an account
of the martyrdoms of Mr. Bayles and Mr. Horner, and of the edification the
people received from their holy ends. We also, if not unworthy, look for the
time when our day may come.” Venerable Southwell on
His Fellow-Catholics – The labours to which they obliged them (the imprisoned
priests) were continual and im moderate, and no less in sickness than in
health; for with hard blows and stripes they forced them to accomplish their
task how weak soever they were. Some are there hung up for whole days by the
hands, in such manner that they can but just touch the ground with the tips of
their toes. In fine, they that are kept in that prison truly live “in lacu
miseriae et in luto fecis.” (“In the pit of filth.”) This Purgatory we are
looking for every hour, in which Topliffe and Young, the two executioners of
the Catholics, exercise all kinds of torment. But come what pleases God, we
hope that we shall be able to bear all in Him that strengthens us. In the
meantime we pray that they may be put to confusion who work iniquity, and that
the Lord may speak peace to His people (Psalm 24 and 89) that, as the Royal
Prophet says, His glory may dwell in our land. I most humbly recommend myself
to the holy sacrifices of your Reverence and of all our friends. MLA
Citation Father Henry Sebastian
Bowden. “Venerable Robert Southwell, S.J., 1595”. Mementoes
of the English Martyrs and Confessors, 1910. CatholicSaints.Info.
21 April 2019. Web. 11 March 2026.
<https://catholicsaints.info/mementoes-of-the-english-martyrs-and-confessors-venerable-robert-southwell-s-j-1595/>
Venerable Robert
Southwell, Jesuit priest He was born at Saint
Faith’s, in Norfolk, and was received into the Society of Jesus when only 16
years old, and early showed signs of great literary gifts. He laboured among
his persecuted fellow countrymen for eight years, at the end of which time he
was betrayed and apprehended a few miles from London. Being cast into the
Tower, he was left for the first month in a most filthy dungeon, and for three
years he was kept in prison and was ten times cruelly racked. When he learnt
that he was to give the supreme proof of his love, his heart overflowed with
joy. Great care was taken to
keep the day of his martyrdom secret, and a famous highwayman was purposely
sentenced to be executed at another place at the same hour. These precautions
were, however, powerless to prevent an immense crowd assembling at Tyburn to
witness the last glorious conflict of the holy Jesuit, poet and Martyr. He made
the sign of the cross as well as he was able with his manacled hands, and then
began to speak to the people in the words of the Apostle: “Whether we live, we
live to the Lord, or whether we die, we die to the Lord; therefore, whether we
live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord.” Then he prayed for the Queen
and for his poor country, imploring the Divine Bounty to favour it with His
light and the knowledge of His truth. He died at the same age as Our Saviour. – from The One Hundred and Five Martyrs of Tyburn, by
The Nuns of the Convent of Tyburn, 1917
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/the-one-hundred-and-five-martyrs-of-tyburn-21-february-1595/ The
Catholic Tradition in English Literature – Robert Southwell Article Robert
Southwell, priest, poet,
and martyr,
was born in 1561,
the third son of a prominent Catholic family in Norfolk. At an early age he was
sent to school at Douai where he came into contact with Leonard Lessius of the
Society of Jesus. Later he attended school at Paris, coming into contact with
Thomas Darbyshire, one of the first Englishmen to become a Jesuit. It was
inevitable, therefore, shat the young Southwell should become imbued with the
desire to serve in the ranks of this society. He became enrolled in 1578 and
two years later took minor orders. During the next four years he occupied
himself in the study of philosophy and in writing verse. In 1584 he took final
orders and stood ready to begin his life’s work. However, in England, at
almost the exact time of his ordination, a law was passed that proscribed
anyone who had entered the Catholic priesthood since the first year of
Elizabeth’s accession from residing upon English soil under penalty of death.
In spite of this law Southwell took up his work in an English mission, to be
watched by the authorities from the beginning. In 1589 he became the confessor
to the Countess of Arundel and passed several years of comparative safety under
this powerful patronage, during which time he made his real literary beginning.
Triumphs Over Death, perhaps his first serious work, belongs to this period, as
does, likewise, Notes on Theology. Some years later he unfortunately made the
acquaintance of one Richard Bellamy, a fervent Catholic who was suspected of
efforts against the crown. An unhappy result of this relationship was
inevitable; Father Southwell was executed at Tyburn in 1595. A deep religious fervor
permeates the entire body of Southwell’s poetry, and this in an age the most
lyrically passionate that English literature has ever known. There is about his
writing, moreover, a quality of imaginative grace that is highly sustained and
provocatively memorable. We feel his fervor and at the same time respond to his
verse harmonies. No one can say, however, that he is without fault as a poetic
artist; he is frequently guilty of grotesque figures, and, quite as frequently,
of a peculiar kind of punning – both traits being part of the literary devices
of his day. MLA
Citation George Carver. “Robert
Southwell”. The Catholic Tradition in English
Literature 1926. CatholicSaints.Info.
7 March 2022. Web. 11 March 2026.
<https://catholicsaints.info/the-catholic-tradition-in-english-literature-robert-southwell/>
SOURCE : https://catholicsaints.info/the-catholic-tradition-in-english-literature-robert-southwell/ Saint Robert Southwell, the martyr who brought beauty
to England Meg
Hunter-Kilmer | Feb 16, 2017 The poet priest knew that for Church to survive, she
needed not only Sacraments but an intellectual life and a culture. There’s a delightful sense of satisfaction that comes
of shattering a useless stereotype. When faced with someone who’s certain that
Christians are weak, milquetoast types, I delight in referencing St. Gabriel
Possenti, who drove an army out of town using the guns he stole from their
holsters. Aquinas and Albert and Augustine obliterate the modern claim that
Christians must all be intellectual lightweights. Really, I don’t think there’s
a single saint who fits nicely in any box the world would like to fashion. But
St. Robert Southwell, a poet, a priest, and a martyr, defies expectations on
every front. Robert Southwell was born in 1561 in Protestant
England. Though his family was Catholic, their fortune came from a monastery
seized by Henry VIII, and Robert’s father and grandfather both wavered between
Catholicism and Protestantism. Still, Robert was sent to Europe for a Catholic
education when he was 15 and not long after petitioned the Jesuits to accept
him. When he was denied, the gentle and artistic Southwell walked to Rome to
ask more forcefully. His determination paid off and his request was approved. Ordained at 23, Southwell asked his superiors to send
him to England, a country already running red with the blood of priests. In the
footsteps of St. Edmund Campion, he set off for England as his superior shook
his head, murmuring, “Lambs sent to the slaughter.” For the next three years, Southwell moved from house
to house reconciling sinners and celebrating Mass. He was then installed at the
home of St. Philip Howard, in prison for his faith and later to be martyred.
Fr. Southwell became the chaplain to Howard’s wife, the countess of Arundel,
while frequently leaving the relative safety of her house to bring Christ all
over England. Like every hidden priest in England, Southwell knew
that his primary duty was to offer the Sacraments to the faithful. But he had a
particular gift that the Church needed desperately. The purpose of the priests
in England wasn’t just to minister to the souls who were still there but to
maintain a Catholic Church in England. The hope was that one day the
persecutions would subside and the Catholic Church could emerge as something
authentically English, not something foreign introduced from without. In order
for the Church to survive, she needed not only Sacraments but an intellectual
life and a culture. These Southwell could give. Set up with a printing press,
the man some believe was a cousin of William Shakespeare began to write and to
publish both poetry and prose. His work flew to the farthest reaches of the
kingdom, giving hope and joy to recusant Catholics (those who had refused to
abandon their faith) who’d been approaching despair. We moderns have forgotten the power of art, the power
of literature. We settle for trite films and banal novels, not realizing that a
people starved for beauty will truly starve. Southwell understood this, and in
his poetic genius (a genius still recognized by secular scholars today) he
sustained his people. But he was a priest before he was a poet and Southwell
spent the six years of his ministry in England celebrating Sacraments,
traveling under cover of darkness, and hiding beneath floorboards as did the
others. Finally he was betrayed and brought before the sadistic Richard
Topcliffe to be broken. His whole life, Southwell had been a remarkably
handsome man, described as almost feminine in his beauty. Faced with a
delicately beautiful poet, his captors were not expecting to find steel beneath
his soft exterior. But Topcliffe, Elizabeth’s expert torturer, tormented him at
least 13 times and each time was met only with the information that he was a
Jesuit priest who had come to England to preach the Catholic faith and was
willing to die for it. Southwell then spent two and a half years in solitary
confinement in the Tower of London, after which he was finally given a trial of
sorts and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. St. Robert Southwell was a sensitive man of strength,
a Christian genius, a poet whose art strengthened the failing. But with all the
gifts nature could offer, he longed for only one thing: Christ and him
crucified. He yearned to be martyred, to pour out his blood for the glory of
God, and his request was granted. In death he gained not only the crown of
martyrdom but also an enduring legacy as the poet who reminded English
Catholics of their heritage and strengthened them to endure. On his feast day,
February 21, let’s ask his intercession for an authentic masculinity among
Christians, one that values beauty, wisdom, and sensitivity as well as courage
and strength. St. Robert Southwell, pray for us.
SOURCE : https://aleteia.org/2017/02/16/saint-robert-southwell-the-martyr-who-brought-beauty-to-england/ The
Triple Crown: Saint Robert Southwell, S.J., Poet, Priest, Martyr, by B. A.
Moore S.J. Interest in the English
Martyrs has probably never been greater than it is at the moment, and hopes for
their Canonization run high. Among that band of heroic souls who passed, as one
of them put it, “through the terrible ‘Red Sea’ of death” were men and women of
every condition of life: married and unmarried, layfolk and religious, secular
priests and priests of a variety of religious orders, members of the nobility
and commonfolk. All of them died, ultimately, for the unity of the Church which
gives their blood a voice of appeal to which our day, more than any other since
their death, is prepared to listen. All of those who died spoke our language
and were formed in a way of life from which our own derives – which gives us an
understanding of, and a nearness to them which is, perhaps, not so easily
captured in regard to other Saints. To represent this varied
band, we have chosen Saint Robert Southwell, Poet, Priest and Martyr. As a
martyr he reminds us that what has drawn these so diverse men and women into a
single band, united among themselves and separated from their contemporaries,
is their common death in a common cause; as a priest he reminds us that it was
around the very survival of the priesthood and the Sacrifice it offers that the
conflict principally raged; as a poet he has not only enriched our literature
but was able to give moving expression to the hopes and fears that like a fever
shook the whole Catholic body of his day. Family Fortunes The fortunes of the
Southwell family were firmly based on the spoils of Henry VIII’s dissolution of
the monasteries – the Benedictine priory at Horsham in Norfolk (ironically
enough, called Saint Faith’s) going to “the King’s true servant”, Sir Richard
Southwell. Time was when the young Richard appeared to be anything but the
King’s true servant, for he faltered in his duty as false accuser of Saint
Thomas More. He redeemed himself, however, by playing this role successfully in
the case of the Earl of Surrey, the poet. This latter’s grandson, Saint Philip
Howard, Earl of Arundel, was later to be supported in his long imprisonment by
Sir Richard’s own grandson, Saint Robert Southwell. New Men, Wealth Thus Sir Richard early
learnt that in those days of new men and new wealth a too-sensitive conscience
could leave a man impoverished, nay, impoverish him still further. Morals gave
way to means. It is no surprise, therefore, to find him married to an heiress
for the continuance of the family fortunes, but preferring his wife’s cousin as
the mother of his children for the continuance of the family itself. He married
her off to an already married dependant against the day when, his wife being
dead, he would convict his henchman of bigamy, and marry his children’s mother,
having by her a last daughter. In these philanderings we
find the very human agency for the fulfillment of the so-called “Monks’ Curse”,
supposed to fall on anyone who profited from the destruction of the
monasteries. For, within a few years of Saint Robert’s death, litigation
between the legitimate and illegitimate branches of the family soon reduced the
family fortunes to a mere shadow of their former substance. Conforming Family With the restoration of
Catholicism under Queen Mary, the Southwell family conformed gracefully enough,
as they did later again in the changed circumstances under Queen Elizabeth.
They did, it is true, even then retain a Marian priest as a sign of their
attachment to the old ways, but he was not called to upset their accommodating
consciences. The father of the future
martyr, Richard Southwell, conformed to the new religion. Not so his aunts,
daughters of old Sir Richard, who have the distinction of being considered
“very dangerous” by the informers among Walsingham’s network of spies. The Third Son Robert, his father’s
third son, was born towards the end of 1561, and even as a child achieved a
certain amount of local fame. While still an infant in the cradle he was stolen
by a gypsy beguiled, as she confessed on being overtaken by the swift pursuit
which followed, by the child’s beauty. This was not mere flattery designed to
soften whatever blows the irate father might have been disposed to deliver.
Later, on the continent, Robert was generally referred to as “the beautiful
English youth”; and at his trial, his fresh and youthful appearance was still
so marked (despite years of imprisonment and 10 cruel rackings) that he was
referred to (contemptuously it is true, but that is not the point) as the “boy
priest”. He was, in fact, then close on 33 years of age. This kidnapping deeply
impressed Robert, told of it no doubt a thousand times by his nurse. Later on,
in his spiritual diary, he was to picture what his ready imagination presented
to him as the probable outcome of this adventure had he not betimes been
rescued. He is listing the more signal mercies shown by God: “What if I had remained
with the vagrant? How abject! How destitute of the knowledge or reverence of
God! In what debasement of vice, in what great perils of crimes, in what
indubitable risk of a miserable death and eternal punishment I would have
been!” In so sensitive and
courteous a soul as his, it was but natural that gratitude to God for his
rescue should have included gratitude to the old maidservant whose timely
discovery of the kidnapping led to his being recovered. Her he sought out on
his first arriving as a priest in England many years later and rewarded her in
the way he knew best – reconciling her to the ancient Faith and providing for
all the need of her old age. His Nickname For some obscure reason,
Robert’s father gave him the nickname “Father Robert”. It is difficult to
suggest a plausible reason why. It was certainly not that his father had
destined him for the Church; priests were literally a dying race in Elizabethan
England. Moreover, Robert was later to remind his father of this nickname,
pointing out that in giving it to him he had spoken more truly than he knew. It
may have meant no more than that Robert was rather fond of the old monastery of
Saint Faith – his father had not yet sold it as he was later forced to do. It
had also been suggested that the prophetic nickname referred to the quiet
gravity of his disposition. It may be so; but certain it is that he was not
always quiet nor always grave. Emulating, no doubt, the indominable spirit of
that aunt of his whom he so much admired, he was caught out in some rather
indiscreet irreverences uttered about the Queen’s regime, and, at the age of
14, found himself carpeted before the, by now, thoroughly inquisitorial Court of
Star Chamber. It was high time to leave England. Illegal Departure This step, which Robert
took in 1576, was not one to be advertised as it was quite illegal.
Consequently, how and from what point of the coast he departed for the
continent is still a matter for conjecture. A poem he wrote in later life
suggests that between the decision to go and the going there was little lapse
of time – not even time to return to bid farewell to his mother and the
ancestral home. For in the poem, “On the Loss of the Child”, Our Lady
complains: How couldst thou go some
other where to dwell The next two years of his
life, 1576-1578, were spent attending the Jesuit school at Douai, with six
months in Paris. During this period, he several times asked to be admitted into
the Society of Jesus. He was deferred each time; perhaps because of some fear
that his rather impressionable temperament did not fit him for the life, or
perhaps because the unsettled condition of that part of Europe at the time made
the future so uncertain. Probably, it was a combination of both circumstances. Jesuit Novice Like Saint Stanislaus
Kostka before him, he set out for Rome to obtain there what had been denied him
elsewhere, and was admitted into the novitiate of the Order on 17 October,
1578, shortly before his seventeenth birthday. The two years noviceship ended
with his taking vows in 1580 – the year in which Saint Edmund Campion and
Father Robert Parsons left to begin their heroic mission in England. The landing of Parsons
and Campion in England was, indeed, portentous of a new phase in the struggle
of Catholicism for survival in England; and tales of accompanying portents on
land and in the sky gained easy credence. Ever since, the shadowy figure of Parsons
(enigmatic even to the understanding of many Catholics) has stood as the very
incarnation of the jesuitical Jesuit; while Campion, in the blaze of his own
glory and the aura of his martyrdom, is a glowing symbol of all the English
Martyrs. “Jewel of England” as Elizabeth called him, his meteoric career
flashed with a fiery brilliance. His elegance of person and urbanity of manner,
his brilliance of mind and keenness of wit, the holy swagger of his Brag made
him a legend even in his own lifetime. Southwell was cast in a
different mould. Sensitive, even excessively so, and retiring, he lived
surrounded by an air more of dedication to sacrifice than by the zest which
characterized Campion. He was a lamb led to the slaughter where Campion was an
eagle. Ordination The years 1580 to 1585
Robert spent in study and in teaching at the English College, being ordained in
1584. During that period, the College passed through one of its great crises
when disaffection (nor the least of it being fomented by saboteurs planted
there by Cecil) threatened the extinction of this creation of the genial Pope
Gregory XIII. His leisure moments (too few for the task as his superiors
eventually pointed out) were spent in compiling and publishing a regular
news-letter of the heroic exploits of the Jesuits already in England – their
extraordinary escapades and escapes, the good accomplished, the tortures
endured, the crowns of martyrdom gained. Not the least exalted but probably the
least exultant reader of these news-sheets was Cecil himself, to whom they were
regularly sent by his satellites in Rome. The English Mission In 1586, Father Robert
sought and obtained leave to go himself to the English mission from the Father
General of the time, Claude Aquaviva. A man like Southwell was sadly needed in
England at the time. Campion, four of his confreres and five secular priests,
former pupils of the Jesuits in Rome, were already gloriously dead. With the
death of these brilliant and cultured, as well as holy, men, the English
Catholics were being starved not only of the Mass and the Sacraments and
instruction in their Faith, but also of a native Catholic Literature. To them,
no one could be more welcome than Father Southwell, priest and poet. Father Weston In the years between
Campion’s martyrdom and Southwell’s arrival in 1586, the most glamorous figure
in the English arena was Father William Weston, a man of great holiness and
zeal with a positive genius for escaping from awkward situations. He was
eventually to die peacefully in Spain; but meanwhile, in England, he endured 17
years imprisonment, including four years solitary confinement in the Tower. One
of the greatest services he did the Catholics in England was to save Southwell
and his companion, Father Henry Garnet, later martyred, from immediate capture
on their arrival.
Father Weston is chiefly
remembered for the alarming frequency with which he, for a few years, performed
exorcisms – to the great distress of the Catholics and the delighted ridicule
of the Protestants. Misguided though his practice was, exorcism was then the
universal remedy for afflictions whose cause, being unknown, was readily
attributed to the devil – especially as the illnesses were in no way physical,
but were what we would now call hysteria, mental derangement, obsessions and
the rest. Besides, as Father Weston himself said, “Something had to be attempted
as much for the sake of those who suffered the affliction as from compassion
towards the persons who had them in their houses.” What he had in mind was the
great likelihood of such sufferers’ being hunted down and burnt as witches. Arrival in England The ship on which Fathers
Garnet and Southwell sailed for England weighed anchor at two o’clock in the
morning. Shortly after sunrise, off a lonely stretch of the coast between Dover
and Folkstone, the ship’s boat was lowered. Robert Southwell was back in
England. To their dismay, they saw
their landing being observed with great interest by a man on the high bluff
above the beach. He was however, as Father Garnet wrote, “some sort of shepherd
and a very honest fellow. He described to us at great length the places round
about and the right way to get to them; and he assured us that he felt towards
us as if we were his own kith and kin, and this he affirmed with a great oath.
So our first adventure was a merry one.” Southwell, too, was soon
writing back to Rome: “At the Queen’s Court
they say there is a business in hand which, if it succeeds, will mean ruin for
us; but if it fails, all will be well. To the Catholics, however, these are but
bugs to frighten children; for they are driven so far already that there is no
room left for further cruelty.” As was so often the case
with Southwell’s observations on the times, these words were a very apt
description of the tortuous Babington conspiracy that was even then on the
point of bursting wide open. How wrong he was in the second opinion he later
learned by personal experience when he endured repeated rackings – each of
which, he wrote, was worse than death. Within a month of
Southwell’s arrival in England, the Babington conspiracy broke; and Southwell,
from the crowd at the foot of the gallows, gave absolution to the first of the
butchered. In Daily Peril In another letter to his
Superior in Rome, Robert has left us a brief but comprehensive picture of his
life at this time. “I am devoting myself to sermons, hearing confessions and
other priestly duties: hemmed in by daily perils, never safe for a moment.”
Dramatic escapes from those human bloodhounds, the persuivants, became a common
occurrence; but it was a unique experience to spend an entire week hidden in a
priest’s hiding-place (those secret cells so artfully constructed in the wall
or under the fireplaces of the great houses) while the persuivants took up
residence and searched the place at their leisure. Not the least important
aspect of this subjection to constant stress through ever-present danger was
the maturing effect it had on Robert’s own character. In the letter he wrote to
Rome from the other side of the Channel when on the point of departing for
England there is a note which may not be too strongly described as slightly
hysterical. This edge of Europe he calls “death’s ante-room”. It is
understandable, of course. He was, after all, not yet 25 years of age, only two
years a priest, endowed with a highly sensitive nature and a vivid imagination,
and was facing an adventure of enormous consequence. More, he was facing a
certain and horrible death: not for nothing was Father General Aquaviva whose
sadly heroic duty it was to send priests to the English Mission known in Rome
as Lambs-to-the-slaughter Aquaviva. And Saint Philip Neri, meeting students
from the English College in Rome, would greet them with the first line of the
Church’s hymn to the Holy Innocents: “Hail, flowers of martyrdom.” Under the stress of
danger, then, this characteristic in Robert disappears; but never the desire
for martyrdom to which he aspired with a calm humility as the supreme
opportunity of showing his great love for Christ who first died for love of
him. Countess of Arundel A cluster of houses in a
quiet corner of London presented at that time a miniature of the whole of
England. There were to be found the great Protestant houses – that of the Earl
of Leicester, Cecil House, Somerset House, and in the midst of them the house of
the unhappy, staunchly Catholic, Countess of Arundel. Her husband, Saint Philip
Howard, still languished in the tower from which he was to find release only in
death. The Countess, under the influence of Saint Robert, threw off the
too-personal grief which had hitherto enveloped her, and took more to heart the
plight of the whole Catholic body of England. She invited Robert to live in her
house in the midst of the enemy camp. So there came about a situation possible
only in a persecuted country. The false witness of Southwell’s grandfather had
sent Howard’s grandfather to the gallows. Wiser than their fathers, the sons,
poets both, gave each other all they had: Howard his house to Southwell,
Southwell the power of his priesthood and his literary talent to Howard. The Authentic Church One of the great tasks of
the mission in England was to ensure the continuity of the Church there with
that first planted by Saint Augustine of Canterbury. If ever the persecution
were relaxed, the Church must be in a position to emerge from the catacombs of
England as a newly blossoming native growth, not as an exotic transplant from
foreign places. It must emerge as the authentic Church of the English tradition
and, in its externals, clothed with an English garment as The Authentic Church The Poet Since the printing
presses of Parson and Campion had been hunted down and destroyed, there had
been no native Catholic literature in England; and the beleaguered Catholic
body was being starved not only of the life of grace, but also of the graces of
intellectual and cultural life. (The impact of Campion’s writings. especially
his Brag and the Ten Reasons should not be under-estimated.)The time was ripe
for a repetition of Campion’s and Parson’s daring and invigorating experiment;
and in the person of this talented poet there was on hand a worthy successor to
Campion, one who could repeat, and perhaps surpass, the glories of the
latter’s. Brag and Ten Reasons To obtain and install,
without arousing the least suspicion, the presses, type and paper needed for
the venture was a Herculean labour. But it was done. In 1587 Robert’s first
work appeared: “An Epistle of Comfort for those restrained in Durance For the
Catholic Faith.” It was written primarily for Saint Philip Howard in whose house
it was composed. It has been praised by critics for “its clarity and rhythmic
beauty, glowing with piety like a stained-glass window”; and in it the glory of
death and martyrdom is matched with solid controversy. The murder about this
time of Mary, Queen of Scots, gave rise to a poem on one of Robert’s favourite
themes – “Decease, Release”. In it, the Queen is made to say: Alive a Queen, now dead I
am a Saint; Once Mary called, my name now Martyr is; From earthly reign debarred by restraint, In lieu whereof I reign in heavenly bliss. Rue not my death, rejoice
at my repose; It was no death to me but to my woe; The bud was opened to let out the rose, The chains unloosed to let the captive go. At the same time, the
rapidly maturing poet was writing newsletters to Rome containing remarkably
accurate and shrewd interpretations of the political scene. His literary brilliance
and attractive personality soon drew to his side a group of brilliant young men
from the Universities and the Inns of Court. From them he learnt what he
gleefully transmitted to his old friend Saint Robert Bellarmine that the
undergraduates at the Universities judged the success or failure of their
ministers’ sermons by whether or not they had the good sense not to try to
refute Bellarmine’s “Controversies”. Robert soon had plenty of
matter for his newsletters; for, following the much-desired failure of the
Armada came 33 martyrdoms, including that of Saint Margaret Ward – “a maid”,
wrote Southwell, “among a thousand, in whose frail sex shone a courage hard to
parallel.” Missionary Tours Meanwhile, the dangers of
too-long continued residence in any one place and the needs of the Catholics
throughout the country sent Robert on missionary tours of England. In them, the
desire for Martyrdom, grown too vehement through the introspection pandered to
by long confinement in the Arundel house, was moderated to a more controlled
resignation. Over these years, while
Robert went about his priestly work, there had been rising to ever greater
power the most notorious of the persuivants – Topcliffe, who had performed such
sterling service in his chosen profession that he was permitted to maintain in
his own house a private rack “for the more convenient examination of
prisoners”. It was a variety of rack known as the manacles, and improved on its
predecessors in two ways: it was far more painful, and yet left no visible
wound or dislocation that would advertise the agony that had been endured upon
it. Consequently, when at his “trial” Southwell protested against the barbarity
of his torture, Topcliffe was able to challenge him to show the court the
scars. “Ask a woman to show her throes (her birth pangs),” Southwell replied.
Into the hands of this savage examiner and to the tender mercies of the
manacles Robert was soon to be committed. Proclamation But before that, he had a
final task to perform. In 1591 there appeared from the Queen’s Council a
pamphlet called the Proclamation, consisting in the main of a diatribe against
priests and Jesuits. In an attempt to rally again the patriotism that had
flashed out on the occasion of the Armada, this Proclamation announced that the
King of Spain and the Pope were busy at work preparing a new invasion of
England. The forerunners of this invasion were the priests who were secretly at
work in England. It was hoped, apparently, that a feeling of patriotism might
succeed in doing what the persecution was signally failing to do. Southwell’s answer to the
Proclamation was entitled An Humble Supplication, and was addressed to his “Best-beloved
Princess”, Queen Elizabeth. The Proclamation, he said, was so coarsely written
that he feared the Queen’s name was being abused in being attached to it. She
was surely ignorant of it as he was sure she was ignorant of the barbaric
tortures inflicted on prisoners in her name. He complained that every incident
(even a fire or a quarrel between the apprentices and their employers) was laid
at the door of Catholics, without the least pretence at a just investigation,
and even when the real agents of the incidents were well known. In refuting the
calumnies of the Proclamation, Southwell was wasting his time, for he was
mistaken in believing the Queen was not a party to it. Supplication But the writing of the
Supplication itself was not a futile expense of energy. By acknowledging freely
the Queen’s temporal power, Southwell was able to reassure the Catholics that
it was indeed for their faith that they were suffering, and was able to show
the viciousness of the Act of 1585 on which they were condemned to death. He
gave clear evidence that the Catholic body was not responsible for plots
against the Queen’s life; that these were, in fact, anti-Catholic forgeries. A
voice crying in the wilderness of those bloody times, he makes an impassioned
plea for tolerance. If nothing else, the
Supplication is a great piece of literature, rising to powerful heights when he
exposes and protests against the sufferings inflicted on Catholics, or when,
with powerful imagination he confronts Elizabeth with all her kingly predecessors
who, being Catholics, were liable to the same penalties as those her government
was inflicting on her loyal subjects who “daily in our lives, and always at our
executions, unfeignedly pray for your Majesty.” Robert was a priest, and as a
priest he struggled for Elizabeth’s soul: “If our due care of our
country be such that, to rear the least fallen soul among your Majesty’s
subjects from a fatal lapse, we are contented to pay our lives for the ransom:
how much better should we think them bestowed, if so high a pennyworth as your
gracious self, or the whole Realm, might be the gain of our dear purchase.” Death Warrant But writing thus he was
signing his own death warrant. The hunt for Southwell was intensified and, in
the following year, 1592, he was taken. In February of that year, Father Garnet
had written in desperation: “There is simply nowhere
left to hide.” But it was not the
thoroughness of the hunt that led to Southwell’s capture, but betrayal by a
Catholic. Among the many Catholic
families to whom Southwell had ministered was that of the Bellamys in
Middlesex. Their staunch adherence to the Faith was notorious, but the house
seemed to bear a charmed existence and no priest was ever captured there. One of the daughters of
the house, Anne, a woman of 29, was committed to prison towards the end of
January, and, soon afterwards, was found to be pregnant by Topcliffe. To cover
his guilt, to capture Southwell and to provide an estate for the prison keeper
(to whom he intended marrying Anne) Topcliffe wove a plot which would
accomplish all three together. It proved successful at the cost of life to
three men and two women, and the ruin of several others. In June, Anne was sent
back to her Father’s house from where she sent for Southwell to come in his
capacity as a priest. Southwell duly arrived, said Mass and preached. He was to
leave the following morning. At midnight the persuivants arrived, led by
Topcliffe. With him was a young man named Fitzherbert who had offered Topcliffe
three thousand pounds to eliminate all the members of the family who stood
between him and the family estate. Three years later, Topcliffe was suing
Fitzherbert for failure to keep the contract. Even in those days, stomachs were
not strong enough for that, and it was the end of Topcliffe’s career – who
rather ungraciously remarked that it was enough to make Father Southwell’s
bones dance for joy. Arrest Realizing that the hunt
was up, and to save his host’s property from destruction, Southwell left his
hiding place and faced the old man. Topcliffe asked, “Who are you?” Southwell
replied, “A gentleman.”
This was one thing
Topcliffe was not and he hurled a stream of abuse at Southwell, ending with the
words, “Priest! Traitor! Jesuit!” “Ah,” replied Southwell mildly, “but that is
what you have to prove.” In a fury, Topcliffe drew his sword and rushed upon
Southwell, but was restrained by his henchmen. The arrest was made. “The
Goliath of the Papists’ was taken to Topcliffe’s house, and the Queen heard the
news “with unwonted merriment”. Torture In the few weeks that he
was in the house, Southwell was put to the manacles 10 times. The pain is akin
to that of crucifixion; and it is no surprise to hear him declare under oath
that he would have found death preferable. The purpose of the
torture was to obtain incriminating evidence against suspected Catholics. It
failed dismally. Cecil, no sentimentalist,
declared: Let antiquity boast of
its Roman heroes and the patience of captives in torments: our own age is not
inferior to it, nor do the minds of the English cede to the Romans. There is at
present confined one Southwell, a Jesuit, who. thirteen times most cruelly
tortured, cannot be induced to confess anything, not even the colour of the
horse whereon on a certain day he rode, lest from such indication his
adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he
that day was. Imprisonment Southwell was then
transferred to the Gatehouse prison, where he had for his keeper the husband of
the woman who had betrayed him. There for some weeks, exhausted and emaciated,
he lay in his own filth, unable even to brush from his body the maggots which
swarmed upon him. By the end of July, his plight was such that his father (whom
Robert had reconciled on his first coming to England) petitioned the Queen that
he either suffer death if he were guilty of death, or else be better lodged.
Southwell was therefore moved to the Tower, the Queen remembering, perhaps,
that his mother had been a childhood friend of hers. Two and a half years of
solitary confinement in the Tower, with the Bible and the works of Saint
Bernard as his only companions, were all that stood between Robert and his
reward. They were long years to a man who had written: Who lives in love loves
least to live And long delay doth rue If Him he love by Whom he live To Whom all love is due; Who for our love did choose to live And was content to die, Who loved our love more than His life And love with life did buy. And again: Not where I breathe but
where I love, I live; Not where I love but where I am, I die: The life I wish must future glory give; The death I feel in present dangers lie. Without the Mass, without
companions, Robert nevertheless had occasional visitors. The tough Lieutenant of
the Tower was charmed by the gentleness and gaiety of his prisoner, and ever
afterwards spoke of him as “the saint, that blessed Father.” On one occasion,
Saint Philip Howard’s pet dog strayed to his cell; Southwell gave the dog his
blessing to carry back to his master. Less welcome guests were the members of
the Privy Council who came again and again with their persistent questionings. The thirty months that he
lay in the Tower must have seemed an eternity to Southwell; and, indeed, there
is little reason to suppose that they would have ended in any way but with his
death in prison had not his own action provoked a different outcome. Southwell
had learned patience, observing that Times go by Turns: Not always fall of leaf
nor ever spring, Not endless night yet not eternal day; The saddest birds a season find to sing, The roughest storm a calm may soon allay; Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all, That man may hope to rise yet fear to fall. He had also learned to
moderate his desire for martyrdom as long as he was performing a useful
ministry with his writing, his secret press, his missionary journeys throughout
England. The Trial But now he seemed to be
suspended midway between earth and heaven. He determined to win the one or the
other; and in 1594 asked to be brought to trial, Cecil replied that if he was
in so much haste to be hanged he should have his desire. Fortified with the first
cup of wine he had tasted in two years, and “decayed in memory” as he said
“from long imprisonment”, he faced his judges to give one of those exhibitions
of gaiety, wit, shrewdness and courage which the martyrs on trial invariably
turned on for the benefit of the real jury, the people of England. Asked would
he be tried “by God and your country”, Robert replied: “By God and by you; for
I would not lay upon my country the guilt of my condemnation.” Asked his age he
replied: “I think I am near the age of Our Saviour who lived upon earth
thirty-three years.” Topcliffe could not appreciate the subtlety of the answer,
and accused Southwell of blasphemy, thereby unwittingly underlining the point
of Southwell’s answer. Topcliffe’s interjections were unlucky; they gave
Southwell the chance to raise the question of torture. Topcliffe blustered: “If
he were racked, let me die for it.” “No,” replied Southwell,” but you have
another kind of torture” (the manacles). Topcliffe: “Show the marks of your
torture.” Southwell: “Ask a woman to show her throes (her birth pangs).”
Topcliffe talked at great length, trying to clear himself. “Thou art a bad
man,” said Southwell, and left it at that. Topcliffe made one more
interjection before being silenced by the judges. “I would blow you all to
pieces,” he shouted. “What, ALL?” quirked Robert, “Soul and body too?” The
smile that no doubt accompanied this sally which, among other things, neatly
turned Topcliffe’s earlier accusation of blasphemy back on his own head, faded
from Robert’s lips as he recognized his next accuser, Anne Bellamy. Her
evidence (which Robert could have discredited had he been willing to expose her
infamy) was used in an attempt to show that Southwell had taught the lawfulness
of perjury. His reply was, by a parable, to ensnare the Court into admitting
his position or to appear disloyal subjects of the Queen. The Verdict The jury retired, and in
a quarter of an hour returned with their verdict of guilty. While the judge
paused to deliver his sentence, Topcliffe again become vocal, calling out to
the crowded hall: “I found him hidden in the tylles (tiles).” With a fine blend
of humility, humour and scorn, Southwell replied: “It was time to hide when Mr.
Topcliffe came.” The expected sentence was passed; Southwell was to be hanged,
drawn and quartered. Dawn of the following day
came at last. His keeper summoned Southwell who embraced him and gave him his
cap – a souvenir the Protestant keeper valued highly, declining all Catholic
offers to buy it. As he was tied to the hurdle, on which he was to be dragged
to the gallows, he exclaimed: “How great a preferment (promotion) for so base a
servant”, as he thought of those who had gone this way before him. A young
woman, related to him, fell on her knees in the mud beside him and asked his
blessing. He gave it, saying, “Dear cousin, I thank thee; and I pray thee, pray
for me.” Arriving at the scaffold, and released from the hurdle, he wiped the
mud from his face and flung the handkerchief as a parting gesture to Father
Garnet whom he saw in the crowd below. The Hanging After he had spoken to
the crowd, declaring his innocence and proclaiming his faith, he prayed, as did
all the Martyrs, for the Queen. The noose was fitted around his neck. It
slipped, was refitted and this time held. His last words as, slowly strangling,
he made the sign of the Cross were, “Into thy hands, O Lord….” The butchering
known as quartering was, by law, performed while the half-strangulated man was
still alive and conscious. The Sergeant, therefore, stepped forward to cut him
down and have the quartering proceeded with, but the powerful Protestant
nobleman, Lord Mountjoy, who was standing by, waved him back, and the crowd
roared its approval. Seeing the Sergeant hesitate, the Sheriff himself stepped
forward drawing his sword to cut the rope; but he, too, stopped when the crowd
roared its hostility. The hangman, taking his cue from the mood of the
spectators, mercifully took the Martyr by the legs and leant with his full
weight. When he felt the body go limp, he gently lowered it to the block. The quarterer went to
work. It is said that as the butcher held the Martyr’s heart aloft in his hand
it seemed to jump from his grasp, as if anxious to join its fellow members of
the Martyr’s body, already reeking in the cauldron. The name of Blessed Robert
Southwell headed the list of the 21 Jesuit priests and one brother who were
among the 136 English Martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December, 1929.
All of this great muster had suffered for the Faith between the years 1594 and
1679. Ten other martyrs, five Jesuit priests led by Blessed Edmund Campion and
five secular priests, who died between the years 1573 and 1582 had already been
beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 29 December, 1886. The only Catholic to suffer
judicial execution for his faith during the Reformation period in Scotland was
the Jesuit priest Blessed John Ogilvie, Martyred at Glasgow in 1615 and
beatified by Pius XI on 29 November, 1929. The Feast of Saint Robert Southwell
and Companions is kept in Jesuit churches on 21 February; that of Saint Edmund
Campion and Companions on 1 December. Both these Saints and their 38 companions
are now remembered as the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales on 25 October. – from the booklet The Triple Crown: Saint Robert Southwell, S.J., Poet, Priest,
Martyr, by B. A. Moore S.J., Australian Catholic Truth
Society, 1966
St. Robert Southwell:
Poet and Martyr A line that is so
overused that it has almost become trite is Shakespeare’s “to be or not to
be.” Yet, it hits at the existential struggle of the modern world. Hamlet’s
struggle embodies the difficulty of living in a world cut off from its own
past. Hamlet receives a revelation of a great rupture from the past; he is
disgusted with the injustice of the present; he struggles with despair. He does
not take his life, but he does sacrifice it for the honor of his family. Though
Shakespeare understood what was at stake in the rise of Protestantism in
England, he himself confronted the crisis in a manner very different from
Hamlet. Shakespeare knew very well the price of confronting the patricide of
England: members of his own family had been executed for keeping the Faith. One
of the members of his family stood out for his courageous confrontation of
Elizabeth’s attack on the Church: St. Robert Southwell. Historians such as
Christopher Devlin, S.J., Michael Wood, and John Klaus have argued that
Southwell was Shakespeare’s cousin. While this fact is not noted by Southwell’s
traditional biographers, they do note Shakespeare’s familiarity with and
admiration for Southwell’s writing. The familial link between the two poets was
originally based upon on an inference from the dedication of Southwell’s St.
Peter’s Complaint, “The Author to His Loving Cousin,” which in some later
manuscripts reads rather “To My Worthy Good Cousin Master W.S.” Klaus in
his Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit provides firm genealogical
evidence for this claim and also establishes a personal convergence of the two
figures through their common friendship with the Earl of Southampton.
Regardless of their personal relation, Southwell’s dedication to his cousin on
the duty of poets hits at the very nature of poetry. Rather than being used to
express amorous passions, poetry is meant to express praise to God. Poets who
by “abusing their talent” write only about the “feignings of love” discredit
the work of the poet. Wood, in his In Search of Shakespeare, notes
this is meant as a criticism of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and
ironically points out that his next play after the dedication was Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Southwell shows the ultimate power of poetry in that God
Himself “delivered many parts of the Bible in verse.” The poet takes up the
craft in imitation of the Creator, particularly when it is shown “how well
verse and virtue suit together.” In his note to reader which follows, Southwell
echoes this point: It is the sweetest note
that man can sing When grace in virtues key
tunes nature’s string Poetry points the way,
but virtue must also be lived. This truth is powerfully expressed in that
“Christ himself, by making an hymn the conclusion of his last supper, and the
prologue to the first pageant of his passion, gave his Spouse a method to imitate…and
to all men a pattern, to know the true use of this measured style.” Poetry is
no game; it is not fulfilled in the expression of passing passions and
emotions. The ultimate duty of the poet is to follow the divine pattern set
forth, not only in verse, but also in deed. In Southwell’s England, this was no
pious remark; it was a challenge to follow Christ to the end. Within the context of the
Elizabethan persecution of Catholics, poetry became a powerful force for
expressing the lament of the soul and the expectation of vindication by God.
Both Southwell and Shakespeare responded to the patricidal attack on
English faith and culture in their writings. While Shakespeare kept his
Catholic faith secret throughout his career, Southwell sacrificed everything in
the attempt to make right what was wrong. Southwell’s life
resembles that of the better-known martyr, Edmond Campion, with the notable
exception that Southwell was raised a Catholic. Both figures studied at Douai,
entered the Jesuits, taught at the English College in Rome, were sent back on
mission to England, served Catholics there through successful clandestine
heroics, were captured and brutally tortured, and finally received a glorious
martyrdom at Tyborne (Feb. 21, 1595 in Southwell’s case). Unlike Campion, whose
life itself shines as one of the glories of English Catholicism (beginning with
his celebrity status at Oxford while still a Protestant), Southwell’s major
legacy is his writing, which was extremely popular in England following his
martyrdom. This is not to dismiss the greatness of his life, seen in his moving
support to his family, convincing them to stop cooperating with Elizabeth’s
religious policies, his long ministry working out of the house of the Countess
of Arundel, and his absolute refusal to say one word of cooperation to his
savage torturers. Yet, it is his poetry, much of which was written in prison,
which masterfully captures the state of spiritual exile of English Catholics
during his time, but also their steadfastness and joy in their faith. That state of exile is
expressed beautifully in Vale
of Tears, a poem named from a line of the Salve Regina. The poem is
noteworthy for its contemplation of the beauty of nature and for using the
natural images it casts to portray a deeper reality of the spiritual life.
Nature speaks in unbroken beauty and majesty, while an overpowering feeling of
something disjointed and amiss, as in these lines describing the Vale: Resort there is of none
but pilgrim wights, That pass with trembling
foot and panting heart; With terror cast in cold
and shivering frights, They judge the place to
terror framed by art. Yet nature’s work it is,
of art untouch’d, So strait indeed, so vast
unto the eye, With such disorder’d
order strangely couch’d, And with such pleasing
horror low and high, That who it views must
needs remain aghast, Much at the work, more at
the Maker’s might; And muse how nature such
a plot could cast Where nothing seemeth
wrong, yet nothing right. Southwell used the image
of a deep and foreboding valley to introduce these lines about the brokenness
of the human soul: All pangs and heavy
passions here may find A thousand motives
suiting to their griefs, To feed the sorrows of
their troubled mind, And chase away dame
Pleasure’s vain reliefs. To plaining thoughts this
vale a rest may be, To which from worldly
joys they may retire; Where sorrow springs from
water, stone and tree; Where everything with
mourners doth conspire. Sit here, my soul, main
streams of tears afloat, Here all thy sinful foils
alone recount; Of solemn tunes make thou
the doleful note, That, by thy ditties,
dolour may amount.
While beauty remains in
the world, even after sin, it is no longer unspoilt. The beauty of this world
will always be tinged with sadness, with tears. The soul is truly a pilgrim and
cannot see this world as its home, but rather as a site through which one
passes on the way to the beauty which will truly last. Southwell’s most famous
poem, The Burning Babe, is one in a series of Christmas poems. It was a
poem so admired that the playwright Ben Jonson said he would trade all that he
had written to have written it himself. Here it is in its entirety: As I in hoary winter’s
night stood shivering in the snow, Surprised I was with
sudden heat which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful
eye to view what fire was near, A pretty babe all burning
bright did in the air appear; Who, scorchëd with
excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed As though his floods
should quench his flames which with his tears were fed. Alas, quoth he, but newly
born in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm
their hearts or feel my fire but I! My faultless breast the
furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and
sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; The fuel justice layeth
on, and mercy blows the coals, The metal in this furnace
wrought are men’s defilëd souls, For which, as now on fire
I am to work them to their good, So will I melt into a
bath to wash them in my blood. With this he vanished out
of sight and swiftly shrunk away, And straight I callëd unto
mind that it was Christmas day. In this poem, Southwell
fulfills the potential of poetry to serve the praise of God, juxtaposing the
love of Christ with the sins of man. It is this backdrop which
inspired Shakespeare to take up the poem by Southwell in Macbeth, possibly
his darkest play. Macbeth clearly manifests the satanic forces of
violence destructively at work in society. Using Southwell’s poetry in this
context is an affirmation of Southwell’s poetic vision, the spiritual power of
poetry to give praise even in the context of death and destruction. Macbeth, in
his soliloquy before the murder of the king Duncan, realizes the treachery and
injustice of his contemplated deed, and refers to the pity which it will invoke
in terms of a naked babe: Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties
so meek, hath been So clear in his great
office, that his virtues Will plead like angels,
trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his
taking-off; And pity, like a naked
new-born babe, Striding the blast, or
heaven’s cherubim, horsed Upon the sightless
couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid
deed in every eye, That tears shall drown
the wind. I have no spur To prick the sides of my
intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which
o’erleaps itself And falls on the other. The burning babe, praised
by Southwell, is called upon by Shakespeare as the witness to the treachery and
death of the innocent king and, one might say, to the treachery and death of
all the innocents betrayed for the faith in the usurpation of the old Catholic
way of life. These two poems represent
the ways in which Southwell saw the power of poetry in Christian life. In Vale
of Tears he captures the beauty of human life, in this case the natural
world, though it is in a state of sorrow and even somewhat in disorder. This reflects
the truth that Christian life is a pilgrimage: even beauty is passing and human
life moves in sorrow toward its goal beyond this world. This message poignantly
captures the state of his native England, where the medieval tradition of Merry
England was turned on its head by the Reformation and where the faith was
systematically persecuted. The Burning Babe passes more explicitly
into the use of poetry of praise of God, which Southwell sees most perfectly
expresses in the psalms. This mode keeps alive the heart of the world that he
saw passing away by expressing the Catholic faith in an artistically dynamic
way. Southwell, by his life
and even more so by his death, shows us the true duty of a poet. Not only to
express the truth, beauty, and goodness of the world, and their opposites, but
also to embody this truth and to be willing to lay one’s life down on its behalf.
The greatest poetry passes through the created world and into the holiness that
lies beyond, into the poetry of the soul’s loving communication with the
Creator. Southwell shows us how to present, embrace, and defend the
truth, no matter the cost. February 21, 2013
SOURCE : http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/st-robert-southwell-poet-and-martyr The Elizabethan martyr
who shows us how to love our faith posted Thursday, 1 Jun 2017 St Robert Southwell St Robert Southwell
heroically ministered to the faithful in Elizabethan England Having written about the
early Christian martyrs and some of their modern counterparts in my last
blog, I have been reading about the Elizabethan Jesuit martyr, St
Robert Southwell in Conscience is My Crown by Patricia W. Claus (Gracewing
£12.99). Actually, the book is a study of four interrelated men of the period,
the Rev Robert Lenthall, his cousin William Lenthall and John Hampden as well
as Robert Southwell, but the saint’s life is naturally the most moving part. Christian martyrs are
made not born. Southwell, who secretly arrived back in England in 1587 after
studying for the priesthood in Rome, was realistic about his chances of evading
capture under the punitive anti-clerical laws of Elizabeth I, writing soberly,
“I know very well that sea and land are gaping wide for me; and lions, as well
as wolves, go prowling in search of whom they may devour.” Yet he still added
bravely, “But I welcome, more than fear, their fangs.” After almost six years
secretly ministering to Catholics, writing devotional poetry as well as works
defending the Faith for his co-religionists, Southwell was captured in 1592 and
tortured to reveal the network of his friends and fellow priests. He gave
nothing away. Even Sir Robert Cecil, son of Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord
Burghley, admitted that “There is at present confined one Southwell, a Jesuit
who, thirteen [sic] times most cruelly tortured, cannot be induced to confess
anything, not even the colour of the horse whereon a certain day he rode…” On 19 February 1595
Southwell was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, proclaiming that he died
“because I am a Catholic priest, elected into the Society of Jesus in my
youth…” It is an inspiring life. Southwell and Shakespeare
both belonged to a “loosely-knit network of intermarried recusant families”
which gives Claus the opportunity to raise the question of Shakespeare’s
religion. It is known that Shakespeare’s father, as well as his older daughter,
were fine-paying recusant Catholics. Claus quotes The Quest for Shakespeare by
Joseph Pearce, which suggests that the poet “was not so much a “secret
Catholic” whose faith was unknown to all but a chosen (Catholic) few, but that
he was considered a “safe” or “tame” Catholic, whose faith was known but was
not considered a threat to the Queen or the state.” This seems a much more
likely conclusion than that offered e.g. by biographer Peter Ackroyd, also
quoted in the book, who concludes that because Shakespeare was able to
imaginatively take on the many different attitudes of his characters it meant
he himself had to be “a man without opinions…a man without beliefs.” Joseph
Pearce ripostes, “No-one on earth who has attained the age of sentience can be
without opinions or beliefs”, pointing out that that “Agnosticism is a belief,
atheism is a belief, nihilism is a belief”; quite so. The last word should go
to Robert Southwell, from whose poem “Content and Rich”, Claus takes her title:
“My conscience is my crown/Contented thoughts my rest/My heart is happy in
itself/My bliss is in my breast.”
Robert Southwell SJ 1561—1595 Robert Southwell, a poet
and prose writer of William
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson‘s
generation, spent his adolescence and early manhood in Italy. His brief
literary career flourished during the years when he was an underground Jesuit
priest in Protestant England. It is agreed that Southwell brought with him from
Italy the themes and the aesthetics of militant Counter-Reformation piety,
although there is disagreement over the terms used to describe the resulting
style: baroque, mannerist, metaphysical, meditative, Petrarchan, and contemplative are
among the adjectives proposed. There is also disagreement over Southwell’s
literary achievement and the extent and significance of his influence. What
cannot be doubted is his extraordinary popularity during his brief English
career and the 40 years following it. Contemporary writers seem to have been
impressed by his clear, precise English, by the beauty of its rhythms, and by
Southwell’s gift for combining passion with moral and intellectual analysis.
There is a strong case to be made for his influence on his contemporaries,
among them Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge,
and William
Shakespeare. as the Arians did
in the persecution of the Vandals, and as the Ethnicswere wont to
call Christians sarmentitios, and semasios, because they were tied to
halfpenny stakes, and burnt with shrubs: so let them draw us upon hurdles, hang
us, unbowel us alive, mangle us, boil us, and set our quarters upon their
gates, to be meat for the birds of the air, as they use to handle rebels: we
will answer them as the Christians of former persecutions have done. Hic
est habitus victoriae nostrae, hec palmata vestis, tali curru triumphamus,
merito itaque victis non placemus. Such is the manner of our victory, such our
conquerous garment, in such chariots do we triumph. What marvel therefore if
our vanquished enemies mislike us?
Repentant eyes are the cellars
of angels, and penitent tears their sweetest wines, which the savor of life
perfumeth, the taste of grace sweeteneth, and the purest colors of returning
innocency highly beautifieth. This dew of devotion never falleth, but the sun
of justice draweth it up, and upon what face soever it droppeth it maketh it
amiable in God’s eye.... No, no, the angels must still bathe themselves in the
pure streams of thy eyes, and thy face shall still be set with this liquid
pearl, that as out of thy tears were stroken the first sparks of thy Lord’s
love, so thy tears may be the oil, to nourish and feed his flame. Till death
dam up the springs, they shall never cease running: and then shall thy soul be
ferried in them to the harbor of life, that as by them it was first passed from
sin to grace, so in them it may be wafted from grace to glory. Southwell also develops a
real narrative intensity as he works out the logic of Mary’s passion. It was
his best-known and most influential prose work. Divers have been thrown into unsavory and dark dungeons, and brought so near starving, that some for famine have licked the very moisture off the walls; some have so far been consumed that they were hardly recovered to life. What unsufferable agonies we have been put to upon the rack, it is not possible to express, the feeling so far exceedeth all speech. Some with instruments have been rolled up together like a ball, and so crushed that the blood sprouted out at divers parts of their bodies.
Southwell’s minor works, A Short Rule of Good Life and the “Epistle
to His Father” (published around 1596-7), like the rest of his writings,
circulated in manuscript before publication. A Short Rule is a small
handbook for the layman who wishes to live a devout life. Like all of
Southwell’s prose, it draws upon the long tradition of Christian literature on
its subject; and its style, plain and expository, is beautifully matched to its
subject and purpose. Its adaptation to lay life of principles originally
developed for conventual life is particularly interesting: After prayer, on working
days, I must go presently about some work or exercise that may be of some
profit, and of all other things take heed of idleness, the mother of all vices.
Towards eleven (if company and other more weighty causes will permit) I may meditate
a little and call to mind how I have spent the morning, asking God grace to
spend the afternoon better.
Southwell’s advice on
running a household, bringing up children, looking after servants, and spending
time wisely places him in the company of contemporaries such as the Calvinist
William Perkins. A Short Rule, like Perkins’s Government of the
Tongue, is a founding document of Christian social and domestic life in the
modern world. It is not surprising that A Short Rule, like Robert
Persons’s Book of Resolution, circulated in versions edited for Protestant
use. According to the
Clarendon Press edition, 57 short poems survive. The most impressive of them to
20th-century taste is probably “A Vale of Tears,” a paysage moralisé of
the “troubled mind” based on the experience of traveling through the Alps. The
Christmas hymns, “New Heaven,
New War” and “New Prince, New Pomp,” using a simple, ballad style for
lofty, complex subject matter, have also been popular since 1900. The gnomic
poems such as “Times Go by Turns” or “Loss in Delays” are the least sympathetic
to modern taste, but they were greatly admired by Southwell’s first readers.
The one long poem, Saint Peter’s Complaint, is a complex study of a mind
in the process of acknowledging that for almost no reason it has betrayed the
person it loves most. The style, like that of Shakespeare’s Rape of
Lucrece (1594)—which it seems to have influenced—is elaborately, even
extravagantly conceitist; but the conceits are functional rather than
ornamental. They serve to locate the speaker’s mind in a universe of reference
and sympathetic relationship. SOURCE : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-southwell What's New Robert Southwell teaches
us how to survive Solange Strong Hertz REMNANT COLUMNIST,
Virginia From
the new book, The Passion of the Church, by Solange Hertz In the face of what looks
like unprecedented crisis a good thing to do is to pick up the nearest history
book and start reading in the presence of God. As the ancient Preacher said,
“What is it that hath been? The same that shall be. What is it that hath been
done? The same that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new, neither is
there any man able to say: Behold this is new. For it has already gone before
in the ages that were before us” (Eccles. 1:9-10). The past isn’t just
prologue, but the very pre-enactment of the present and the future. People, especially the
pious, often believe they are facing some dilemma no one has ever faced before.
That’s because most of them don’t live more than 80 years, and a third of that
had to be spent in sleeping just to keep going. And people forget. Even when
they remember, they are tied to their senses and all the confusing momentary
data these relay to mind and passions for tabulation. It’s normal to draw
conclusions relating only to the immediate surroundings. The devil, on the other
hand, never forgets. His life span is forever, and he never sleeps. Being pure
spirit he is furthermore unimpeded by matter in his thought process, and his
will is set undeniably in one direction – “seeking someone to devour.”
Instantly present wherever he acts, he has had thousands of years in which to
study us, noting with satisfaction that human nature never changes. He better
than anyone knows that man doesn’t “evolve.” This means he can use the same
tricks on us over and over. When we fall for them, often as not he has persuaded
us that we are confronted with a situation for which no rules have yet been
worked out, and that the solution is all up to us. Formal disobedience
easily follows. Vows and laws, designed precisely in anticipation of the
extraordinary – the very ropes keeping Ulysses lashed to the mast of the ship
when the sirens start singing – are discarded in the name of the emergency
itself. The old serpent told Mother Eve that God’s law couldn’t really apply in
the case of the forbidden fruit, which could hardly cause death, for “God knows
that in what day soever you [a plural pronoun in the Vulgate, by the way] shall
eat thereof, your eyes shall be open” (Gen. 3:5). God, the devil implied, was
waiting for Eve to grow up and show some initiative. He was simply testing her
– as indeed He was. The trick still works.
Schismatics of every shade, professing the most orthodox doctrine (which is
what makes them schismatics and not heretics) are proliferating among
traditionalists today, setting up ecclesiastical structures of all shapes! Good
Catholics seek to justify these schemes by maintaining that they have been
betrayed by the heads of the Church herself, even by her Supreme Head. So what’s new? When
Adam ratified Eve’s initiative, each and every one of us was formally betrayed
by the head of the whole human race long before we were ever conceived. The
pattern of “revolution from above” has not changed. The Son of God
himself was condemned not by underlings, but by the highest ecclesiastical and
secular authorities. He showed us how to defer to their authority even unto
death, all the while refusing in His actions to do “according to their works.”
He showed us the Cross. Like everyone else, the
devil has to work through divinely established channels to perpetrate any real
evil. He can’t create any new situations, but only shuffle the scenery. Only
God can say, “Behold I make all things new” (Apo. 21:5) . . . “A new
commandment I give unto you” (John 13:34). Only He can put the “new song” into
our mouths, reveal our new name written or seal a new Testament in His own
Precious Blood (Apo. 14:3, 2:17; Matt. 26:28). Power to produce something new
is a prerogative of divine omnipotence, closely akin to forgiving sins. Where
men seem to have created a new situation, we need only look under the stage
dressing to find the same old one which confronted Adam and then our Lord. One
succumbed to the siren song of revolution, the Other did not. With the same thing
happening all the time, prophecy comes easily to those with grace to read the
past correctly. Scripture itself, says St. Paul, was given as a prefiguration
of what will happen to us, “upon whom the ends of the world are come” (1 Cor.
10:11). Although things will be essentially the same, however, there will be
this difference: they will grow steadily worse until the climax is reached. Our
Lord promised us, “There shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been
from the beginning of the world” (Matt. 24:21). St. Paul wrote the young Bishop
Timothy, “In the last days shall come dangerous times” ( 2 Tim. 3:1), so
dangerous that we have our Lord’s word for it that if those future days were
not shortened by the divine mercy, no one could be saved (Matt. 24:22). As the
devil gains ascendancy over sinful men, choices will narrow, deceptions become
more subtle in the fading light of the eclipsing Church. The Jesuit martyr St.
Robert Southwell thought it was bad enough in England four centuries ago when
he wrote, “Now is the time in which many of our forefathers desired to live!”
What would he say today? Addressing his Catholic
contemporaries, he declared, “You it is, whom God hath allotted to be the chief
actors in this contest. From your veins He means to derive the streams that
shall water His Church. He hath made choice of you to delight His friends and
confound His enemies, with the beauty and grace of your virtuous life and
patient constancy. Now is the time come for the light of the world to blaze
out; for the salt of the earth to season weak souls tending to corruption; yea,
for the good shepherd to spend his life for the defense of his silly flock. The
pruning-time is come, and in order that the tree of the Church may sprout out
more abundantly, the branches and boughs of full growth are lopped off.
Now is the time come of which Christ forewarned us: ‘It shall come to pass that
he who killeth you shall think he doth God a service.’ Lo, the things that were
said are now done; and now, since that is fulfilled which was foretold, that
which was promised will also be performed; our Lord himself assuring us: ‘When
you see all these things come to pass, then know you that the kingdom of heaven
is at hand.’” Where these words do not
apply to some extent, there can be only one reason, for St. Paul told St.
Timothy categorically that all “that will live godly in Christ Jesus
shall suffer persecution” (2 Tim. 3:12). Where some persecution is not felt in
God’s Church is where faith has come to terms with the world – if not battling
to maintain the status quo in the name of religion. As Fr. Southwell
wrote, “When England was Catholic, she had many glorious confessors; it is for
the honor and benefit of our country that it should be well stored with a
number of martyrs; and we have now, God be thanked! such martyr-makers in
authority as mean, if they have their will, to make saints enough to furnish
all our churches with treasure, when it shall please God to restore them to
their true honors; and doubt not but either they or their posterity shall see
the very prisons of execution become places of reverence and devotion.” England as a nation has
yet to return to the Faith, for although bloody martyrdoms are no longer the
rule, the times have only worsened. Reading English history we can learn some
of the things to expect, for the situation that pertained there can now be said
to exist within the Church herself. As a seminarian in Douai and Rome, Fr.
Southwell searched like us for some historical precedent to enlighten him, and
found a satisfactory one in the storm which decimated the Church in North
Africa in the third century. There was indeed a close resemblance between what
happened there and in England, a Catholic country long known as “our Lady’s
bower.” At a time when the Church in Africa appeared to be so flourishing
that there seems to have been serious talk of shifting some of her Roman
administration to Carthage, two persecutions were unleashed upon it, the first
under the Emperor Decius, the second under Valerian. From the first moment,
thousands of Catholics, both priests and laity, rushed to the pagan temples to
sacrifice or burn incense to the gods without waiting to be asked, rather than
risk confiscation of their property, let alone death. The more wily among them,
called the libellatici, bought certificates from the Roman magistrates
stating they had complied with the government order of worship whereas in
reality they had not. The martyrs – among them St. Perpetua and St. Felicity
mentioned in the Holy Mass – were great, but few and far between. St. Cyprian, native
Bishop of Carthage, ran for cover during the first persecution, but vehemently
excoriated both kinds of lapses. He managed to ready a valiant remnant for the
second persecution, during which he laid down his own life along with many
others; but as later in England, Christianity never recovered its former
preeminence in Africa, being furthermore left in the grip of the Novatian
schism, which raged for generations. Arising from the controversy over the
canonical standing of former defectors, this schism eventually set up an
anti-Pope to enforce its rigid disciplines against these lapsed Catholics, so
characteristic of the schismatic mentality is merciless orthodoxy, St.
Cyprian, Pope St. Cornelius and other Popes pled in vain for leniency
toward those who repented. Having never before
fallen away in such unheard of numbers, many African Christians sincerely
believed that this was the Great Apostasy of the last days, a normal assumption
ever since then, wherever the Church herself seems to be defecting. Although
many of the predicted signs are often present, and some major political figure
would seem to fit the description of the Antichrist, so far the conclusive
proof postulated by our Lord has been conspicuously missing, for He told the
Jews, “I am come in the name of my Father, and you receive me not; if another
shall come in his own name, him you will receive” (John 5:43). So far no persecutor has
been publicly acclaimed by the Jews as their Messiah, although by now the time
may not be far off. Even St. Cyprian, like Fr. Southwell and all of us, seemed
to have expected this false Messiah momentarily. He exhorted his flock, “Nor
let any one of you, beloved brethren, be so terrified by the fear of
persecution, or the coming of the threatening Antichrist, as not to be found
armed for all things by the evangelical exhortations and precepts, and by the
heavenly warnings. Antichrist is coming, but above him comes Christ also!” Today, amid clearer and
clearer apocalyptic signs, the number of apostates only continues to grow. Once
in the thousands, they can now be counted in the millions, all the while God
continues to distill His saints at His divine leisure. As Fr. Southwell looked
to St. Cyprian of Carthage for inspiration in his apostolate to the abandoned
sheep of Elizabethan England, we can now look to him. The afore-cited quotation
from him occurs in his Epistle of Comfort. Now a spiritual classic,
it survives today in a huge body of some 300 volumes of English recusant
literature now thumbed almost exclusively by scholars, but which represent the
Herculean efforts of Catholic writers to keep the true Faith alive and in print
amid the avalanche of poisonous heretical works then only beginning to engulf
the faithful the world over. To the general run of
posterity Robert Southwell is merely an English poet of acknowledged genius who
authored the famous poem “The Burning Babe.” Anthologies
occasionally mention his Catholic priesthood, but more likely limit themselves
to pointing out his uncanny ability to make Elizabethan conceits and verse
forms serve sacred subjects. His prose works, also using brilliant imagery, are
always to the same religious purpose. The English persecution
can be said to have officially begun with Elizabeth’s first Parliament, which
introduced by law actual changes in worship and put legal sanctions behind
them. By the close of 1587 the Epistle was ready to strengthen the
faithful who had taken a stand against Cranmer’s Mass, mostly by preparing them
for the worst. Although its original title page read “Imprinted at Paris,” the
work is printed on English paper and generally known to have been rolled off
the secret press operated in the very heart of London by Fr. Southwell’s
religious Superior, Fr. Henry Garnet, S.J. Its main theme is the
same as St. Thomas More’s great Dialogue of Comfort penned in the
Tower nearly a half century before. Both expound the great supernatural reasons
for standing firm against the enemy, but whereas the layman More approaches the
problem speculatively, Fr. Southwell approaches it as a priest and pastor of
souls. Exuding immediacy and urgency, the Epistle is intensely
practical, and small wonder, for it began as a series of letters smuggled to
the imprisoned St. Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, to sustain him
during the long captivity in which he finally died, bereft all the while of the
Sacraments and Catholic companionship of any kind. A godson of Philip II of
Spain and an erstwhile favorite of Elizabeth’s, the young Earl had cut short a
worldly, pleasure-seeking court life which caused his wife much suffering, by a
sudden fervent conversion to the old Faith and an impolitic refusal to attend
the new church services. The Jesuit martyr never
actually met him, but a deep spiritual friendship developed between them by
correspondence, and eventually both were canonized on the same day in 1970. It
is his letters to the young Earl that Fr. Southwell later collected and revised
for general consumption by deleting from them particulars which would have
applied only to the original recipient. The Epistle makes
fulsome use of what the Earl’s pious wife dubbed “the blessed Fr. Southwell’s
remedy” against fear: To imagine the worst, to expect it, and to offer it
up beforehand to almighty God in union with the sufferings of the Redeemer
before anything happened to shake one’s resolve. Keeping before his
readers the supernatural nature of their trial, he bids them look at the four
great consolations persecution offers them: “First, it must needs be a
great comfort to those that, either reclaimed from schism or heresy, or from a
dissolute life to the constant profession of the Catholic faith, are for that
cause persecuted by Satan and his instruments: for it is a very great sign that
they are delivered out of his power and accounted by him as sheep of God’s
flock, seeing that otherwise he would never so heavily pursue them. . . . It is
not for us to regard the slanders of men, or to desert the service of God for
them, seeing that it is but a very slender excuse to allege the fear of words
of a vassal as a just impediment for not performing our duty towards our
Sovereign. The friendship of this world is an enemy to God. . . . “Secondly, we should
willingly undergo persecution also because ‘whom God loveth He chastiseth, and
scourgeth every child He receiveth. . . .’ The vanities of this world
cast the soul into so delightsome a frenzy, and lull it so dangerously asleep,
that many in a fit of licentiousness run headlong to perdition, and while
they rejoice they rave; and others, in a careless and remiss kind of life,
sleep themselves to death. . . . To wean us from an unnatural nurse, God
anointeth her breast with the bitterness of tribulation. “And in the third place,
one . . . cannot but think that it is a most comfortable thing to suffer
adversity for a good cause; seeing that it is not only the livery and
cognizance of Christ, but the very garment of royalty which He chose to wear in
this life. . . . And surely now is the time that we are called by Christ
through fire and water, and now with loud voice doth He renew His old
proclamation: ‘Whoever loveth father, mother, wife, children, house or living
more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he that taketh not up his cross and
follow Me, cannot be My disciple. . . .’ What comfort can a man reap in a place
that is governed by the Prince of darkness and peopled with our enemies and the
enemies of God; where vice is advanced, virtue scorned, the bad rewarded and
the good oppressed? “But in the fourth place,
to come to the principal drift of my discourse, what more forcible things can I
set before your eyes as motives to comfort you in your tribulation, than the
cause of your persecution, the honor of your present estate and the future
reward of your patient and constant sufferance? And first, as to the cause that
you defend – which is no less than the only true and Catholic religion. You
defend that Church which is avouched by all antiquity; confirmed by the blood
of martyrs; gainsaid by the heretics of all ages and most undoubtedly approved
by all concurring testimonies. You defend that Church of Rome to which, as St.
Cyprian says, ‘misbelief can have no access, and which can receive no forgery.’ “But, on the other side,
two hundred founders of new sects that have been since Christ’s time, though
they have for a season flourished and prevailed, having emperors and potentates
to defend them, infinite books and writings to divulge their doctrines and all
temporal aids to set them forward; yet we see that their memory is quite
abolished, their names commonly unknown and no more mention of them than the
condemnation and disproof of their errors recorded by Catholic writers. The
same doubtless will be the end of the novelties of our days, which being only
parts of their corruptions, revived and raked out of oblivion, as heretofore
they vanished with their devisers, so will they now with their revivers. More
than other things under the sun, heresy is never new! “Yet, so ripe is heresy
grown, so infinite the sects and divisions into which it has spread, besides
new ones daily uprising, that the variety of religions and the uncertainty
which among so many is truest, hath made the greater part of our country to
believe none at all. And this, in truth, is the end and last step to which
heresy bringeth a man. Seeing therefore that the ship of St. Peter now saileth,
not against the wind of one evil spirit, or against the stress of one flood of
heresy, but against a tide of all the pestilent spirits of former ages, and
against the mainstream of all heresy; it is no less necessary than glorious for
us to employ our last endeavors in the defense thereof; and think our limbs
happily lost, our blood blessedly bestowed, our lives most honorably spent in
this so noble and important a cause.”
St. Robert sealed these
words with his own blood and dismembered limbs at Tyburn on February 21, 1595.
It would be hard to believe he wasn’t writing for us who are now at grips with
an evil Pope St. Pius X labeled “the compendium of all heresies,” which has
decimated Christendom not only as a political entity, but is now leaving gaping
holes in every family. That so far it has had to rely so little on open
physical violence is proof of its power and virulence. St. Robert reminds us,
“Your adversaries are mighty, their forces very great, their vantage not
unknown, their malice experienced: but your Captain has always conquered, your
cause has in the end always advanced, your predecessors never lost the field;
wherefore then should you have less hope of the victory? Christianity is a
warfare, and Christians spiritual soldiers. . . . Now cometh the winnower with
his fan to see who is blown away like light chaff and who resists the blasts
like massy wheat. . . . Many may seem faithful in the calm of the Church, but
when the blasts of diversity bluster against them, few are found in the fruit
of martyrdom.” Ever envisaging the
worst, St. Robert proceeds to show the tremendous spiritual advantages to be
found in prison: “For though prisons in themselves be the folds of Satan, to
harbor his lewd flock, yet when the cause ennobles the name of prisoner, the
prisoner abolishes the dishonor of the place. What thing of old more odious
than the cross? What place more abhorred than the Mount of Calvary? . . .Think
not of the name prison and you will find it a retiring place fittest to serve
God. . . a school of divine and hidden mysteries to God’s friends, where Joseph
learned to decipher dreams, Samson recovered his strength and Manassas was
converted. The saint’s knowledge of prison life was far from academic. Before
undergoing torture and imprisonment himself, he had contrived to visit many
prisoners secretly, even whole groups of them. His one recorded sermon and one
of his finest prose works, “Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears,” was delivered on
her feast day in London’s famous Clink only a month after his return from the
Continent. So, if it comes to martyrdom, so much the better. We must all die
anyway. “Why, therefore, should we fear that which cannot be avoided?. . . He dies
old enough who dies good. . . . The baptism of blood surpasses that of water,
for it is the greatest point of charity by God’s testimony. Fr. Southwell concludes
his Epistle by upbraiding those Catholics who have submitted to the
new English religion out of false obedience to their superiors for the scandal
they give “in confirming the obstinacy of misbelievers, in weakening and
overthrowing the faith of the faint-hearted and wavering.” He speaks of the
“danger of infection by contagious speeches that creep and corrode like
canker.” To the would-be ecumenists he says, “I wish not to expose your
contempt of the canon of the Apostles, of the Council of Laodicea and others
forbidding to resort to the prayers or conventicles of heretics; of the example
of all antiquity condemning the same; of the verdict and common consent of the
profoundest writers in Christendom; and in particular, of the choice men in the
Tridentine Council who, after long sifting and examining this point, in the end
found it altogether unlawful and avouched it better to suffer all kinds of
torment than yield to it. Yea, although they were desired not to make this a
public decree, in respect to the troubles that might arise to the Catholics in
England, in whose behalf the question of going to church was proposed; yet the
Legate and the aforesaid Fathers gave this answer: that they would have their
resolution no less accounted of than if it were the censure of the whole
Council.” Fr. Southwell reminds his
readers of their duty to give good example. “The more exquisite the rigors our
enemies exercise against us, the greater is the allurement of others to our
religion. . . everyone seeing such constancy is cast into some scruple. But
alas, many of them, yielding before the battle. . . have not left themselves so
much as this excuse – that they went to church unwillingly. They offer
themselves voluntarily; they run unwittingly to their ruin and seem rather to
embrace a thing before desired than to yield to an occasion they would fain
have avoided. And did not your feet stumble, your eyes grow dim, your hearts
quake and your bodies tremble when you came into the polluted synagogue? Could
the servant of Christ abide in that place?. . . Could you come hither to offer
your prayers unto God? . . . Will you seek to shelter yourselves under the
pretext that you are in mind Catholics and that you come to church only to obey
the law?” He reminds these weak
Catholics, “You carry also with you your dear innocents, . . . thus training
your little ones to destruction, unlike the good mother in Machabees who rather
exhorted her children to martyrdom than to offend by saving their lives.” He
warns, “Divers heretics will be witnesses against you in the day of judgment,
for,” quoting St. Cyprian, “if the faith that conquers be crowned, the
perfidiousness that betrays shall be chastised.” In every age the wavering side
with an illusory majority, lacking the spiritual sight of the prophet Eliseus,
who reminded the Israelites besieged by the Syrian multitudes, “Fear not, for
there are more with us than with them” ( 4 Kgs. 6:16). In St. Thomas
More’s Dialogue of Comfort there is a fine passage underscoring this
truth: “Now, if it were . . . that you should be brought through the
broad high street of a great city and that all along the way that you were
going there were on the one side of the way a rabble of ragged beggars and
madmen that would despise and dispraise you, with all the shameful names that
they could call you, and all the villainous words that they could say to you:
and that there were then all along the other side of the same street . . . a
goodly company standing in a fair range, a row of wise and worshipful folk
allowing and commending you, more than fifteen times as many as that rabble of
ragged beggars and railing madmen are: would you cease your progress willingly,
believing that you went unto your shame because of the shameful jesting and
railing of those mad, foolish wretches? Or hold on your way with a good cheer
and a glad heart, thinking yourself much honored by the laud and approbation of
that other honorable sort? A trenchant appraisal of the militant Catholic here
below who sides with the real majority in the Church – the countless angelic
hosts and multitudes of the blessed martyrs and saints who witness his trials.” St. Robert likewise begs
us not to go to perdition with the faithless “for company’s sake. . . . Let not
the example of those that fall make you weaker. If they had been of us they
would have stayed with us. We should rejoice when the wolves are separated from
the sheep of Christ. . . Let no man imagine that the good go out of the Church.
The wind carries not away the wheat, neither does the storm overthrow the trees
that are strong rooted.” He closes with a description of what heaven will be
like, and the words, “Not he who begins, but he who perseveres unto the end
shall be saved.” Although responsible for
many conversions in the course of the strenuous underground ministry he
exercised for some six miraculous years around London before being caught, St.
Robert was not concerned with non-Catholics. He saw his duty in supplying the
desperate needs of the uprooted faithful who were merely trying to save their
souls amid the general apostasy. He contrived to reach not only those who were incarcerated,
like the Earl, and perhaps facing the death penalty, but larger numbers like
the Earl’s wife, the Countess Anne Dacres, who were trying to lead good
Catholic lives at large, isolated from most of society and yet courting almost
certain danger by worshiping in secret. To this end he wrote the Short
Rule of a Good Life, which issued from Fr. Garnet’s press shortly after
its author’s martyrdom. It was coupled with the beautiful, poignant and long
Letter to his Father,[1] Richard Southwell, exhorting
him to return to the Faith. This gentleman had made fatal compromises in hopes
of saving the family fortune, but found grace with God after his son’s
sacrifice. In 1600 Fr. Garnet was able to write his Jesuit Superior, “Mr. Southwell,
Robert’s father, has just died a Catholic.”The saint’s name did not appear on
the volume, but everyone knew the notorious Fr. Southwell had written it, and
so great was his literary reputation throughout England that it circulated
freely. After a half century of religious chaos the English were so desperate
for good spiritual direction that even the heretics made use of it. Some of the
editions even boasted official sanction. Purged of references to saints, mortal
and venial sins and Catholic practices, the Short Rule emerged in
Anglican dress as the reformers’ own doctrine. This was not uncommon practice
on their part, for tampering was easier and more profitable than outright
suppression, always difficult to enforce. A like fate overtook Fr. Persons’
edition of Loarte’s Christian Directory, cleverly modified by a
Calvinist divine. As practical and
immediate as the Epistle, the Short Rule is generally
acknowledged to have been written for the Countess of Arundel. In any case her
saintly personal life was a great credit to Fr. Southwell’s spiritual
direction, for this gracious, valiant woman daily risked her life to help him
and many other priests reach as many Catholics as possible, affording the
lodging, material helps and protection without which their ministry would soon
have foundered. Not the least of her contributions to the cause was the
aforementioned printing press. One of the Catholic counties of Maryland bears
her name to this day. On reading the Rule one
is struck first by its crashing lack of originality. The work of a highly
gifted, imaginative poet, its contents are pretty much an Ignatian version of
hard-headed old Catholic doctrine and precepts handed down for generations. If
the author were not known, it would be hard to discern from the text alone that
it was written during a period of intense persecution, when the most respected,
long-standing Catholic families were being systematically shattered, robbed and
humiliated for refusing to accept a man made reform soon to cast out an entire
Christian nation for hundreds of years from the Church Christ founded.
One of the few clues to the contemporary scene occurs in a section headed “On
the Care of My Children,” where parents are urged to “tell them often of the
abbeys, and the virtue of the old monks and friars and other priests and
religious women.” Needless to say, this passage did not escape the Anglican
editor, who substituted, “tell them often of the virtue of their predecessors,
and of the truth and honesty of the old time and the iniquity of ours.” Never at any time does
the author descend to personal invective or mention those laboring to destroy
the Faith among his contemporaries. He lays down in the first chapter: “I
cannot serve God in this world, nor go about to enjoy Him in the next, but that
God’s enemies and mine will repine and seek to hinder me: which are
three.” Elizabeth? Cranmer? Perhaps Sir Henry Walsingham and his
bloodhound Richard Topcliffe? Hardly. The enemies he speaks of are far more
formidable, and more ancient: the world, the flesh and the devil. “Wherefore I must resolve
myself and set it down as a thing undoubted that my whole life must be a
continual combat with these adversaries, whom I must assuredly persuade myself
do lie hourly in wait for me to seek their advantage, and that their malice is
so implacable and their hatred against me so rooted in them that I must never
look to have one hour secure from their assaults, but that they will from time
to time, so long as there is breath in my body, still labor to make me
forsake and offend God, allure me to their service and draw me to my
damnation.” Thus does he strike the nub of all persecution in England or
anywhere. Had every English Catholic been living by the principles outlined in
the Countess’ Rule, Cranmer and his revolution would not have
collapsed, but never happened, because there would have been no need to purify
their souls. How reassuring therefore
to find nothing new in all these pages! Their whole tenor is how to maintain
union with God by the perfect accomplishment of His holy will. It is the
ancient science of the saints, for whom God’s will soars above every other
means of union, even the Eucharist.. For instance, Fr. Southwell makes no
mention of spiritual Communion, a practice so useful, consoling, and so often
recommended to those deprived of the Sacraments. But why should he? If
the Rule is followed, one’s whole life becomes one unbroken spiritual
Communion, continuing without interruption into eternity. The baptized under
persecution may not be able to attend Mass, but they can live it in their flesh
by mystical union with Christ in prayer and suffering. Where it is impossible
to do both, mere attendance pales by comparison in cases where God himself has
removed the liturgical wraps from the essential reality. Sometimes it would
seem that we must be torn periodically from the Sacraments and liturgy in order
to be forcibly reminded of their divine Source. Many saints have suffered this
trial. Persecution stands at the summit of the Beatitudes, for “your reward is
very great in heaven” (Matt. 5;12). St. Cyprian, who fought
to preserve the same Latin Rite Mass which is proscribed nearly everywhere
today, and for which Fr. Southwell laid down his life, had this to say to the
heretics of his day: “If in the sacrifice Christ offered no one is to be
imitated but Christ, we must beyond doubt obey and do what Christ did, and what
He commanded to be done: since in the Gospel He tells us: ‘You are my friends
if you do the things I command you’ (John 15:14). . . So if Christ alone is to
be listened to, we must pay no attention to what another thinks is to be done,
but do what Christ who is above all first did. We are not to follow after the
notions of men, but the truth of God; since God says to us by His prophet
Isaiah: ‘In vain do they worship Me, teaching the doctrines and the commands of
men’ (29:13). “And in the Gospel He
says this same thing: ‘Making void the word of God by your own tradition, which
you have given forth’ (Mk. 4:13). And He lays it down in another place
and says, ‘He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and
shall so teach men, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt.
5:19). And if it is not lawful to undo even the least of the Lord’s
commandments, how much more unlawful is it to break those that are so grave, so
serious, so closely related to the mystery of the Lord’s Passion and to our own
Redemption, or to change into something else, because of some human notion,
that which has been divinely handed down to us?” Living the Mass in
prefiguration in the midst of the fiery furnace in Babylon, the good Azarias
prayed, “We, O Lord, are diminished more than any nation and are brought low in
all the earth this day for our sins. Neither is there at this time prince or
leader, or prophet, or holocaust, or sacrifice, or oblation, or incense, or
place of first-fruits before Thee, that we may find mercy: nevertheless in a
contrite heart and humble spirit let us be accepted. As in holocausts of rams
and bullocks, and as in thousands of fat lambs: so let our sacrifice be made in
Thy sight this day, that it may please Thee: for there is no confusion to them
that trust in Thee” (Dan. 4:37-40). The picture was just as
bleak for English Catholics in Fr. Southwell’s day. Although St. Pius V had
excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth as Queen of England, relieving her
subjects of all allegiance to her, he had died before being able to organize
the military expedition designed to enforce the Bull, and the two organized by his
successor Gregory XIII had both failed through treachery. The spiritual state
of Europe was such that exterior means had lost all power. In the Short
Rule St. Robert therefore counsels the penitent, “a perfect resignation of
myself into God’s hands, with a full desire that He should me as it were to His
glory, whether it were to my temporal comfort or no. And to be as ready to
serve Him in misery, need and affliction as in prosperity and pleasure,
thinking it my chiefest delight to be used as God will, and to have His
pleasure and providence fully accomplished in me, which is the end for which I
was created and for which I do now live. . . To which these considerations may
help me: “First, the end I aim at
is God’s glory in this world and His reward in the next; and therefore, knowing
that nothing but my voluntary sin can bar me from this end, what need I much
care by what means God will have me attain it? For the means can last but a
little, and the end endureth forever and is so much the more comfortable in
that it has been achieved with more discomfortable toils. “Secondly, God loves me
more than I love myself, and is so wise that He best sees what is fittest for
me, all present and future circumstances considered. He is so mighty that what
His wisdom and love shall conclude for my good His power can put into
execution; and therefore let me rather yield myself wholly to His providence
than mine own desires. “Thirdly, whatsoever
moves me to fear or dislike anything which I could not frame my mind to bear, God
sees it as well and far better than I, yea, and all other secret and unknown
hazards that are annexed to that thing. If then He, knowing all these things,
will nevertheless let it happen to me, I must assure myself that it proceeds of
love and is for my greater good, and that having laid a heavy burden upon weak
forces will by His grace supply all my fears, wants and frailties.” We can imagine what
impact such words must have had when the public first read them, so soon after
the cruel martyrdom God had let happen to their author. Fr. Garnet’s Preface to
the Reader runs, “The author of this little book, gentle reader, I nothing
doubt but is very well known to thee, as also for his learning, piety, zeal,
charity, fortitude and other rare singular qualities, but especially for his
precious death he is renowned to the world abroad. Neither needeth there any
extraordinary vision, but the sound and certain doctrine of the Catholic Church
is sufficient to persuade that he is a most glorious saint in heaven. . . . But
because thou shouldst not be ignorant of the way by which this valiant champion
of Christ arrived unto so happy a country, he himself hath left behind him for
thy benefit, and even among the last of his fruitful labors for the good of
souls had designed to publish unto the world the description of this most
gainful voyage to heaven . . . the Short Rule of a Good Life. For Fr. Southwell and
many other martyrs the more apt title might have been Good Rule for a
Short Life. As St. Thomas More put it in his Dialogue of
Comfort, “There is no born Turk so cruel to Christian folk as is the false
Christian that falleth from the faith.” Where Master Rich was not lacking to
St. Thomas, nor Judas to Christ, neither were false brethren lacking to the
besieged Catholics of England. Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s
Secretary of State and Chief of Security, had agents even among the English
seminarians studying abroad for the priesthood, who not only served as
informants, but fomented every possible dissension among clergy and students. Others, posing as
Catholics and moving in the clandestine Mass groups, became adept at enrolling
the weaker members in little plots and counter-plots and then denouncing them
to the authorities. The most famous of these machinations by far was the
so-called Babington Plot, named after the unfortunate Anthony Babington whom
Walsingham chose for the role of patsy, as we would say today. Ostensibly
rigged to assassinate Elizabeth and enthrone Mary Queen of Scots as the
rightful English monarch, this conspiracy was entirely concocted by the enemy.
It brought to ruin and the gallows not only the Catholics directly implicated,
together with those who unknowingly befriended them, but provided the long
sought for pretext for the execution of Mary, who had in no way promoted it,
although she had been told of it. Even Fr. Southwell,
lately arrived in England, had barely escaped being innocently involved. So
consummate had been the deception, he had at first believed the plot was indeed
the work of Catholics. In his Humble Supplication to Her Majesty – penned
to protest the Proclamation of 1591 branding priests like himself as dissolute
agents of Spain – the nobly born Jesuit is able later to inform Elizabeth that
Walsingham’s spy Robert Poley was “the chief instrument to contrive and
prosecute the matter, to draw into the net such green wits as . . . might
easily be overwrought by Mr. Secretary’s subtle and sifting wit. For Poley
masking his secret intentions under the face of religion, and abusing with
irreligious hypocrisy all rites and sacraments to borrow the false opinion of a
Catholic, still fed the poor gentleman [Babington] with his master’s baits, and
he holding the line in his hand, suffered them like silly fishes to play
themselves upon the hook till they were thoroughly fastened, that then he might
strike at his own pleasure, and be sure to draw them to a certain destruction.”
The destruction was
thorough once the trap was sprung. In An Autobiography from the Jesuit
Underground, Fr. William Weston later wrote, “On one side of my room was
the public road. On the other the river Thames. Throughout the day and, I
think, for several days that followed, great crowds gathered in the street
cheering and making merry. They piled up masses of wood and set fire to them,
then stood around talking wildly all the time against the Pope, the King of
Spain, against Catholics and the Queen of Scots; and not the least, as you can
guess, against the Jesuits. . . On the other side of the river the sight
was more terrible still. Catholics tied hand and foot were ferried across the
river, up and down between the Tower and Westminster where the trials were
held. . . For the space of at least six or seven weeks this was my daily
spectacle. During all that time the trials were conducted, death sentences
pronounced on many gentlemen and the executions carried out. Fr. Southwell writes in
the Supplication: “All highways were watched, infinite houses
searched, hues and cries raised, frights bruited in people’s ears, as though
the whole realm had been on fire, whereas in truth it was but the hissing of a
few green twigs of their own kindling, which they might without any such uproar
have quenched with a handful of water.” And again, “As for this action of
Babington, it was in truth rather a snare to entrap them than any device of
their own, since it was both plotted, furthered and finished by Sir Francis
Walsingham and his other complices, who laid and hatched all the particulars
thereof, as they thought it would best fall out of the discredit of Catholics
and cutting off the Queen of Scots.” His personal estimation
of the Scottish queen is best revealed in a stanza of a poem he composed at her
death which is rarely found in anthologies: Alive a Queen, now dead a
Saint; Once Mary called, my name
now Martyr is; From earthly reign
debarred by restraint, In lieu whereof I reign
in heavenly bliss. Using poetic license to
the full, Fr. Southwell found no difficulty in canonizing England’s and
Scotland’s rightful sovereign. May the Church set her seal on her in time! Like
her eulogizer, Mary by God’s grace achieved the perfect solution to religious
persecution. As St. Cyprian said, “This is He, our God! Not the God of all men,
but of the faithful, and of those who believe in Him, who when He comes at His
second coming, shall appear openly and not keep silence. . . Let us wait for
Him, dearly beloved, our Judge and our Avenger; who shall revenge, together
with Himself, the people of His Church and the number of all the just from the
beginning of the world.” There is no such thing as
a political solution to a battle not waged against flesh and blood, beyond the
sphere of politics, and Fr. Southwell never proposed any by either word or
deed. In any age what is a political solution but an escape from suffering by
substituting the natural for the supernatural? At the dawn of Marxism the
Russian philosopher Berdyaev pointed out how this modern political solution is
nothing but a categorical flight from the Cross. The Marxist, says he in The
Russian Revolution, “will not accept a world whose creation is accompanied
by the sufferings of human beings. He wants to destroy that world and create a
new one where suffering does not exist. God created an unjust world full of
suffering, and therefore He must be rejected for moral reasons. . . The only
thing to pit against integral Communism, materialistic Communism, is integral
Christianity.” Like Isaias pleading with
Achaz “at the conduit of the upper pool” to trust God and not come to terms
with the enemies besieging Jerusalem (Is. 7), Fr. Southwell never ceased proposing
integral Christianity, but he was heeded little more than the old prophet, for
by the 17th century the enemy had literally poisoned the whole recusant body
with the bait of political solutions. Suspicion and in-fighting reduced
Catholic resistance to abject begging for peaceful co-existence with the
“separated brethren.” Under Lord Baltimore the “political solution” came to
America, where it soon developed into the heresy of Americanism which is now
infecting the whole world. If Fr. Southwell, like Christ
our Lord, was immune to political temptations, again like His Master, he was
not immune to betrayal. He was caught at Uxenden, home of the Bellamys, a
staunch Catholic family who had also befriended St. Edmund Campion, Fr.
Persons, Fr. Weston, Fr. Garnet and many other underground priests. Two of its
sons were put to death, a third tortured and exiled, with the mother left to
die in prison, as innocent victims of the Babington Plot. Tragically, it was a
daughter of the house, Anne Bellamy, who was prevailed upon to betray Robert
Southwell. This unfortunate young woman had gone valiantly to prison for her
faith, but was raped there by Topcliffe and became pregnant. Christopher Devlin puts
the story thus in his biography of the Saint: “Anne in her misery was to
be offered the hope of saving her family from all future vexation by enticing
Southwell to spend one night under their roof, informing Topcliffe meanwhile of
the time and hiding-place. Thus the Bellamys would be caught in a position
where only Topcliffe’s personal favor could preserve their lives and property.
The ploy had actually been concocted by one Nicholas Jones, a servant of
Topcliffe’s with high ambitions. Well before her child was due, Anne would be
married to Nicholas Jones – but married in the Church with the blessing of her
parents, and with the rich manor of Preston from the Bellamy lands as her
dowry. In the event, five innocent people, three men and two women, died in
great pain, and several others were ruined, in order to provide the weaver’s
son [Jones] with a country-house. It was as Mrs. Nicholas
Jones that Anne Bellamy testified against St. Robert Southwell at his trial. He
was executed the following day. So what’s new? He was only 34, but
as he had put it to the young Earl of Arundel, “He dies old enough who dies
good!” St. Robert Southwell,
pray for us!
[1] These
works are available in one volume from the Folger Shakespearean Library in
Washington, D.C., unfortunately in a tampered Protestant version, but with the
original passages supplied in an Appendix.SOURCE : https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/archive-2005-0930-southwell.htm  San Roberto Southwell Sacerdote
gesuita, martire >>>
Visualizza la Scheda del Gruppo cui appartiene Horsham Saint Faith,
Inghilterra, 1561 - Tyburn, Londra, Inghilterra, 21 febbraio 1595 Martirologio
Romano: Sempre a Londra, san Roberto Southwell, sacerdote della Compagnia
di Gesù e martire, che svolse per molti anni il suo ministero in questa città e
nella regione limitrofa e compose inni spirituali; arrestato per il suo
sacerdozio, per ordine della stessa regina fu torturato con grande crudeltà e a
Tyburn coronò il suo martirio con l’impiccagione. Il santo oggi festeggiato
appartiene alla folta schiera di martiri cattolici uccisi dagli anglicani in
Inghilterra, proprio al tempo dell’affermazione nell’isola della Chiesa
nazionale nata dallo strappo tra il re Enrico VIII ed il Romano Pontefice. Il
ricordo di questi eroici testimoni della fede non andò perduto e parecchi di
essi sono stati beatificati dai papi tra l’Ottocento ed il Novecento. Una
quarantina di essi sono anche stati canonizzati da Papa Paolo VI il 25 ottobre
1970, tra i quali il personaggio oggetto della presente scheda agiografica. Robert Southwell nacque
nel 1561 a Horsham Saint Faith, nel Norfolk, regione dell’Inghilterra). In età
giovanile fu mandato in Francia per gli studi, poiché tutte le istituzioni
accademiche inglesi erano ormai divenute protestanti: studiò dunque presso il Collegio
Inglese a Douai ed il parigino Collegio di Clermont. Qui entrò a contatto con i
gesuiti e maturò la decisione di entrare nella Compagnia. L’ammissione gli fu
rifiutata a causa dell’età ancor troppo giovane, ma il Southwell ben lontano
dal demordere intraprese a piedi un pellegrinaggio a Roma, ove fu accolto e
poté entrare nel noviziato di Sant’Andrea il 17 ottobre 1578. Terminò poi il noviziato
a Tournai, in Belgio, ma fece nuovamente ritorno a Roma per intraprendere gli
studi filosofici e teologici. Fu proprio nella “Città Eterna” che nel 1584
Robert Southwell ricevette finalmente l’ordinazione presbiterale. Per due anni
svolse il suo apostolato nel Collegio Inglese di Roma, sino a quando fu
destinato alla missione inglese e fece così ritorno in patria di nascosto nel
luglio 1586, insieme con il confratello Padre Enrico Garnet. Raggiunse Londra e da qui
si cimentò nell’aiutare altri sacerdoti cattolici ad entrare in Inghilterra e
trovare una sistemazione. Amministrò inoltre i sacramenti nei paesi circostanti
la capitale e scrisse libri ed opuscoli sulla fede cattolica per conto di una
stamperia segreta fondata proprio dal Garnet. Una donna, o più
precisamente la testimonianza da lei portata contro il sacerdote gesuita, si
rivelò fatale per il destino di Padre Southwell: nel luglio 1592, infatti, fu
rilasciata dal carcere una certa Anna Bellamy, che durante la prigionia si era
convertita all’anglicanesimo. Dopo settimane di orrende
torture, non riuscendo a convincerlo a svelare nulla sugli altri preti
cattolici presenti in Inghilterra, il religioso venne trasferito alla Torre di
Londra, ove rimase imprigionato per due anni e mezzo. Infine il 20 febbraio
1595 fu processato per alto tradimento, al quale segurono la condanna ed il
giorno seguente l’impiccagione a Tyburn. Fu dichiarato santo da Paolo VI nel
1970. Autore: Fabio
Arduino
SOURCE : http://www.santiebeati.it/dettaglio/42330 CANONIZZAZIONE DI
QUARANTA MARTIRI DELL’INGHILTERRA E DEL GALLES OMELIA DEL SANTO PADRE
PAOLO VI Domenica, 25 ottobre l970 We extend Our greeting
first of all to Our venerable brother Cardinal John Carmel Heenan, Archbishop
of Westminster, who is present here today. Together with him We greet Our
brother bishops of England and Wales and of all the other countries, those who have
come here for this great ceremony. We extend Our greeting also to the English
priests, religious, students and faithful. We are filled with joy and happiness
to have them near Us today; for us-they represent all English Catholics
scattered throughout the world. Thanks to them we are celebrating Christ’s
glory made manifest in the holy Martyrs, whom We have just canonized, with such
keen and brotherly feelings that We are able to experience in a very special
spiritual way the mystery of the oneness and love of .the Church. We offer you
our greetings, brothers, sons and daughters; We thank you and We bless you. STORICO EVENTO PER LA
CHIESA UNIVERSALE La solenne canonizzazione dei 40 Martiri dell’Inghilterra e del Galles da Noi or ora compiuta, ci offre la gradita opportunità di parlarvi, seppur brevemente, sul significato della loro esistenza e sulla importanza the la loro vita e la loro morte hanno avuto e continuano ad avere non solo per la Chiesa in Inghilterra e nel Galles, ma anche per la Chiesa Universale, per ciascuno di noi, e per ogni uomo di buona volontà. Il nostro tempo ha bisogno di Santi, e in special modo dell’esempio di coloro che hanno dato il supremo testimonio del loro amore per Cristo e la sua Chiesa: «nessuno ha un amore più grande di colui che dà la vita per i propri amici» (Io. l5, l3). Queste parole del Divino Maestro, che si riferiscono in prima istanza al sacrificio che Egli stesso compì sulla croce offrendosi per la salvezza di tutta l’umanità, valgono pure per la grande ed eletta schiera dei martiri di tutti i tempi, dalle prime persecuzioni della Chiesa nascente fino a quelle – forse più nascoste ma non meno crudeli - dei nostri giorni. La Chiesa di Cristo è nata dal sacrificio di Cristo sulla Croce ed essa continua a crescere e svilupparsi in virtù dell’amore eroico dei suoi figli più autentici. «Semen est sanguis christianorum» (TERTULL., Apologet., 50; PL l, 534). Come l’effusione del sangue di Cristo, così l’oblazione che i martiri fanno della loro vita diventa in virtù della loro unione col Sacrificio di Cristo una sorgente di vita e di fertilità spirituale per la Chiesa e per il mondo intero. «Perciò - ci ricorda la Costituzione Lumen gentium (Lumen gentium, 42) – il martirio, col quale il discepolo è reso simile al Maestro che liberamente accetta la morte per la salute del mondo, e a Lui si conforma nell’effusione del sangue, è stimato dalla Chiesa dono insigne e suprema prova di carità».
Molto si è detto e si è scritto su quell’essere misterioso che è l’uomo : sulle
risorse del suo ingegno, capace di penetrare nei segreti dell’universo e di
assoggettare le cose materiali utilizzandole ai suoi scopi; sulla grandezza
dello spirito umano che si manifesta nelle ammirevoli opere della scienza e
dell’arte; sulla sua nobiltà e la sua debolezza; sui suoi trionfi e le sue
miserie. Ma ciò che caratterizza l’uomo, ciò che vi è di più intimo nel suo
essere e nella sua personalità, è la capacità di amare, di amare fino in fondo,
di donarsi con quell’amore che è più forte della morte e che si prolunga
nell’eternità. IL SACRIFICIO NELL’AMORE
PIÙ ALTO Il martirio dei cristiani è l’espressione ed il segno più sublime di questo amore, non solo perché il martire rimane fedele al suo amore fino all’effusione del proprio sangue, ma anche perché questo sacrificio viene compiuto per l’amore più alto e nobile che possa esistere, ossia per amore di Colui che ci ha creati e redenti, che ci ama come Egli solo sa amare, e attende da noi una risposta di totale e incondizionata donazione, cioè un amore degno del nostro Dio. Nella sua lunga e gloriosa storia, la Gran Bretagna, isola di santi, ha dato al mondo molti uomini e donne che hanno amato Dio con questo amore schietto e leale: per questo siamo lieti di aver potuto annoverare oggi 40 altri figli di questa nobile terra fra coloro che la Chiesa pubblicamente riconosce come Santi, proponendoli con ciò alla venerazione dei suoi fedeli, e perché questi ritraggano dalle loro esistenze un vivido esempio. A chi legge commosso ed ammirato gli atti del loro martirio, risulta chiaro, vorremmo dire evidente, che essi sono i degni emuli dei più grandi martiri dei tempi passati, a motivo della grande umiltà, intrepidità, semplicità e serenità, con le quali essi accettarono la loro sentenza e la loro morte, anzi, più ancora con un gaudio spirituale e con una carità ammirevole e radiosa. È proprio questo atteggiamento profondo e spirituale che accomuna ed unisce questi uomini e donne, i quali d’altronde erano molto diversi fra loro per tutto ciò che può differenziare un gruppo così folto di persone, ossia l’età e il sesso, la cultura e l’educazione, lo stato e condizione sociale di vita, il carattere e il temperamento, le disposizioni naturali e soprannaturali, le esterne circostanze della loro esistenza. Abbiamo infatti fra i 40 Santi Martiri dei sacerdoti secolari e regolari, abbiamo dei religiosi di vari Ordini e di rango diverso, abbiamo dei laici, uomini di nobilissima discendenza come pure di condizione modesta, abbiamo delle donne che erano sposate e madri di famiglia: ciò che li unisce tutti è quell’atteggiamento interiore di fedeltà inconcussa alla chiamata di Dio che chiese a loro, come risposta di amore, il sacrificio della vita stessa.
E la risposta dei martiri fu unanime: «Non posso fare a meno di ripetervi che
muoio per Dio e a motivo della mia religione; - così diceva il Santo Philip
Evans - e mi ritengo così felice che se mai potessi avere molte altre vite,
sarei dispostissimo a sacrificarle tutte per una causa tanto nobile». LEALTÀ E FEDELTÀ E, come d’altronde numerosi altri, il Santo Philip Howard conte di Arundel asseriva egli pure: «Mi rincresce di avere soltanto una vita da offrire per questa nobile causa». E la Santa Margaret Clitherow con una commovente semplicità espresse sinteticamente il senso della sua vita e della sua morte: «Muoio per amore del mio Signore Gesù». « Che piccola cosa è questa, se confrontata con la morte ben più crudele che Cristo ha sofferto per me », così esclamava il Santo Alban Roe.
Come molti loro connazionali che morirono in circostanze analoghe, questi
quaranta uomini e donne dell’Inghilterra e del Galles volevano essere e furono
fino in fondo leali verso la loro patria che essi amavano con tutto il cuore;
essi volevano essere e furono di fatto fedeli sudditi del potere reale che
tutti - senza eccezione alcuna - riconobbero, fino alla loro morte, come
legittimo in tutto ciò che appartiene all’ordine civile e politico. Ma fu
proprio questo il dramma dell’esistenza di questi Martiri, e cioè che la loro
onesta e sincera lealtà verso l’autorità civile venne a trovarsi in contrasto
con la fedeltà verso Dio e con ciò che, secondo i dettami della loro coscienza
illuminata dalla fede cattolica, sapevano coinvolgere le verità rivelate,
specialmente sulla S. Eucaristia e sulle inalienabili prerogative del
successore di Pietro, che, per volere di Dio, è il Pastore universale della
Chiesa di Cristo. Posti dinanzi alla scelta di rimanere saldi nella loro fede e
quindi di morire per essa, ovvero di aver salva la vita rinnegando la prima,
essi, senza un attimo di esitazione, e con una forza veramente soprannaturale,
si schierarono dalla parte di Dio e gioiosamente affrontarono il martirio. Ma
talmente grande era il loro spirito, talmente nobili erano i loro sentimenti,
talmente cristiana era l’ispirazione della loro esistenza, che molti di essi
morirono pregando per la loro patria tanto amata, per il Re o per la Regina, e
persino per coloro che erano stati i diretti responsabili della loro cattura,
dei loro tormenti, e delle circostanze ignominiose della loro morte atroce. «POSSANO TUTTI OTTENERE
LA SALVEZZA» Così il Santo Alban Roe, poco prima dell’impiccagione, pregò: «Perdona, o mio Dio, le mie innumerevoli offese, come io perdono i miei persecutori», e, come lui, il Santo Thomas Garnet che - dopo aver singolarmente nominato e perdonato coloro che lo avevano tradito, arrestato e condannato - supplicò Dio dicendo: «Possano tutti ottenere la salvezza e con me raggiungere il cielo».
Leggendo gli atti del loro martirio e meditando il ricco materiale raccolto con
tanta cura sulle circostanze storiche della loro vita e del loro martirio,
rimaniamo colpiti soprattutto da ciò che inequivocabilmente e luminosamente
rifulge nella loro esistenza; esso, per la sua stessa natura, è tale da
trascendere i secoli, e quindi da rimanere sempre pienamente attuale e, specie
ai nostri giorni, di importanza capitale. Ci riferiamo al fatto che questi
eroici figli e figlie dell’Inghilterra e del Galles presero la loro fede
veramente sul serio: ciò significa che essi l’accettarono come l’unica norma
della loro vita e di tutta la loro condotta, ritraendone una grande serenità ed
una profonda gioia spirituale. Con una freschezza e spontaneità non priva di
quel prezioso dono che è l’umore tipicamente proprio della loro gente, con un
attaccamento al loro dovere schivo da ogni ostentazione, e con la schiettezza
tipica di coloro che vivono con convinzioni profonde e ben radicate, questi
Santi Martiri sono un esempio raggiante del cristiano che veramente vive la sua
consacrazione battesimale, cresce in quella vita che nel sacramento
dell’iniziazione gli è stata data e che quello della confermazione ha
rinvigorito, in modo tale che la religione non è per lui un fattore marginale,
bensì l’essenza stessa di tutto il suo essere ed agire, facendo sì che la
carità divina diviene la forza ispiratrice, fattiva ed operante di una
esistenza, tutta protesa verso l’unione di amore con Dio e con tutti gli uomini
di buona volontà, che troverà la sua pienezza nell’eternità. La Chiesa e il mondo di
oggi hanno sommamente bisogno di tali uomini e donne, di ogni condizione me
stato di vita, sacerdoti, religiosi e laici, perché solo persone di tale
statura e di tale santità saranno capaci di cambiare il nostro mondo tormentato
e di ridargli, insieme alla pace, quell’orientamento spirituale e veramente
cristiano a cui ogni uomo intimamente anela - anche talvolta senza esserne
conscio - e di cui tutti abbiamo tanto bisogno. Continui il Signore a suscitare nella Chiesa dei laici, religiosi e sacerdoti che siano degni emuli di questi araldi della fede. Voglia Dio, nel suo amore, che anche oggi fioriscano e si sviluppino dei centri di studio, di formazione e di preghiera, atti, nelle condizioni di oggi, a preparare dei santi sacerdoti e missionari quali furono, in quei tempi, i Venerabili Collegi di Roma e Valladolid e i gloriosi Seminari di St. Omer e Douai, dalle file dei quali uscirono appunto molti dei Quaranta Martiri, perché come uno di essi, una grande personalità, il Santo Edmondo Campion, diceva: «Questa Chiesa non si indebolirà mai fino a quando vi saranno sacerdoti e pastori ad attendere al loro gregge».
Voglia il Signore concederci la grazia che in questi tempi di indifferentismo
religioso e di materialismo teorico e pratico sempre più imperversante,
l’esempio e la intercessione dei Santi Quaranta Martiri ci confortino nella
fede, rinsaldino il nostro autentico amore per Dio, per la sua Chiesa e per gli
uomini tutti. PER L’UNITA DEI CRISTIANI May the blood of these Martyrs be able to heal the great wound inflicted upon God’s Church by reason of the separation of the Anglican Church from the Catholic Church. Is it not one-these Martyrs say to us-the Church founded by Christ? Is not this their witness? Their devotion to their nation gives us the assurance that on the day when-God willing-the unity of the faith and of Christian life is restored, no offence will be inflicted on the honour and sovereignty of a great country such as England. There will be no seeking to lessen the legitimate prestige and the worthy patrimony of piety and usage proper to the Anglican Church when the Roman Catholic Church-this humble “Servant of the Servants of God”- is able to embrace her ever beloved Sister in the one authentic communion of the family of Christ: a communion of origin and of faith, a communion of priesthood and of rule, a communion of the Saints in the freedom and love of the Spirit of Jesus.
Perhaps We shall have to go on, waiting and watching in prayer, in order to
deserve that blessed day. But already We are strengthened in this hope by the
heavenly friendship of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales who are canonized
today. Amen. Copyright © Dicastero per
la Comunicazione
SOURCE : https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/it/homilies/1970/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19701025.html I MARTIRI
Elenco dei martiti con relativa ricorrenza: John Houghton, Sacerdote
certosino, 4 maggio Robert Lawrence,
Sacerdote certosino, 4 maggio Augustine Webster,
Sacerdote certosino, 4 maggio Richard Reynolds,
Sacerdote brigidino, 4 maggio John Stone, Sacerdote agostiniano,
23 dicembre Cuthbert Mayne,
Sacerdote, 30 novembre Edmund Campion, Sacerdote
gesuita, 1 dicembre Ralph Sherwin, Sacerdote,
1 dicembre Alexander Briant,
Sacerdote gesuita, 1 dicembre John Paine, Sacerdote, 2
aprile Luke Kirby, Sacerdote, 30
maggio Richard Gwyn, Laico, 17
ottobre Margaret Clitherow,
Laica, 25 marzo Margaret Ward, Laica, 30
agosto Edmund Gennings,
Sacerdote, 10 dicembre Swithun Wells, Laico, 10
dicembre Eustace White, Sacerdote,
10 dicembre Polydore Plasden,
Sacerdote, 10 dicembre John Boste, Sacerdote, 24
luglio Robert Southwell,
Sacerdote gesuita, 21 febbraio Henry Walpole, Sacerdote
gesuita, 7 aprile Philip Howard, Laico, 19
ottobre John Jones, Sacerdote dei
Frati Minori, 12 luglio John Rigby, Laico, 21
giugno Anne Line, Laica, 27
febbraio Nicholas Owen, Religioso
gesuita, 2 marzo Thomas Garnet, Sacerdote
gesuita, 23 giugno John Roberts, Sacerdote
benedettino, 10 dicembre John Almond, Sacerdote, 5
dicembre Edmund Arrowsmith,
Sacerdote gesuita, 28 agosto Ambrose Edward Barlow,
Sacerdote benedettino, 10 settembre Alban Bartholomew Roe,
Sacerdote benedettino, 21 gennaio Henry Morse, Sacerdote
gesuita, 1 febbraio John Southworth,
Sacerdote, 28 giugno John Plessington,
Sacerdote, 19 luglio Philip Evans, Sacerdote
gesuita, 22 luglio John Lloyd, Sacerdote, 22
luglio John Wall (Gioacchino di
Sant’Anna), Sacerdote dei Frati Minori, 22 agosto John Kemble, Sacerdote,
22 agosto David Lewis, Sacerdote
gesuita, 27 agosto
SOURCE : https://www.causesanti.va/it/santi-e-beati/40-martiri-di-inghilterra-e-galles.html SOUTHWELL, Robert di Mario Praz Enciclopedia Italiana
(1936) Sacerdote e poeta, nato
nel 1561 o nel 1562 a Horsham St Faith presso Norwich, morto a Londra il 22
febbraio 1595. Di vecchia famiglia cattolica, studiò nel collegio gesuita di
Douai e a Roma, dove fu ricevuto tra i gesuiti nell'ottobre del 1578. Dopo due
anni di noviziato, prese i primi voti della compagnia a Tournai, nel 1580, indi
tornò a Roma, dove, dopo studî di filosofia e teologia, fu nominato prefetto
degli studî nel collegio inglese (1584). Insieme col padre Henn. Garnett
penetrò sotto mentite spoglie in Inghilterra nel luglio del 1586, e col finto
nome di Cotton accudì alla sua missione apostolica, divenne cappellano e
confessore della contessa di Arundel; tradito da una giovane correligionaria
caduta nelle mani dei persecutori dei cattolici, il S. fu arrestato nel giugno
1592, imprigionato nella casa dell'aguzzino Topcliffe e, dopo crudeli torture,
trasportato nella torre di Londra e nella prigione di Newgate, e infine
impiccato Tyburn. Delle sue poesie la più
cospicua è il poema St Peter's Complaint, imitazione delle Lacrime di
San Pietro di Luigi Tansillo, di cui il S. tradusse un frammento
probabilmente durante il soggiorno romano. Altre poesie devote il S. scrisse in
prigione; alcune raccolte sotto il titolo di Maeoniae, furono pubblicate
nel 1595: spira da tutte un'ardente devozione che si esprime talvolta con
ardite immagini barocche: particolarmente famosa è quella intitolata The
Burning Babe. In versi è anche il trattatello devoto A Foure fould Meditation
of the foure last things (pubblicato nel 1606), mentre un altro, Marie
Madgalen's Funerall Teares (1591) è in prosa, e A Hundred Meditations
on the Love of God è tradotto dallo spagnolo di Diego de Estella. Ediz.: Complete
Works, Londra 1876; Complete Poems a cura di A.B. Grosart, Blackburn
1872 (fuori commercio); The Book of R.S., Priest, Poet, Prisoner,
a cura di Ch. M. Wood, Oxford 1926. Bibl.: R.A. Morton, An
Appreciation of R. S., Filadelfia 1929; P. Janelle, R. S., tesi, Parigi
1935 (vers. inglese: R S., The Writer, a Study in Religions Inspiration,
Londra 1935); M. Praz, R. S.'s Saint Peter's Complaint and its Ital.
Source, in The Modern Language Review, XIX, n. 3 (luglio 1924). © Istituto della
Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani - Riproduzione riservata
SOURCE : https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/robert-southwell_(Enciclopedia-Italiana)/ RITO DE CANONIZAÇÃO DE
QUARENTA MÁRTIRES DA INGLATERRA E DE GALES HOMILIA DO PAPA PAULO VI Domingo, 25 de Outubro de
1970 Dirigimos a Nossa
saudação, em primeiro lugar, ao venerado Irmão, Cardeal Dom John Carmel Heenan,
Arcebispo de Westminster, aqui presente, e também aos Nossos Irmãos, Bispos da
Inglaterra, de Gales e de outros Países, que vieram a Roma para assistir a esta
grandiosa cerimónia, juntamente com muitos sacerdotes, religiosos, estudantes e
fiéis de língua inglesa. Sentimo-Nos feliz e comovido por os ter hoje à Nossa
volta. Representam, para Nós, todos os católicos ingleses, espalhados pelo
mundo e levam-Nos a celebrar a glória de Cristo nos Santos Mártires, que
acabámos de canonizar, com um sentimento tão vivo e tão fraterno que Nos
permite saborear, com singularíssima experiência espiritual, o mistério da
unidade e da caridade da Igreja. Saudamo-vos, Irmãos e Filhos, agradecemo-vos e
abençoamo-vos. A Nossa saudação, cheia
de respeito e de afecto, também se dirige aos membros da Igreja Anglicana,
presentes a este rito. De modo particular, apraz-Nos sublinhar a presença do
representante oficial do Arcebispo de Canterbury, Reverendo Doutor Harry
Smythe. Como os sentimos perto! Gostaríamos que eles lessem no Nosso coração a
humildade, o reconhecimento e a esperança com que os acolhemos. E, agora,
saudamos as Autoridades e as Personalidades que aqui vieram representar a Grã-
Bretanha e, com elas, todos os Representantes de outros Países e de outras
Religiões. Associamo-los, de bom grado, a esta celebração da liberdade e da
fortaleza do homem, que tem fé e vive espiritualmente, ao mesmo tempo que
mantém respeitosa fidelidade à soberania da sociedade civil. A solene canonização dos
Quarenta Mártires da Inglaterra e de Gales, que acabámos de realizar,
proporciona-Nos a agradável oportunidade de vos falar, embora brevemente, sobre
o significado da sua existência e sobre a importância que a sua vida e a sua
morte tiveram, e continuam a ter, não só para a Igreja na Inglaterra e no País
de Gales, mas também para a Igreja Universal, para cada um de nós e para todos
os homens de boa-vontade. O nosso tempo tem
necessidade de Santos e, de modo especial, do exemplo daqueles que deram o
testemunho supremo do seu amor por Cristo e pela sua Igreja: «Ninguém tem maior
amor do que aquele que dá a sua vida pelos seus amigos » (Jo 15, 13).
Estas palavras do Divino Mestre, que se referem, em primeiro lugar, ao
sacrifício que Ele próprio realizou na cruz, oferecendo-se pela salvação de toda
a humanidade, são válidas para as grandes e eleitas fileiras dos mártires de
todos os tempos, desde as primeiras perseguições da Igreja nascente até às dos
nossos dias, talvez mais veladas, mas igualmente cruéis. A Igreja de Cristo
nasceu do sacrifício de Cristo na cruz, e continua a crescer e a desenvolver-se
em virtude do amor heróico dos seus filhos mais autênticos. Semen est
sanguis christianorum (Tertuliano, Apologeticus, 50,
em: PL 1, 534). A oblação que os mártires fazem da própria vida, em
virtude da sua união com o sacrifício de Cristo, torna-se, como a efusão do
sangue de Cristo, uma nascente de vida e de fecundidade espiritual para a
Igreja e para o mundo inteiro. Por isso, a Constituição sobre a Igreja
recorda-nos: «o martírio, pelo qual o discípulo se assemelha ao Mestre que
aceitou livremente a morte pela salvação do mundo e a Ele se conforma na efusão
do sangue, é considerado pela Igreja como doação insigne e prova suprema da
caridade » (Lumen
Gentium, n. 42)- Tem-se falado e escrito
muito sobre este ser misterioso que é o homem: sobre os dotes do seu engenho,
capaz de penetrar nos segredos do universo e de dominar as realidades
materiais, utilizando-as para alcançar os seus objectivos; sobre a grandeza do
espírito humano, que se manifesta nas admiráveis obras da ciência e da arte;
sobre a sua nobreza e a sua fraqueza; sobre os seus triunfos e as suas
misérias. Mas o que caracteriza o homem, o que ele tem de mais íntimo no seu
ser e na sua personalidade, é a capacidade de amar, de amar profundamente, de
se dedicar com aquele amor que é mais forte do que a morte e que continua na
eternidade. O martírio dos cristãos é
a expressão e o sinal mais sublime deste amor, não só porque o mártir se
conserva fiel ao seu amor, chegando a derramar o próprio sangue, mas também
porque este sacrifício é feito pelo amor mais nobre e elevado que pode existir,
ou seja, pelo amor d'Aquele que nos criou e remiu, que nos ama como só Ele sabe
amar, e que espera de nós uma resposta de total e incondicionada doação, isto
é, um amor digno do nosso Deus. Na sua longa e gloriosa
história, a Grã-Bretanha, Ilha de Santos, deu ao mundo muitos homens e
mulheres, que amaram a Deus com este amor franco e leal. Por isso, sentimo-Nos
feliz por termos podido incluir hoje, no número daqueles que a Igreja reconhece
publicamente como Santos, mais quarenta filhos desta nobre terra, propondo-os,
assim, à veneração dos seus fiéis, para que estes possam haurir, na sua
existência, um vívido exemplo. Quem lê, comovido e
admirado, as actas do seu martírio, vê claramente e, podemos dizer, com
evidência, que eles são os dignos émulos dos maiores mártires dos tempos
passados, pela grande humildade, simplicidade e serenidade, e também pelo
gáudio espiritual e pela caridade admirável e radiosa com que aceitaram a
sentença e a morte. É precisamente esta
atitude de profunda espiritualidade que agrupa e une estes homens e mulheres,
que, aliás, eram muito diversos entre si em tudo aquilo que pode diferenciar um
grupo tão numeroso de pessoas: a idade e o sexo, a cultura e a educação, o
estado e a condição social de vida, o carácter e o temperamento, as disposições
naturais, sobrenaturais e as circunstâncias externas da sua existência.
Realmente, entre os Quarenta Mártires, temos sacerdotes seculares e regulares,
religiosos de diversas Ordens e de categoria diferente, leigos de nobilíssima
descendência e de condição modesta, mulheres casadas e mães de família. O que
os une todos é a atitude interior de fidelidade inabalável ao chamamento de
Deus, que lhes pediu, como resposta de amor, o sacrifício da própria vida. E a resposta dos Mártires
foi unânime. São Philip Evans disse: « Não posso deixar de vos repetir que
morro por Deus e por causa da minha religião. E sinto-me tão feliz que, se
alguma vez pudesse ter mais outras vidas, estaria muito disposto a
sacrificá-las todas por uma causa tão nobre ». E, como aliás também
muitos outros, São Philip Howard, conde de Arundel, afirmou igualmente: «Tenho
pena de ter só uma vida a oferecer por esta nobre causa». Santa Margaret
Clitherow, com simplicidade comovedora, exprimiu sintèticamente o sentido da
sua vida e da sua morte: « Morro por amor do meu Senhor Jesus ». Santo Alban
Roe exclamou: «Como isto é pouco em comparação com a morte, muito mais cruel,
que Jesus sofreu por mim ». Como muitos outros dos
seus compatriotas, que morreram em circunstâncias análogas, estes quarenta
homens e mulheres da Inglaterra e de Gales queriam ser, e foram até ao fim,
leais para com a própria pátria que eles amavam de todo o coração. Queriam ser
e foram, realmente, fiéis súbditos do poder real, que todos, sem qualquer
excepção, reconheceram até à morte como legítimo em tudo o que pertencia à
ordem civil e política. Mas consistia exactamente nisto o drama da existência
destes mártires: sabiam que a sua honesta e sincera lealdade para com a
autoridade civil estava em contraste com a fidelidade a Deus e com tudo o que,
segundo os ditames da sua consciência, iluminada pela fé católica, compreendia
verdades reveladas sobre a Sagrada Eucaristia e sobre prerrogativas
inalienáveis do sucessor de Pedro que, por vontade de Deus, é o Pastor
universal da Igreja de Cristo. Devendo escolher entre a perseverança na fé e,
portanto, a morte por ela, e a conservação da própria vida, renegando a fé,
eles, sem um momento de hesitação e com uma energia verdadeiramente
sobrenatural, puseram-se da parte de Deus e enfrentaram alegremente o martírio.
O seu espírito era tão magnânimo, os seus sentimentos tão nobres, e a
inspiração da sua existência tão cristã, que muitos deles morreram a rezar pela
sua querida pátria, pelo Rei ou pela Rainha e, até, pelos responsáveis directos
da sua prisão, dos seus tormentos e das circunstâncias ignominiosas da sua
morte atroz. As últimas palavras e a última
oração de São John Plessington foram exactamente estas: « Que Deus abençoe o
Rei e a sua família e queira conceder a Sua Majestade um reinado próspero nesta
vida e uma coroa de glória na outra. Que Deus conceda a paz aos seus súbditos,
permitindo-lhes que vivam e morram na verdadeira fé, na esperança e na caridade
». Santo Alban Roe, pouco
antes de ser enforcado, implorou: « O meu Deus, perdoa as minhas inumeráveis
ofensas, como eu perdoo os meus perseguidores ». E São Thomas Garnet, depois de
ter nomeado e perdoado aqueles que o tinham traído, encarcerado e condenado,
dirigiu uma súplica a Deus, dizendo: «Que todos eles possam obter a salvação e
chegar ao céu comigo». Ao ler as actas do
martírio deles e ao meditar sobre o abundante material, recolhido com tanto
cuidado, sobre as circunstâncias históricas da sua vida e do seu sofrimento,
ficamos impressionado, de modo particular, com o que inequívoca e luminosamente
refulge na sua existência, e que, pela sua própria natureza, transcende os
séculos, conservando, portanto, toda a sua actualidade, e evidentemente,
sobretudo nos nossos dias, uma importância capital. Referimo-Nos ao facto de
estes filhos e filhas da Inglaterra e Gales terem vivido a sua fé com
seriedade, o que significa terem-na aceitado como regra única da sua vida e do
seu comportamento, haurindo nela uma grande serenidade e uma profunda alegria
espiritual. Com a simplicidade e a espontaneidade, aliadas ao precioso dote do
humor, tipicamente próprio do seu povo, com dedicação ao cumprimento dos seus
deveres, sem qualquer ostentação e com a franqueza característica de quem vive
com convicções profundas e bem radicadas, estes Santos Mártires são um exemplo
radioso do cristão, que vive realmente a sua consagração baptismal, crescendo
na vida que lhe foi dada no sacramento da iniciação, e que o da Confirmação
robusteceu tanto, que a religião, para ele, não é um facto marginal, mas a
própria essência de todo o seu ser e das suas acções, ao ponto de fazer com que
a caridade divina se torne a força inspiradora, efectiva e operante de uma
existência, totalmente dedicada à união de amor com Deus e com todos os homens
de boa-vontade, que encontrará a sua plenitude na eternidade. A Igreja e o mundo de
hoje têm suma necessidade destes homens e destas mulheres, de todas as
condições e estados de vida: sacerdotes, religiosos e leigos, porque só pessoas
com tanta envergadura e santidade serão capazes de transformar o nosso mundo
atormentado e de lhe dar de novo, juntamente com a paz, aquela orientação
espiritual e verdadeiramente cristã a que todos os homens intimamente aspiram,
embora algumas vezes inconscientemente, e de que todos temos tanta necessidade. Elevamos a nossa prece de
gratidão a Deus, por ter querido, com a sua próvida bondade, suscitar estes
Santos Mártires, cuja operosidade e sacrifício muito contribuíram para
conservar a fé católica na Inglaterra e no País de Gales. Que o Senhor continue a
suscitar, na Igreja, leigos, religiosos e sacerdotes, que sejam émulos dignos
destes arautos da fé. Queira Deus, com o seu
amor, que também hoje floresçam e se desenvolvam centros de estudo, formação e
oração, capazes, nas actuais circunstâncias, de preparar santos sacerdotes e
missionários, como fizeram, naqueles tempos, os veneráveis Colégios de Roma e
Valladolid e os gloriosos Seminários de Saint Omer e Douai, dos quais saíram
muitos dos Quarenta Mártires, porque, como disse um deles, Santo Edmund
Campion: « Esta Igreja nunca se enfraquecerá enquanto houver sacerdotes e
pastores que se preocupem com a própria grei». Queira o Senhor
conceder-nos a graça de fazer com que, nestes tempos de indiferentismo
religioso e de materialismo teórico e prático cada vez mais difundidos, o
exemplo e a intercessão dos Quarenta Santos Mártires nos fortifiquem na fé,
robusteçam o nosso autêntico amor a Deus, à Igreja e a todos os homens. E que o sangue destes
Mártires possa curar a grande ferida, aberta na Igreja de Deus, pela separação
da Igreja Anglicana da Igreja Católica. Não é só uma, dizem-nos estes Mártires,
a Igreja que Jesus Cristo fundou? Não foi este o testemunho que eles deram? O
seu amor à própria pátria dá-nos a certeza que, no dia em que for
restabelecida, com a graça de Deus, a unidade da fé e da vida cristã, a honra e
a soberania deste grande País, que é a Grã-Bretanha, não sofrerão qualquer
ofensa, assim como o devido prestígio e o grande património de piedade e de
bons costumes, próprios da Igreja Anglicana, não serão diminuídos quando esta
Igreja Católica Romana e este humilde « Servo dos Servos de Deus » puderem
abraçar a sempre dilectíssima irmã, na única e autêntica comunhão da família de
Cristo: comunhão de origem, comunhão de fé, comunhão de sacerdócio, comunhão de
regime e comunhão dos Santos, na liberdade e na caridade do Espírito de Jesus. Talvez ainda tenhamos que
esperar e velar para merecer aquele dia feliz. Mas esta esperança agora é
confortada com a amizade celeste dos Quarenta Mártires da Inglaterra e do País
de Gales, hoje canonizados. Assim seja! Copyright © Dicastério
para a Comunicação SOURCE : https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/pt/homilies/1970/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19701025.html Robert Southwell
(1561-1595) : https://www.luminarium.org/renlit/southwell.htm Saints Edmund Campion,
Robert Southwell & companions By Paul
Zalonski on December 1, 2009 : https://communio.stblogs.org/2009/12/saint-edmund-campion-robert-southwell-companions.html
Robert Southwell, su Discogs, Zink
Media. : https://www.discogs.com/fr/artist/918813 |
_(14587571879).jpg){kind=link}
