There seems to be no doubt that the Church, as a visible society of baptized persons, was fully established and functioning in Wales by 200 a.d. Her influence is to be discerned in our earliest vocabulary, e.g. the word for ‘universe’ in Welsh is ‘bedyssawd’, the Latin ‘baptizati’, an assembly of baptized persons. By the sixth century Welsh epic poetry was being written in die context of a Christian culture. Taliesin, the poet, describing the court of Urien Prince of Rheged in Southern Scotland, which formed part of Roman Britain, describes a Catholic family life as lived in the court of his exalted patron. By 314, when the Council of Arles met, Bishops from the whole of Christendom attended and ‘lesser clergy’ from Spain, Italy, Gaul, and Britain. The three orders of Bishops, Presbyters and Deacons were present. We have every reason to deduce that the Catholic Church in Wales was well established, vigorous and in full cognizance of its sister assemblies on the Continent. We hear of British representatives at all the subsequent councils except that of Nicaea. When in 383 Magnus Maximus was proclaimed Emperor by the British Legions before he left for the Continent to defend the fortunes of Rome, he was baptized as an orthodox believer and won the approval of St Martin of Tours, St Ambrose of Milan, and Pope Siricius for his faithfulness in belief.

There is no need to stress this aspect of Welsh history to a Catholic audience. It was part of the general picture of the Europe of that day. What is perhaps not so generally realized amongst Catholics is that Wales in those days was part and parcel of the Roman Empire, under the direct rule of Roman Emperors, for all of three centuries. After an initial period of resistance to Roman arms our forbears seem to have attained a modus vivendi and to have co-operated with their rulers and actually to have enjoyed a long period of tranquillity.

In 1575 a Welsh priest in Rome wrote down a plan which he had cherished in his long years of exile, since the time when the death of Mary Tudor had extinguished his hopes of becoming Bishop of Bangor. He imagined the galleys of the Papal fleet coming to anchor at Menai, and disembarking an army led by Catholic exiles. The mountain passes from Harlech to Conway were to be blocked by Welsh Catholic sympathizers, and when sufficient English Catholics had made their way into this bridgehead, he proposed a breakout into the Midlands to rescue Mary Queen of Scots and place her on the English throne.

Dr Morys of Clynnog, the author of this scheme, made Wales his landing place for three reasons: her potentialities for resistance, her separate language and history, and her fidelity to the Catholic faith. All these points are made, from the opposite side, by Morys Clynnog’s supplanter in the Bishopric of Bangor, the Protestant Nicholas Robinson. ‘I have found’, he wrote in 1567, ‘since I came to this country images and altars standing in churches undefaced, lewd and indecent vigils and watches observed, much pilgrimage-going, many candles set up to the honour of saints, some relics yet carried about, and all the country full of beads and knots.’ Fr Robert Persons, s.j., likewise turned his attention to Wales at the start of his famous missionary journey with Blessed Edmund Campion in 1580 as a region where priests would be welcome and would do great work for the Catholic cause.

Our enquiry leads us to consider the way in which the Catholic Church adapted her mission to the Welsh nation in the unprecedented circumstances of the Elizabethan persecution. First we must study the part played by the seminary priests from Douai in North Wales. At the very beginnings of the Douai seminary we find associated with Cardinal Allen a Welsh priest from Anglesey, Dr Owen Lewis, like Morys Clynnog, an Oxford graduate and an exile.

Adam, says the Bible, was made to the image of God, and the Church adds that so are all men; and that this image-hood is chiefly in man’s soul. What then is ‘soul’? In our philosophy the term, or its equivalents, denotes life; anything alive has a soul. But ordinarily, of course, it means the life- principle in man; and human life is very different from that of other terrestrial beings. Whether or not any animals reason, it seems absurd to compare the cleverest dogs or monkeys with the enormous range of human achievement. On this planet at least we stand out pretty clearly. Now this, Catholics say, is due to a radical difference in the human life-principle—that it differs from the rest of the world we know not only as dogs differ from roses or horses from dogs, but as something that is not strictly part of the physical world differs from the entire physical world. The human soul is partly outside the physical and even the animal world. To use a question-begging term, it transcends all bodies animate and inanimate. What does this mean?

The ‘transcendence’ of man, his ‘spirituality’ as distinct from mere vitality, is commonly approached negatively. It is said that precisely as a human agent I have certain activities which are not activities of my body or of any part of my body, in which something other than any organ of the body is operating. The body may concur with or condition such activity, it is not precisely the agent acting. The reference is to intellectual activities. Reflecting, then, on these, I think I can make two affirmation about them which, on analysis, yield some understanding of that boasted ‘transcendence’: that I am aware of things (a) as real, and (b) as significant.