40 Martyrs of England and Wales

The Forty Martyrs died under varied circumstances, but all were marked by a legal condemnation based on anti-Catholic penal laws. For men, the ordinary penalty for the crime of high treason was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; women were burned alive or—in the case of Margaret Clitherow—crushed under the weight of stones. Cuthbert Mayne, a priest ordained at Douai, was executed at Launceston in 1577, found guilty of having introduced a papal bull into England. Edmund Campion, a brilliant Jesuit and former Oxford fellow, led a clandestine mission for two years before being hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on December 1, 1581. Robert Southwell, a Jesuit poet, was martyred at Tyburn in 1595 after three years of captivity. Margaret Clitherow, a mother in York, was crushed to death in 1586 for sheltering priests. Anne Line was executed in 1601 for the same reason. John Southworth exercised his ministry in London among the poor before being hanged at Tyburn in 1654. The members of the group suffered waves of persecution corresponding to specific political tensions: the bull of excommunication of Pius V against Elizabeth I (1570), the Gunpowder Plot (1605), and the false Popish Plot of Titus Oates (1678-1679). What the martyrs defended was not a political cause but freedom of conscience and communion with the See of Peter.

What unites these forty very different figures is above all a common conviction: the primacy of spiritual authority over temporal power, and fidelity to the Roman Church as an inviolable condition of Christian life. None of them sought death as an ideal in itself; several tried to flee or hide, but they refused to abjure their faith when persecution seized them. Priests trained at Douai, Reims, or Rome returned to England knowing they risked execution; some, like Edmund Campion, declared it openly in letters. Among the laity, holiness was expressed in the courageous hospitality granted to hunted priests: Margaret Clitherow transformed her house into a place of clandestine worship; Swithun Wells hosted secret Masses until his arrest and execution. John Houghton, a Carthusian prior, was one of the first to refuse the Oath of Supremacy in 1535, declaring that he could not "in conscience betray his faith." The hagiographic tradition has retained a remarkable serenity in these martyrs in the face of death: Philip Evans, a Welsh Jesuit, played the harp in his cell the day before his execution. For Paul VI, their testimony had a prophetic value for the contemporary world: he saw in their death a sign that "fidelity is stronger than fear."

The process of recognition for the English and Welsh martyrs began in Rome starting in 1850, when the Catholic hierarchy was re-established in England and Wales. On December 29, 1886, Pope Leo XIII beatified eleven of the future canonized, and on December 15, 1929, Pope Pius XI beatified twenty-nine other members of the group. In total, more than two hundred martyrs had been beatified before 1970; the forty were chosen as representative of the whole. Pope Paul VI solemnly announced the canonization during the consistory of May 18, 1970, declaring his intention to enroll them in the catalogue of saints "on the twenty-fifth day of October of this year, in the Vatican Basilica." The ceremony took place as announced on October 25, 1970, in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Due to the fact that Thomas More and John Fisher, members of the same period of persecution, had been canonized in 1935 with a dispensation from miracles, Paul VI, after consultation with the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints, deemed it acceptable to proceed with the canonization on the basis of a single duly verified miracle: the healing of a young mother suffering from a malignant tumor (fibrosarcoma) on her left shoulder blade, which was recognized as perfect, definitive, and inexplicable on a natural level. The common liturgical feast is celebrated on October 25, the date of their canonization. In England, since 2001, these forty saints are commemorated on May 4 with all the martyrs of the English Reformation; in Wales, October 25 remains the proper feast of the six Welsh martyrs and their companions.

The legacy of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales transcends the framework of national devotion. Their canonization, occurring during the era of post-conciliar ecumenical dialogue, was a delicate moment regarding relations with Anglicanism: Paul VI took care to emphasize that their death did not represent a condemnation of the English people nor an obstacle to the reconciliation of Christians, but a universal testimony of fidelity to conscience. The forty saints have left lasting imprints on the religious geography of England and Wales: the house-chapel of Margaret Clitherow in York, the shrine of David Lewis in Usk in Wales, the site of Tyburn in London (place of execution for many martyrs, where a Benedictine community has perpetuated their memory since 1903). Dozens of churches, Catholic schools, and religious institutes bear their names in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. The figure of Edmund Campion in particular, a leading intellectual converted to Catholicism and martyred at thirty-nine, has remained a symbol of the resistance of learned faith against political power. Robert Southwell, whose poems circulated clandestinely in Elizabethan England, is recognized as one of the great spiritual poets of the English language. Their relics are preserved in various British shrines, and their annual feast still gathers pilgrims from all over England and Wales.