Even before my trip there, I had developed something of an interest in the Catholic history of England, particularly during the time of great English martyrs such as St. John Fisher, St. Thomas More, St. Edmund Campion, et al.
Going there and seeing first hand the remnants of a glorious Catholic past was both painful in an almost nostalgic way, and yet instructive.
One of the other seminarians I was traveling with brought along two texts to read during our travels which I think really help to frame the struggles of the Catholic Church in England during the last 500 years or so.
The first is a document known as "Campion's Brag," written by St. Edmund Campion to the Lord's of Her Majesty's Privy Council during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At the time of its writing, St. Edmund Campion had just snuck back into the country after having spent years in formation within the Jesuit order in various places on Continental Europe. Now as a priest, St. Edmund would begin clandestinely offering the sacraments to the oppressed Catholics of England. Knowing that it would only be a matter of time before he would be caught, St. Edmund Campion composed this document in which he openly declares his true intentions and attempts to avoid being falsely accused as a traitor of the crown. Here's one of my favorite excerpts from the document:
Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.
The other text we had was the transcript of a sermon delivered some three hundred years later by the famous convert and soon-to-beatified John Henry Cardinal Newman. The occasion of its preaching was the 1852 restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England. After centuries of persecution leading to the almost total destruction of Catholicism in England, consider then the significance of this event in which new Dioceses and Bishops were to be re-established in England. Again, another amazing excerpt:
Arise, Mary, and go forth in thy strength into that north country, which once was thine own, and take possession of a land which knows thee not. Arise, Mother of God, and with thy thrilling voice, speak to those who labour with child, and are in pain, till the babe of grace leaps within them! Shine on us, dear Lady, with thy bright countenance, like the sun in his strength, O stella matutina, O harbinger of peace, till our year is one perpetual May. From thy sweet eyes, from thy pure smile, from thy majestic brow, let ten thousand influences rain down, not to confound or overwhelm, but to persuade, to win over thine enemies. O Mary, my hope, O Mother undefiled, fulfil to us the promise of this Spring. A second temple rises on the ruins of the old. Canterbury has gone its way, and York is gone, and Durham is gone, and Winchester is gone. It was sore to part with them. We clung to the vision of past greatness, and would not believe it could come to nought; but the Church in England has died, and the Church lives again. Westminster and Nottingham, Beverley and Hexham, Northampton and Shrewsbury, if the world lasts, shall be names as musical to the ear, as stirring to the heart, as the glories we have lost; and Saints shall rise out of them, if God so will, and Doctors once again shall give the law to Israel, and Preachers call to penance and to justice, as at the beginning.
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