For the Mass and the Salvation of Souls: The Witness of the Blessed Martyrs of Douai
MASS Deus venerunt
LESSON Hebrews 12:1–10
GOSPEL St Luke 12:1–8
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
On the feast of Corpus Christi, 8 June 1577, approximately one hundred armed men descended upon Golden Manor in Cornwall. Accompanying them were the sheriff and several magistrates. Their object was to arrest a single Catholic priest, Cuthbert Mayne, who had returned from the Continent the previous year and was secretly ministering to the faithful. He had been ordained at Douai in 1575. Now, on the very day when the Church celebrated the mystery of Christ’s abiding presence in the Blessed Sacrament, the authorities came to seize a man whose priesthood existed principally to bring that same Sacrament to souls deprived of it.
There is something profoundly revealing about that scene. An entire apparatus of civil authority had been mobilised against a priest whose principal occupation was offering Mass, hearing confessions, instructing Catholics and reconciling sinners to the Church. Mayne was eventually condemned for high treason and executed at Launceston in November 1577. Offered his life in exchange for abandoning his religion and acknowledging the Queen’s ecclesiastical supremacy, he refused. His answer was not an act of political rebellion. It was the confession of a man who understood that the Church belongs to Jesus Christ, and that no earthly sovereign can claim authority over what God has instituted.
Today we commemorate the Blessed Martyrs of Douai, whose history began on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1568, when William Allen, afterwards Cardinal, established the English College at Douai. Situated then in the Spanish Netherlands, the college provided a refuge for Catholic scholars and developed into a seminary organised according to the principles of the Council of Trent. Its original purpose had been to preserve learning and prepare for a future restoration of Catholic life. But the young priests formed there were unwilling merely to await more favourable circumstances. England needed priests, and they were determined to return.
Between the martyrdom of St Cuthbert Mayne in 1577 and that of Blessed Thomas Thwing at York in 1680, 158 men associated with Douai, including secular and religious clergy and laymen, suffered martyrdom. In 1585, Parliament had made the very presence of certain Catholic priests in England an act of high treason, while those who knowingly sheltered them risked capital punishment. Yet still the missionaries came. They crossed the Channel knowing that the sacramental ministry entrusted to them might be purchased at the price of their lives.
We must understand precisely what they were defending. Their purpose was not simply the preservation of a religious culture, however venerable, nor the maintenance of an ancestral identity. They returned because souls needed the grace of God. Children needed baptism. Penitents needed absolution. The dying needed the last sacraments. Above all, the faithful needed the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, through which the one redeeming Sacrifice of Calvary is made present upon the altar. These men knew that the Church’s mission concerned eternal salvation, and therefore could never be reduced to whatever religious activity the state might permit.
The Introit of today’s Mass gives voice to a wounded Church: Deus, venerunt gentes in hereditatem tuam — “O God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance.” The Psalm speaks of the sanctuary profaned, the servants of God slaughtered, and Jerusalem reduced to ruins. Such language is not chosen to cultivate resentment. It teaches us to recognise what is lost when the worship of the true God is displaced, and to understand the suffering of the Church within the mystery of Christ’s own Passion. Her enemies may confiscate her buildings, imprison her ministers and scatter her children; they cannot annul the divine commission by which she exists.
In the Gospel, Our Lord speaks directly to the fear which persecution produces: “Be not afraid of them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.” It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the martyrs felt no fear. They knew what awaited them at Tyburn, York, Launceston and the other places of execution. The prospect of hanging, drawing and quartering was deliberately calculated to terrify. But Christ commands His disciples to recognise a judgment more terrible than any earthly tribunal: “Fear ye him, who after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell.” The fear of God establishes the proper order of every lesser fear.
Yet almost immediately Our Lord speaks of the sparrows, not one of which is forgotten before God, and of the very hairs of our heads being numbered. Divine judgment and divine tenderness belong together. The God before Whom we shall answer for our fidelity is the same Father Who knows every sorrow and every sacrifice. The martyrs were not abandoned when their prayers failed to secure their release. Their perseverance was itself the triumph of grace. And the promise which sustained them remains the promise offered to us: “Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God.”
The Epistle develops this lesson through the image of Christian perseverance. Surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses”, we are commanded to “run by patience to the fight proposed to us”, looking always to Jesus, “the author and finisher of faith”. The martyrs did not make themselves holy by the mere exercise of human courage. Their strength came from Christ. The priest who mounted the scaffold had first learned to kneel before the altar. The fidelity manifested at death was formed by the discipline of a life surrendered to God.
Consider Blessed Thomas Thwing, the last of Douai’s martyrs, executed on 23 October 1680. For years he had laboured among Catholics in Yorkshire, serving as chaplain and helping with the education of the young. During the hysteria surrounding the fabricated Popish Plot, he was accused of conspiring against the King. He maintained his innocence, protesting his loyalty to the sovereign while refusing to surrender his priestly identity. His dying words were, “Sweet Jesus, receive my soul.” Nearly a century separated his death from the foundation of Douai. The circumstances had changed, but the need for faithful priests had not.
The Collect asks that the same Holy Ghost Who strengthened these martyrs may inspire us to “love that which they loved, and to perform in deed that which they taught.” Notice that the Church does not ask merely that we admire their courage. She asks that we share their loves and imitate their deeds. And what did they love? Jesus Christ, His Blessed Mother, His Church, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and the souls for whom He shed His Precious Blood. Their witness confronts us with an uncomfortable question: whether these same realities occupy the first place in our own lives.
We may defend the traditional liturgy, profess sound doctrine and speak readily of Catholic restoration. All these things are important. But the martyrs remind us that the ultimate purpose of restoration is the sanctification and salvation of souls. A beautifully celebrated Mass must lead us to deeper repentance, greater charity and more perfect conformity to Christ. The preservation of sacred tradition is inseparable from the supernatural life which that tradition exists to nourish. We must not be content to possess the outward inheritance while neglecting the conversion of heart which makes us faithful heirs.
The Secret of today’s Mass asks God to hear the martyrs whose souls cry from beneath His altar. The Communion antiphon, taken from the Apocalypse, likewise places before us those who were slain for the Word of God and the testimony they maintained. These are especially fitting words at the Holy Sacrifice. The blood of the martyrs derives its worth from the Blood of the Redeemer. Their sacrifice was possible because Christ had first offered Himself for them. Here upon the altar we encounter that same divine Victim, the source of the grace by which they persevered and by which we ourselves must hope to attain eternal life.
The additional prayers of today’s Mass recall England’s ancient dedication as the Dowry of Our Lady and its fidelity to Peter, Prince of the Apostles. The martyrs understood that Catholic England could not be restored by separating devotion to the Blessed Virgin from obedience to the Apostolic See, or either from the integrity of the Catholic Faith. Their loyalty was not principally to a nation, a dynasty or a particular ecclesiastical personality, but to the divine constitution and perennial doctrine of the Church. That witness is as necessary to the universal Church today as it was to England in their own time.
Our circumstances are different, and we should resist the temptation to compare every contemporary difficulty with the sufferings of the martyrs. Nevertheless, there are questions which their example obliges us to answer. Do we make the sacraments central to our lives? Do we pray for priests and encourage vocations? Do Catholic parents teach their children the Faith without embarrassment or compromise? Are we prepared to bear misunderstanding, professional disadvantage or social disapproval rather than deny what Christ has revealed? And when we fall into sin, do we seek reconciliation promptly, recognising the tremendous gift of sacramental absolution for which these missionaries risked so much?
There is one final detail worth remembering. When news of another martyrdom reached Douai, the college traditionally offered a solemn Mass of thanksgiving. Not because death was desirable, still less because persecution was good, but because God had bestowed upon one of His servants the grace of final perseverance. Here was a priest who had kept faith to the end. Here was another soul whose earthly witness had been completed in union with the suffering Christ.
Dearly beloved, the great tragedy would be to honour these men while remaining indifferent to the very things for which they died. We have before us the same altar, the same sacramental priesthood, the same Catholic Faith, and the same promise of eternal life. May the Blessed Martyrs of Douai obtain for us the grace to treasure what they treasured, to practise what they taught, and to persevere in the charity of Christ until death.
For what they preserved at the cost of their blood, we must preserve by the fidelity of our lives; and what they carried across the sea at the peril of death, we must carry into our homes, our families and our daily conduct: the living Faith of Jesus Christ, without which no soul can attain salvation.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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