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Vivian Redlich, 1905–1942: A Martyr in the Tradition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In early August 1942 an English Anglican missionary priest named Vivian Redlich met his death at the hands of the Japanese in Papua, then in the Anglican diocese of New Guinea. Redlich is one of a group of Papua New Guinea martyrs commemorated by the Anglican Church. I first heard his story when I joined the staff of his former theological college at Chichester, where he is remembered every year with a Eucharist at which an account of his martyrdom is liturgically read, and where he stands as a model of priestly dedication and sacrifice for those approaching ordination. I have prepared this paper to remember him on this fiftieth anniversary of his death, and in particular to set his story in the context of the earliest tradition of martyrology.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1993
References
1 This is part of the account read at the Thanksgiving Eucharist in Chichester Cathedral, 5 June 1992, for the fiftieth anniversary of Redlich’s death. It is printed by kind permission of the Principal, the Revd Canon P. G. Atkinson.
2 The Papua New Guinea Church Partnership [hereafter P.N.G.C.P.] is at Partnership House, Waterloo Road, London SEi 8XA: the New Guinea Mission changed its name to this when the Anglican Province of Papua New Guinea was inaugurated in 1977.
3 From material issued by P.N.G.C.P. for the Jubilee Eucharist for the New Guinea Martyrs, held on 5 September 1992.
4 Henrich, Ruth, ed., South Sea Epic: War and the Church in New Guinea 1939–43 (London, 1944)Google Scholar [hereafter SSE].
5 Dorothy Tomkins and Brian Hughes, The Road from Gona (Sydney, 1969) [hereafter RG], includes continuous narrative based on several manuscripts and the reports of eyewitnesses. In his foreword, Frank W. Coaldrake, Chairman of the Australian Board of Missions, writes that the compiler sometimes ‘recast their stories to fit the over-all perspective which the ABM asked him to adopt’.
6 See Wetherell, David, ed., The New Guinea Diaries of Philip Strong 1936–1945 (Melbourne, 1981)Google Scholar [hereafter NGDPS], p. 113, and n. 2; the Diaries are important material on this subject, as is D. Wetherell’s Reluctant Mission: the Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea 1891–1942 (St Lucia, Queensland, 1977).
7 Henrich, Ruth, ed., Heroes of the Church Today: Stories from the Far East (London, 1948)Google Scholar [hereafter HCT], pp. 5–9.
8 Selections from Bitmead’s story are often quoted in material on Redlich produced in this country and Australia, but I have not managed to discover the immediate context of its writing.
9 Quoted in, e.g., RG, pp. 27–9.
10 In Christopher Garland, A Centenary History of the Diocese of Popondota [sic, sometimes ‘Popondetta’], p. 9. No publisher is named; an extract was given me by P.N.G.C.P.
11 See RG, p. 62.
12 For these stories, see all the books quoted, esp. SSE, where their letters are quoted.
13 Tomlin, J. W. S., Awakening. A History of lhe New Guinea Mission (London, 1951), p. 192 Google Scholar.
14 I am grateful to Dr David Hilliard, of The Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, for details of this; and see Paul Richardson, in the Weekly Times of Papua New Guinea, 23 Apr. 1992, p. 16.
15 HCT. p. 8.
16 NGDPS, p. 179.
17 HCT, pp. 7–8.
18 Musurillo, H., ed., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar [hereafter ACM]. Cf. on Perpetua and Felicitas, Stuart G. Hall, ‘Women among the early martyrs’, above, pp. 1–21.
19 Angelo di Bernardino, ed., and Adrian Walford, tr., Encyclopaedia of the Early Church, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1991), 2, p. 533, under Martyr III.
20 ACM, pp. 16–17 (Polycarp, 20).
21 Ibid., pp. 2–3 (Polycarp, 1, 1).
22 Ibid., pp. 62–3 (Martyrs of Lyons, 1, 1).
23 Ibid., pp. 106–7 (Perpetua, 1, 1).
24 Ibid., pp. 10–11 (Polycarp, 10, 1).
25 Ibid., pp. 108–9 (Perpetua, 3, 2).
26 Ibid., pp. 12–13 (Polycarp, 14, 2).
27 Ibid., pp. 82–3 (Martyrs of Lyons, 2, 2).
28 HCT, foreword.
29 ACM, pp. 106–7 (Perpetua, 1, 1).
30 Annie S. Strachan, Heroic Deeds on the Mission Field (London, n.d., but before 1912, see text).
31 Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, Horatius, xxvii; in, for example, Macaulay, , Lays of Ancient Rome, Essap and Poems (London, 1963)Google Scholar.
32 For instance, though disparagingly, in Wilfred Owen’s Duke et decorum est in his Collected Poems (London, 1963).
33 Horace, Odes III, ii, 13: discussed in G. Williams, The Third Book of Horace’s Odes (Oxford, 1979). pp. 32–7.
34 For Augustine, see, for example, his treatment of the story of Regulus in De chítale Dei, I, xv, accessible in English in Augustine, City of God, tr. H. Bettenson (London, 1972).