The Catholic calendar on the wall beside my desk lists yesterday as the feast of St. Anthony Mary Claret and the day before yesterday as the feast of St. John of Capistrano. Today, however, is blank. Apparently, or so it would seem, the Church does not celebrate the feast of any particular saint today. Most Catholics, even devout Catholics who try to keep an eye on the saint of the day, will remain woefully ignorant of the fact that today is the Feast of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Wishing no disrespect to St. Anthony Mary Claret and St. John of Capistrano, both of whom are worthy of the veneration due to all the saints, but why are forty men and women who were killed by the anti-Catholic totalitarianism of England’s “reformed” government less important in the eyes of the Church than solitary holy men who died of natural causes? Many of the English Martyrs were hanged, drawn and quartered, a mode of execution that ranks amongst the most gruesome and barbaric ever invented in the sordid annals of human history. Another of the Forty Martyrs, St. Margaret Clitherow, was crushed to death by having weights placed upon her chest. Legend suggests that she might have been pregnant at the time. Isn’t such a saintly heroine and martyr, who laid down her life for the Faith, worthy of a feast day of her own? Doesn’t she deserve a mention on the Catholic calendar on the wall beside my desk? And yet she is not even deemed worthy of mention when placed together with her thirty-nine fellow martyrs!
If England is ever to return to the Faith of her Fathers, she will need the powerful intercession of these powerful saints. How can people pray for their intercession if they do not even know that they exist? As a Catholic and an Englishman, I hope and pray that their omission from the first rank of feast days may be rectified.
May the Martyrs of England pray for the land of their birth and for its conversion. Amen.
Hopefully, the day is being observed at St. Joseph and the English Martyrs parish in Bishops Stortfor, Herts., which is where we lived while I worked in the UK.
Indeed, Joseph. All calendars in the English language should have this day listed.
In fact, the Feast of the English Martyrs is now celebrated (since 2000) on May 4! It was a memorial on the calendars of England and Wales but was promoted to a Feast! Is there someway for lay people to request it be added to the universal calendar of saints?