By JAMES MONTI
The recent slaughter in odium fidei of the 85-year-old French priest Fr. Jacques Hamel on July 26 shortly after two terrorists stormed into the church where he was celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a vivid manifestation that the price for being a faithful Catholic has been rapidly escalating of late.
On a broader plain the stakes for faithful Catholics have been raised by a growing web of laws clearly designed to eradicate by means of coercion any opposition to secular society’s agenda of deconstructing marriage, family life, morality, and the right to life.
Beyond this, Catholics deal with the daily threat of what the great St. Thomas More scholar Fr. Germain Marc’hadour aptly described over six decades ago as “civic annihilation,” in which a Catholic faithful to the teachings of the Church may find himself standing virtually alone, with even many of his fellow Catholics “ready to taunt him” (Marc’hadour, “Obedient Unto Death: A Key to St. Thomas More,” Spiritual Life, n.s., volume 7, fall 1961, p. 217).
But as our Lord taught us with the parable of the merchant in search of fine pearls (Matt. 13:45-46), no price is too high to pay for what we believe as Catholics. It has always been so. On June 25, 1580, a man dressed as a merchant of jewels arrived at the English seaport of Dover. He had truly come in search of the “pearl of great value,” for he was in fact returning to his native land in secret as a newly ordained Jesuit Catholic priest intent upon serving the country’s underground community of Catholics persecuted under Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603).
Three weeks later, early on the morning of July 19, 1580, this priest, the future saint and martyr Fr. Edmund Campion, was taking leave of a fellow Jesuit, Fr. Robert Persons, as the two were about to go their separate ways to begin their mission when a messenger arrived.
The messenger, a recusant Catholic layman who had managed to slip out of prison, explained to the two priests that there was a plot to accuse the Jesuits of being motivated by political designs rather than the salvation of souls, and that it was therefore expedient that they should each write a signed declaration of their true motivations which in the event of their arrest and execution would serve to refute such a lie.
At this Fr. Campion took a pen, sat down and within half an hour composed what is one of the finest pieces of English Catholic literature, a text addressed to the councilors of Queen Elizabeth.
After beginning his declaration by stating that his mission to his native land is “for the glory of God and benefit of souls,” he explains that this mission has summoned him to “a special kind of warfare,” which is none other than that of preaching the Gospel, administering the sacraments, converting sinners, giving instruction and refuting errors and vice. In the interest of “advancing the majesty of Jesus my King,” he declares himself ready and willing to debate with any and every Protestant preacher.
Having expressed the hope that his offer to explain and defend the teachings of the Catholic Church might gain a hearing before the queen’s council and even before the queen herself, Fr. Campion draws his declaration to its dramatic climax by speaking of the spiritual army of English priests and seminarians to which he belongs:
“Many innocent hands are lifted up unto Heaven for you daily and hourly, by those English students whose posterity shall not die, which, beyond the seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you to Heaven or to die upon your pikes. . . .
“We have made a league — all the Jesuits in the world . . . cheerfully to carry the cross that 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 to be 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.”
Fr. Campion ends his “Letter to the Council” (a text dubbed by his adversaries as his “Brag”) by expressing the hope that even if his offer is rejected and he in the end is met with nothing but the “rigour” of execution at the councilors’ hands, God may somehow bring about their reconciliation with him so that “we may at last be friends in Heaven” (text in Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography, John Hodges, 1896, pp. 225-228).
In light of the recent scholarship regarding evidence of Catholic sympathies, beliefs, and connections in the life and plays of Edmund Campion’s contemporary William Shakespeare (1563-1616), and the evidence that Shakespeare made oblique references to the martyr in his play Twelfth Night (c. 1601), it does not seem too much of a stretch to see a similarity of spirit between Fr. Campion’s bold declaration of his and his companions’ fight to the death for the Catholic faith and the following famous lines from Shakespeare’s 1599 play Henry V, in which King Henry rouses his men for the battle to come:
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/ For he today that sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,/ This day shall gentle his condition:/ And gentlemen in England now a-bed/ Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,/ And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks/ That fought with us upon St. Crispin’s day” (act IV, scene iii, lines 60-67).
Unlike Henry V, Fr. Campion was to die on the battlefield — hung, drawn, and quartered on December 1, 1581 — as did many more of his “band of brothers” in the priesthood. But no battle fought for Christ is ever truly lost. And those who die for the Church by doing so win her greatest victories.
There were English laymen as well who were had reckoned no expense too high in holding fast to their Catholic faith. Thus those who dared to involve themselves in the sheltering of fugitive priests did so at the peril of their lives.
Fr. Henry Garnet (1555-1606) tells of lay Catholics in County Durham (1592-1593) hiding in the woods to escape detection by the “pursuivants” — the relentless huntsmen of Elizabeth’s police state. He tells of a nobleman and his wife, eight months pregnant, who had built for themselves an amazing underground bunker beneath an oak tree, with two bedrooms and a bathroom, as well as a recess for storing food. A narrow opening in a cleft root of the large tree, concealed with sod, provided the only point of entry.
With the pursuivants conducting their searches usually in the morning or at night, the couple ventured out of their cave only in the early afternoon. In these cramped quarters they even managed to accommodate a visiting priest, the Jesuit Fr. John Nelson. Their secret home managed to last six weeks until rain and melting snow brought the cave roof down upon them — unfortunately Fr. Garnet does not indicate whether the couple survived this accident (Michael Hodgetts, “A Topographical Index of Hiding Places,” Recusant History, volume 16, 1982, p. 158).
All Treason
In his comprehensive masterpiece on the way of perfection, The Spiritual Life, Fr. Adolphe Tanquerey, SS (1854-1932), observes that the secular world tempts believers by fomenting immoral examples, fostering pleasure-obsessed behavior among the young, marital infidelity in families, and dishonesty in the workplace.
But when the world finds that seductive offers of pleasure, wealth, and power do not suffice to bring down the faithful it adopts a different tactic — “it attempts to terrorize us,” sometimes by overt persecution, but at other times, “…the world turns timid souls from the discharge of their religious duties by mockery and jest. It refers to them as hypocrites and dupes believing still in antiquated dogmas. It holds up to ridicule parents whose daughters are modestly dressed….Many souls are in this manner, in spite of the protests of conscience, driven to conform through human respect” (Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, Desclee and Co., Tournai, 1930, p. 111).
After having been threatened with a lawsuit for preaching a courageous homily on May 13 in defense of the traditional family, the archbishop of Valencia, Spain, Antonio Cardinal Canizares Llovera not only reiterated what he had said but declared himself ready to repeat it again “even if they would crucify me” (The Wanderer, June 30, 2016, p. 1a).
At St. Edmund Campion’s execution one of those present said to him, “In your Catholicism all treason is contained” (Simpson, p. 453). In the eyes of the world, it was treason then, and it is treason now.
None of us knows just how high a price we may be asked to pay in the days ahead, in the years ahead, for remaining faithful Catholics.
But is it even conceivable that there could ever be a price too high to pay for eternal bliss with God, with our Lady, with the angels and saints, and with our families and friends? Yes, indeed, “The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood.”
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