Tuesday, December 1, 2009

God's Champion


"And touching our Societie, 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 practices 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."

--Saint Edmund Campion's Challenge to the Privy Council, also known as Campion's Brag

Please follow these links to two excellent posts on Saint Edmund Campion who was martyred on December 1, 1581:

http://www.catholictradition.org/Saints/campion.htm

http://cantuar.blogspot.com/2009/12/st-edmund-campion-saint-for-anglican.html
(Two other saints were also martyred with Saint Edmund Campion at Tyburn on this day in 1581. They are Saint Ralph Sherwin, a convert and secular priest, and Saint Alexander Briant, a Jesuit priest. Henry Walpole, a lapsed Catholic who was at the execution, was spattered there by a drop of Saint Edmund Campion's blood. Walpole soon after left England to become a Jesuit priest, and was himself later martyred at Tyburn.)

All you holy English martyrs, pray for us.

Salvete flores martyrum!