On this day, in 1608, St. Thomas Garnet was martyred at Tyburn. Here's more about him:
Protomartyr of St. Omer and therefore of Stonyhurst College; b. at Southwark, c. 1575; executed at Tyburn, 23 June, 1608. Richard Garnet, Thomas's father, was at Balliol College, Oxford, at the time when greater severity began to be used against Catholics, in 1569, and by his constancy gave great edification to the generation of Oxford men which was to produce Campion, Persons and so many other champions of Catholicism. Thomas attended the Horsham grammar school and was afterwards a page to one of the half-brothers of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, who were, however, conformists. At the opening of St. Omer's College in 1592, Thomas was sent there. By 1595 he was considered fit for the new English theological seminary at Valladolid, and started in January, with five others, John Copley, William Worthington, John Ivreson, James Thomson, and Henry Mompesson, from Calais. They were lucky in finding, as a travelling companion, a Jesuit Father, William Baldwin, who was going to Spain
in disguise under the alias Ottavio Fuscinelli, but misfortunes soon
began. After severe weather in the Channel, they found themselves obliged to run for shelter to the Downs, where their vessel was searched by some of Queen Elizabeth's ships, and they were discovered hiding in the hold. They were immediately made prisoners and treated very roughly. They were sent round the Nore up to London, and were examined by Charles, second Lord Howard of Effingham, the lord admiral. After this Father Baldwin was sent to Bridewell prison, where he helped the confessor James Atkinson to obtain his crown. Meantime his young companions had been handed over to Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, having found that they encouraged one another, sent them one by one to different Protestant bishops or doctors. Only the youngest, Mompesson, conformed; the rest eventually escaped and returned to their colleges
beyond seas after many adventures. We are not told specifically what
befell young Garnet, but it seems likely that he was the youth confined
to the house of Dr. Richard Edes (Dict. Nat. Biog., XVI, 364). He fell
ill and was sent home under bond to return to custody atOxford by a certain day. But his jailer not appearing in time, the boy escaped, and to avoid trouble had then to keep away even from his own father. At last he reached St-Omer again, and thence went to Valladolid, 7 March, 1596, having started on that journey no less than ten times.
After ordination in 1599, "returning to England I wandered", he says, "from place to place, to reduce souls which went astray and were in error as to the knowledge of the true Catholic Church". During the excitement caused by the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 he was arrested near Warwick, going under the name Thomas Rokewood, which he had no doubt assumed from Ambrose Rokewood of Coldham Hall, whose chaplain he then was, and who had unfortunately been implicated in the plot. Father Garnet was now imprisoned first in the Gatehouse, then in the Tower, where he was very severely handled in order to make him give evidence against Henry Garnet, his uncle, superior of the English Jesuits, who had lately admitted him into the Society. Though no connection with the conspiracy could be proved, he was kept in the Tower for seven months, at the end of which time he was suddenly put on board ship with forty-six other priests, and a royal proclamation, dated
10 July, 1606, was read to them, threatening death if they returned.
They were then carried across the Channel and set ashore in Flanders.
Father Garnet now went to his old school at St-Omer, thence to Brussels to see the superior of the Jesuits, Father Baldwin, his companion in the adventures of 1595, who sent him to the English Jesuitnovitiate, St. John's, Louvain, in which he was the first novice received. In September, 1607, he was sent back to England, but was arrested six weeks later by an apostate priest called Rouse. This was the timeJames's controversy with Bellarmine about the Oath of Allegiance. Garnet was offered his life if he would take it, but steadfastly refused, and was executed at Tyburn, protesting that he was "the happiestman this day alive". His relics, which were preserved at St-Omer, were lost during the French Revolution.
Today is also, FWIW, the birthday of my son, Thomas Garnett. Pretty cool.
Monday, June 21, 2010
It seems to me -- and has seemed to me for a while -- that a distressing large number of educated and engaged people have embraced -- either uncritically or insufficiently critically -- inaccurate and often tendentious narratives about historical events, developments, and personalities involving the Church. Whether the question involves the causes and characteristics of the so-called "Dark Ages" or the rise of America's common-school system, it too often seems that an I-would-have-thought-by-now-discredited-or-at-least-problematized "whiggish" bias shapes the telling of the relevant stories and that even Catholics (perhaps in an effort to over-compensate for some other Catholics' "triumphalism") buy and repeat them.
So, I'm reading this summer (among other things) Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades: A History (buy it here), and encourage other Catholics who aspire to an accurate (and therefore instructive) understanding of the past to read it, too. At the very least, the book helps with the task of ministering to the poor souls who sat through Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (link).
Here, by the way, is a review by the great scholar of late antiquity, Robert Louis Wilken, of two other Crusades-related books:
. . . The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. . . .
[T]he "remembered" history of the Crusades might better be called an
imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen
Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades "have come to
have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely
through the agency of illusion." Mr. Phillips, a professor of history
at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only
"shadows of the crusades, not true shapes." . . .
Sunday, June 6, 2010
This post, "Religion and the Judiciary" -- about the relevance of judges' religious faith -- from the "U.K. Supreme Court blog"("SCOTUK?"), by MOJ-friend Aidan O'Neill, is worthy reading and thinking about. (Among other things, the post is a reminder that even someone as gifted as Ronald Dworkin will sometimes say shockingly unhinged things. Aidan's post quotes an example.) Aidan's interesting post closes with this:
What the religiously motivated find difficult to understand or accept is that the freedom from discrimination on grounds of religion or belief which has been afforded them by the law does not extend to giving the religious a general right to discriminate (on otherwise unlawful grounds such as sex, age, race, disability, or sexual orientation) on the basis of religion or belief. There will undoubtedly be more litigation – if not further legislation – on this whole vexed issue. The UK tradition of being blind to our Justices’ religion will come to be further strained as a result.
If the term "does not extend" is meant to be used descriptively -- that is, to report that, in fact, the laws in the U.K. are not understood to protect religiously motivated "discrimination" -- then, of course, I have to defer to Aidan, who knows far more about the laws in the U.K. than I do. If, though, the suggestion is that the laws should not distinguish between (irrational, invidious, etc.) "discrimination," on the one hand, and "religiously motivated decisions about employment and related matters by religious institutions and authorities," on the other, then I'd have to disagree.
UPDATE: Aidan wrote to me, and said -- in response to the above -- that "[t]he phrase 'does not extend' from the passage you quote, was indeed being used being used be me purely descriptively rather than implying any prescriptive judgment on my part." He added, "[t]he law is still very recent on all this and the case law has yet fully to develop. At the moment however the relevant government quango intervening on matters of discrimination , the Equality and Human Rights Commission, seems very much to be running the line that religion cannot and should not be recognised as providing any kind of lawful basis for making choices in employment or service provision on the basis of the employee/service recipient’s sexual orientation. But as you know in the UK we have a quite different history and perception of the right role of religion in society, favouring establishment and presuming state regulation of religious bodies, rather than assuming any strict separation between the two sphere which so marks out US jurisprudence on the issue."
