Furor over Forty

Furor over Forty Few Vatican announcements in recent years--apart from Pope Paul's birth control encyclical--have caused such a worldwide stir as the abrupt downgrading of more than 200 saints in 1969. Among the popular figures dropped from the universal liturgical calendar were St. Christopher, St. Nicholas (the original Santa Claus) and England's patron St. George. Now English Roman Catholics are about to recapture some of their lost ground: Pope Paul VI is planning to canonize 40 Roman Catholic martyrs who were condemned to agonizing deaths on the orders of Anglican rulers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The canonization plans have raised fears that the cause of ecumenism in Britain may be sacrificed at the stake.

The 40 were chosen from among 365 who were executed between the reign of Henry VIII and the rule of Cromwell, under the Act of Supremacy of 1534. The act made it high treason to refuse the oath that accepted the King as supreme head of the Church of England, to go abroad and return as an ordained Catholic priest, or even to harbor a priest. Since no Catholic priest could be ordained in England, a steady flow of young Englishmen left the country for The Netherlands. They returned as priests in disguise to visit among known Catholic homes called "Mass houses." where they secretly met with the faithful and celebrated Mass. Eventually, about two-thirds of these undercover priests were caught and executed.

Some of the best known among the 40 martyrs: EDMUND CAMPION, a debonair Jesuit scholar who was described by William Cecil as "one of the diamonds of England," and was patronized by high nobility, even for a time by Queen Elizabeth. Campion's treatise Decem Rationes (Ten Reasons), in which he challenged Protestants to religious debate, led to his death by hanging. In 1886, Campion was made a beatus, a preliminary step to canonization that all 40 have attained.

ROBERT SOUTHWELL, another Jesuit, whose poems were admired by Ben Jonson, executed after prolonged torture. PHILIP HOWARD, Earl of Arundel and forefather of the present Duke of Norfolk, who was caught trying to escape to France. He died after ten years of privation in the Tower of London, accused of praying for the success of the Spanish Armada.

PHILIP EVANS, called the jolliest of Welsh martyrs, who was playing court tennis when told that he had to die for being a priest ordained abroad. First, the story goes, he finished the game. MARGARETCLITHEROW, comely wife of a Yorkshire butcher, who was pressed to death with a sharp stone under her back for the crime of harboring priests.

The two leading religious leaders of Britain, the Catholics' John Cardinal Heenan of Westminster and the Anglicans' Archbishop Ramsey of Canterbury, are deeply opposed on the issue of canonization. Cardinal Heenan sees it as a badly needed restorative "to recall the Catholic Church in Britain to a sense of discipline and allegiance to the Pope." Archbishop Ramsey is worried that it will rekindle religious antagonism. "I am increasingly convinced that the canonization would be harmful to the ecumenical cause in England and that it would encourage the emotions which militate against it," he said. He finds a "siege mentality" among English Roman Catholics that "is bound up psychologically with a kind of martyrdom complex deeply rooted in history. Ought we, on both sides, not be getting away from it?"

Honor Where Due. However, arguments for and against canonization cross religious lines. The Archbishop was taken to task by some of the Anglican clergy for interfering in Catholic affairs. Said the Dean of Prescot at Lancashire: "The recollection and commemoration of men and women who died for genuine religious convictions will hearten not only Catholics but many others." Oxford's A. L. Rowse, a leading Elizabethan scholar and a "nonsectarian rationalist." put forward historical arguments against canonization. "The fact is," he said, "that by its bull of 1570, the papacy declared war on Elizabeth I, not only by excommunicating her but deposing her, enjoining upon Catholics the duty of opposing her by every means."

In Rome, there is no intention to back down. The cause for canonization was opened in 1961, and the investigation has now been completed. Soon a consistory of about 25 prelates will meet in Rome to give their final approval. The Vatican is confident that the uproar in Britain will fade away before the tribunal reaches its verdict. After all, other Catholic martyrs of the same period--notably Sir Thomas More --were proclaimed saints without causing a ripple.

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