Traditionally, meditations on death have leagued with those on the judgment and on hell to induce a type of fear that leads to repentance. Death terrifies the pagan and the Christian who by sin has strayed into a pagan way of life. In a world given over to the search for material well being and the more physical perfections of human life these terrors are pushed into the background of the mind. The foreground is wholly filled with the desires and activities connected with good living. Meditation on death is the last thing the living materialist would willingly undertake.

St Thomas More, ‘the one genius of England’, to quote Erasmus, is one of the best-loved of Englishmen. His wit and learning led Swift to number him among the seven great men of the world. His gentleness and charity led the Elizabethan London playwrights to name him ‘the best friend the poor e'er had’. Yet his very greatness and the warmth of his humanity have, in some respects, obscured the essential More, to the vast collection of Moreana available there is very little concerning Thomas More the saint, even less on More the theologian and little on Thomas the lawyer. By profession St Thomas was a lawyer, but it was as a theologian that he was admired and criticised by his contemporaries, and it was as the ‘leader of the opposition’ that he was liquidated by Henry.

When, at the beginning of the year 1535, Blessed John Houghton, the Prior of the London Charterhouse, announced to his monks gathered together in Chapter that they must either renounce the authority of the Pope or suffer death, all cried with one mind and one voice: ‘Let us all die in our simplicity’. They had lived in simplicity, and it was in simphcity that they wished to die. But what exactly is this simplicity, which is the characteristic mark of every true Carthusian?

Behind the more dramatic features of the history of the Church in England during Elizabeth's reign—threatened military intervention by Phillip of Spain, the excommunication of Elizabeth, the rise and fall of her many suitors and the rather spectral presence of Mary Stuart beyond the northern border—lies the unfailing influence of the missionary priests. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the fact that Catholicism in England did not suffer the fate it has met in the Scandinavian countries is to be attributed to them more than to any other elernent of the Counter-Reformation movement. At a time when the ranks of the old Marian clergy were thinned by death, life imprisonment or banishment and the strength of the Elizabethan administration was concentrated with a particular violence against the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, Fr William Allen conceived the idea of founding a seminary at Douai.

The apostolate of the Missionary Priests would have been I impossible without the heroic co-operation of the lay Catholics. As in the early Church, the faith lived in the houses of the faithful. No less than eighty laymen and women—a Quarter of the whole—find a place in the calendar of the martyrs. But there were many who suffered a slow martyrdom in prison, under conditions inconceivable to us, and whose sufferings have deceived scant recognition. The names of ten layfolk who died in prison are among the Dilati (those whose causes have been postponed through lack of evidence), but this list is woefully incomplete. There were many others who spent most of their lives in prison, but were let out to die. Richard Wenster, the Yorkshire schoolmaster, and Francis Tregian were there for more nan thirty years. Thomas Pound, after a similar ordeal, was sentenced in his old age to lose his ears for protesting against the martyrdom of Laurence Bailey in 1604. The sentence was commuted, but he had his ears nailed to the pillory in London and Lancaster. Roland Jenks the printer was sentenced to be nailed to the pillory by his ears and to release himself by cutting them off with his own hand. Yet none of these are martyrs properly so—called

In the splendid ceremony at which we have been assisting, there are two elements: the dedication of the altar and the burying of the relics of martyrs in that altar. At some periods and in some parts of the Catholic world these two elements have been so distinguished that they have even taken place on different days. Since this is the Feast of St Peter's Chains, and St Peter, Apostle and Martyr and first Bishop of Rome, is our great patron, propose to dwell chiefly on the most Roman of these two elements, which were not conflated as they are now until the Middle Ages; and the most Roman of them is the enshrining of the relics of the martyrs in the altar of sacrifice. It was not till after the Roman Empire had officially recognised the legality of the Catholic religion in the early fourth century that we were able to have permanent churches and fixed altars; and then the churches were at first dedicated, set apart for the worship of God in the celebration of Mass, simply by the decree of the Christian Emperor handing them over to religious uses. And the altars which it was the main purpose of those churches to house, were considered sufficiently hallowed by the celebration of Mass upon them. How indeed could they be more or better hallowed?