St. Edmund’s College, a small Catholic boarding school in Ware, England, is full of history. Not the usual type of history at the usual high school. St. Edmund’s actually traces its history back to 1586 and the founding of the English College at Douay, France. Cardinal William Allen started the college in order to educate young Catholics not allowed to exercise their religion under the harsh laws of Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603.

nglish Catholics who hid priests from authorities, who desired to practice their faith, or who simply bought Catholic books smuggled into the country, faced severe punishments, including fines, imprisonment, and even death. For Eliza-bethan Catholics, faith was hazardous to one’s health. Yet Catholics remained faithful in large numbers and the English Church, although heavily persecuted, never succumbed. The English College at Douay flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and sent scores of priests into England as missionaries.

With the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, it once again became rather dangerous to be an English Catholic, this time for a different set of political reasons. The Catholic Church was one of the primary targets of the revolutionaries’ violence. With few options available and in the face of imminent destruction, Douay College moved from France back into England and became St. Edmund’s College in 1793.

Now over two hundred years old, St. Edmund’s College educates more than five hundred students each year. Church history and institutional history saturate St. Edmund’s in manifold ways. Pictures of every English bishop beginning from 1793 hang in a row on the way to the dining hall. Original buildings from 1793 are still in use today. Amazingly, archivists know the names of all 12,100 students and teachers who have studied and taught at the College from its founding in 1568.

The Witness of English Martyrs

Born under dire circumstances, the Douay College at St. Edmund’s also preserves the story of martyrdom. Few American Catholics, of course, fully appreciate martyrdom. Although anti-Catholicism is as American as apple pie (especially entrenched in Hollywood and secular universities), religious freedom remains the law of the land. We do not and have not had to die for our faith.

English Catholics, on the other hand, count forty martyrs from the reign of Elizabeth I alone. For them, the altar is stained with the blood of ancestors. This reality manifests itself in a variety of ways. At St. Edmund’s, the living tradition of martyrdom envelops the entire school. Perhaps largely unnoticed or quietly assimilated by the students and faculty, this sense of martyrdom is, to the outsider, both disturbing and awe-inspiring, both shocking and spiritually edifying.

I didn’t travel to St. Edmund’s looking for martyrs. I am, by training, a university professor, and my research interests include Shakespeare and sixteenth-century books. St. Edmund’s houses a spectacular collection of Catholic books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so my trip had everything to do with this collection, the remnants of the library from the English College at Douay.
Nevertheless, martyrdom is one of the first images that greets any visitor arriving at St. Edmund’s. Two large wooden plaques prominently stand in the main entrance. The heading reads “MARTYRES COLLEGII NOSTRI DUACENSIS” [“Martyrs of Our College at Douay”].

The names of more than a hundred and fifty men appear on the plaques, each with his year of martyrdom and location of execution. This impressive memorial uses the genitive case in Latin to describe the college and the martyrs. This is our college, the inscription insists; these are our martyrs.

Executed for Possessing Catholic Books

The Douay Museum, I soon learned, also tells a related tale of persecution and martyrdom. Among the hundreds of old books in the collection, two books record the story of martyrdom rather well. Consider the case of Thomas Alfield and Thomas Webley.

In 1583, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, one of Queen Elizabeth’s top advisers and an inveterate anti-Catholic, published a short pamphlet entitled The Execution of Justice in England. In this book, Burleigh redefined treason (a capital offense) to include Catholic worship and practice. In short, Catholics became enemies of the state by their very existence.

In 1584, William Cardinal Allen wrote a pamphlet titled A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics in response to Burleigh. Allen wanted the world to know of the treachery and persecution in England, and he wanted the story told correctly. In the preface, Allen passionately argued for religious toleration:

We protest before God and all his saints, that we will (upon any reasonable security of our persons, liberty of conscience, permission to exercise Christian Catholic offices, to the salvation of our own souls and our brethren) do the same things publicly which we now do secretly, in all peaceable and priestly sort as hitherto we have accustomed: and that so, those things which now you suspect to be done against the state (for that they be done in covert) may plainly appear unto you nothing else indeed.

In other words, Allen wanted the opportunity to practice his faith (saying Mass, hearing confession, baptizing children, anointing the sick) in full view, without the threat of persecution or bodily harm. Ironically, officials such as Lord Burleigh, while forcing Catholics into hiding by persecution, were claiming that such secretiveness was proof of their criminal intentions! Allen was boldly challenging that claim.

The English government obviously ignored the challenge, and the plea for toleration. According to museum records, on July 6, 1585, the Blessed Thomas Alfield and a layman, the Venerable Thomas Webley, suffered execution at Tyburn (the killing place) for distributing copies of Allen’s book. Such executions, it bears emphasizing, were horrific deaths. The condemned was hanged, cut down while still alive, drawn and quartered, and then disemboweled.

Some years later, another Elizabethan lost his life in a related manner. On April 19, 1601, James Duckett was executed at Tyburn for his Catholic faith. He had been arrested simply for possessing copies of a book called Bristow’s Motives, first published in 1575. This volume had an especially profound history.
Bristow’s Motives contained forty-eight points concerning the Catholic faith that Richard Bristow wanted to present to the public. Upon publication, Elizabeth’s agents seized most, but not all, copies of the book. The same book had been used as evidence against St. Edmund Campion during his trial in 1581, resulting in his execution. Then, in 1599, another edition of the book had been printed — the edition that Duckett was executed for possessing.

At Duckett’s trial, the jury heard from only one witness, who presented perjured evidence. The jury returned a not-guilty verdict. That decision apparently angered the judge, one Mr. Popham. Judge Popham reminded the jurors that Duckett had paid to have a copy of the Motives bound for him in leather. They deliberated once again, returned shortly, and pronounced Duckett guilt of a felony. Shortly thereafter, he too was executed.

The Price of Faith

The Catholic faith in America is largely free from hardships and pain associated with martyrdom. We Americans haven’t experienced concerted religious persecution; we haven’t lost our rights to worship. Yet the price for living the Faith rises each day. Given the radically secular nature of our society, it’s becoming more and more costly to be an authentic, practicing Catholic. For many, birth control, divorce, materialism, and relativism are far more attractive, far easier to purchase, than striving for a meaningful life of faith.

As the price of faith rises, Catholics are generally responding in one of two ways. On the one hand, many Catholics simply refuse to practice the Faith with any seriousness. When it becomes too difficult, when the “rules and regulations” of virtue limit the fun and pleasure readily available, some Catholics simply abandon the Church. Not understanding the personal costs, many more simply will not “budget” for it properly.

On the other hand, in the spiritual as in the economic realm, when prices rise, goods increase in value. So we find today that thousands of young Catholics across America are returning to the Faith with enthusiasm.

A number of forces contribute to what I think can be rightly called this “Catholic Renaissance,” which seeks to reanimate a dynamic Catholic tradition. The new generation of obedient Catholics (combined with an older generation of faithful warriors) have witnessed the “progressive” changes in the wake of Vatican II and rejected them as watered-down or insubstantial for a postmodern diet. Many of these believers find the challenges of Catholicism not only worth the price, but essential for a life of faith. They like the rigor of the Catholic intellectual tradition, the consistency of doctrine, the sense of community, the reverent rituals, and the quest for holiness.

Obedient Catholics, of course, also experience difficulties and challenges with the faith. They aren’t a bunch of mindless followers or programmed cyborgs. Yet the very difficulty provides the desire for mastery, the striving for virtue and holiness. Moreover, many of these Catholics recognize that secular life offers very little in terms of the transcendent. Faith and religious practice offer, to quote T.S. Eliot, “a still place in a turning world.”

The Big Picture

So what does this have to do with looking for martyrdom at St. Edmund’s? To the outsider, like myself, it helps explain the ineffable. For me, Catholicism is so much larger than the sum of its parts. And that’s even before I saw the big picture.

Big-picture Catholicism not only requires the believer to understand the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. It not only requires an active mind and open heart while receiving the Eucharist. It’s not enough to see the beauty of the Vatican and the art of St. Peter’s. Big picture Catholicism also recognizes imagined communities in vital ways. In other words, the community of believers in any religion, especially a religion with one billion members, will never all meet one another. We know that they exist because we imagine them.

Imagined communities unite followers of a religious tradition just as they unite families, nations, and football fans. So hearing about the martyrs, seeing their pictures on the wall, reading their names on the plaques — in short, living among the martyrs — brings that imagined community into focus.
Thousands and thousands of Catholics strive to tap into the dynamic, living tradition of the Church. And the Church needs the regenerating power of these energized Catholics. Do we need new martyrs to reanimate the Church in America and throughout the world? No, we have martyrs enough. What is required, however, is an empathetic imagination. We need the ability to feel deeply and powerfully what the martyrs felt, to understand what was at stake when they concluded that the Faith was worth dying for. And through all this we need to be touched by the grace of God, filled with the Holy Spirit.

Pope John Paul II clearly recognizes the value of appreciating martyrdom. In his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, the Holy Father urges the faithful to make a serious effort to recover and appreciate the stories of martyrdom. He emphasizes the crucial role played by those who display heroic virtue; these martyrs signify a unity in Christ shared by all Christians. In a recent homily, the Pope adds that “the precious heritage that these courageous witnesses have passed down to us is a patrimony shared by all the churches and ecclesial communities.” In other words, all believers belonging to the body of Christ share a common heritage of persecution and martyrdom.

Yet it would be a mistake to see martyrdom as an historical event with few modern valences. It’s estimated that two thirds of all martyrs in Christian history died in the twentieth century. We need only consult the sobering account of fidelity in Robert Royal’s The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive History (Cross-road, 2000) to shed complacency in matters spiritual.

The Church encourages us to read about the martyrs and to pray for their intercession. We grow in faith and virtue through the process. Our faith is not merely a gift we receive from our parents; it’s also a treasure we pass along to our children.

Although we may never be asked to shed our blood as did the martyrs of St. Edmund’s, their struggle to live an authentic life of faith and integrity is our own. We recognize and honor the faithful departed when we share the stories of faith with the young, for in them, the story lives on.