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Faithful to the Truth even unto Martyrdom
How women kept the Faith alive in post-Reformation England
J J Scarisbrick
This talk was give at the Mulieris Dignitatem Conference.
I am going to talk about a particular period in English Catholic history. Why is it relevant to this Conference? Because it is a rare, perhaps unique, story of Catholic lay women exercising their authentic autonomy and dignity, accepting the equality and complementarity of male and female and the complementarity of lay person and cleric. It is a unique story of lay women―as wives, mothers, catechists, evangelists, friends of the poor and protectors of priests―helping to create a Catholic counter-culture over and against a bitterly anti-Catholic prevailing culture. It is a unique display of the genius of women in their lay role.
It therefore has especial relevance to us today. It should inspire in the future.
In 1559 England became officially a Protestant country. The Mass was abolished, Catholic bishops removed and replaced by Protestant ones and an essentially Calvinist religious settlement imposed on the country. The old religion was outlawed and thereafter subject to erratic, inefficient but often savage persecution―indeed, increasingly savage persecution. Catholic laypeople faced exclusion from public life and eventually crippling fines for non-attendance at Protestant services. It was soon a capital offence to harbour a priest or to be reconciled to the Church or to practice the faith, let alone to be a priest.
English Catholicism would have died a slow, quiet death of spiritual malnutrition (which is what Queen Elizabeth in particular intended) but for the following: the survival of a large number of dispossessed priests who continued to serve an increasingly underground Church; the arrival from the 1570s onwards of a growing number of many zealous priests who had been ordained in English seminaries set up on the Continent― secular priests and then religious (notably Jesuits); the constancy of so many English laypeople, male and female, especially the latter. Again and again we encounter this fact: the English lay Catholic recusant community during what English Catholics know as Penal times, everywhere boasted more women than men. I make no attempt here to explain this fact. I merely report it. Let me give some quick evidence for it. In 1606 there was a sudden anti-Catholic purge which resulted in some 820 Catholics being newly indicted, that is, brought before the chief court of the land and charged with recusancy. Of these 820 new offenders, 532 (65 per cent) were women: 284 wives, 37 widows and 211 spinsters. In the county in which I live (Warwickshire―then a notoriously ‘papistical’ part of the land) there were 235 new victims, 172 of them (nearly 70 per cent) women. In Yorkshire, the proportion was even higher: 83 out of 109 (i.e. nearly 80 per cent).
It is important to understand what all this meant in human terms.
All those women faced heavy fines and even prison. Many of those listed were probably servants in those Catholic country houses which played so important a part in sustaining the underground Church. They would have been hand-picked by their mistresses precisely because they would not inform the authorities of the comings and goings to the house of missionary priests, the secret Masses, baptisms and marriages and so on. But married recusant women were in a very daunting situation. If their husbands were still loyal Catholics, their joint recusancy could put everything at risk. If the husbands were Protestants or conforming (as many no doubt were) by not conforming themselves the wives were not only defying their spouses (and this in a society, as we are often told, which was strongly patriarchal) but could ruin them. A Catholic wife could cost a man his job (or public office) and he was liable for the fines for her non-attendance at the parish church. He could be forced to enter into bonds for her good behaviour and even face prison if she defaulted. In short, to be a recusant woman, especially a recusant wife of a non-Catholic could require enormous courage.
It could eventually cost lives. Of the 190-odd English Catholics who suffered martyrdom during the fiercest persecution under Elizabeth I, there are three famous women. Their stories vividly illustrate some of the ways in which the old Faith was sustained by female effort. Margaret Clitherow, wife of a butcher in York, had herself been reconciled to the Church at the age of 18 and was married to a loving, tolerant non-Catholic. Her home became a radiant centre of Catholic activism: seminary priests and Jesuits secretly sheltered there, her children given a wonderful Catholic formation (two of the boys were later ordained). Eventually betrayed, she refused to plead to the charge of harbouring priests for fear of incriminating others and suffered the horrendous punishment for that refusal―being crushed to death by heavy stones laid on her prostrate body.
Then there was St Margaret Ward, a zealous unmarried woman who succoured Catholics in London prisons and helped a priest to escape by boat from one of them. Alas, she was identified by the gaoler, then brutally flogged in an attempt to get her to betray fellow-Catholics and eventually, in August 1588, hanged for high treason at Tyburn (at Marble Arch, London).
In February 1601 St Anne Line, a widow, suffered the same fate at the same place. For years she had kept house for Jesuit priests working in London or coming there for retreats, using her skill with the needle to produce vestments in her spare time, sheltering young women on their way to convents in Flanders, instructing children in the Faith in a neighbouring house. Her faith had cost her her inheritance when her husband died and she suffered poor health. Eventually she was betrayed by a Judas in the Government’s pay, arrested and condemned to death. She was so ill that she had to be taken to the scaffold in a basket.
These three, Margaret Clitherow, Margaret Ward and Anne Line are now canonised saints. There was almost a fourth. Mrs Dorothy Wiseman of Braddocks in north Essex was a key figure in a network of Catholic houses which sheltered missionary priests, secular and Jesuit, when she was eventually arrested and condemned to death even as Elizabeth I lay dying. Her successor, James I, anxious to win Catholic support, pardoned her and she was spared martyrdom.
Yes, it could be argued that these three (almost four) female martyrdoms out of the nearly 200 male ones does little to support my case. But I am going to argue now (and this is perhaps the most important thing I have to say) that this is not fair.
In the first place, consider women like Lady Cowdray in Sussex (south England) or Dorothy Lawson in the North, who more or less openly defied the law and provided havens for priests, old and new, distributed rosaries and Catholic prayerbooks, catechised the young, and visited the sick.
Consider those brave women who presided over the dozens of major Catholic gentry homes from which seminary priest and Jesuits, disguised as schoolmasters or whatever, and protected by priest-holes and elaborate escape routes could minister to the surrounding areas. These women were often running not only complicated households but were largely responsible for ensuring that their resident or visiting priests could safely say Mass and administer the sacraments. They also catechised their children, ensured that staff―even tenants―were safe, and would have to face sheriffs and posses when they arrived to carry out a sudden search of their homes armed with sniffer-dogs and crow-bars. Then consider all the women who went to prison because they had refused to attend their non-Catholic churches and had incurred huge unpaid fines as a result. There were scores of them. I cannot say exactly how many. In 1583 someone complained that there was no room in prisons for thieves and the like because they were full of Papists (Catholics). Many of these prisoners, of course, would have been men. But there were certainly a lot of women. In 1573, for instance, thirty Catholic ladies (all of what we would today call upper-class) were arrested in York and imprisoned in one fell swoop. Now, we must be careful. Most prisons then were privately owned and you paid for what you got. Some were almost incredibly lax. You came and went (and ate) as you could afford. Others were abominable, deadly cess-pits, where a notorious disease called gaol-fever (dysentery?) reigned.
Scores of Catholic women went into such prisons, some in and out several times, because they had refused to conform. For some, such imprisonment was not very onerous. For others it was lethal. They died there. I cannot give you exact figures. I can only make responsible guesses. I estimate that scores of Catholic women (maybe as many as 200) were imprisoned for the Faith between 1559 and 1603 by a regime which, on the whole, was not bloodthirsty and did not want to make martyrs―not least because it knew that, in those famous words, “blood of martyrs is seed of the Church”. Of them, perhaps a third or maybe a quarter died in prison or as an immediate result of imprisonment.
Is that a lot or a little? I do not know.
All I do know is that it would greatly increase the list of English Martyrs if these Catholic heroines could meet the stringent requirements of Rome’s Congregation for Saints. Unfortunately, so little is known about them that they will never qualify for beatification, let alone anything higher.
I end with two remarks. First when a hatmaker’s Catholic wife in prison in York was asked why she would not attend Protestant services she replied ‘because there is neither priest, altar or sacrifice there.’ I cannot think of a more succinct and accurate statement. Any professional theologian would have been proud of it.
Finally, consider the achievement of one of the many Catholic families which owed so much to the women in charge of their households, namely the Bedingfields, a Suffolk dynasty. Eleven daughters of Frances Bedingfield (died in 1644) became nuns. By the time of the French Revolution 29 Bedingfield girls had done so―and many of their brothers had become priests. Such was the Catholic culture which a great recusant family could produce, thanks above all to the women who inspired it.
Report on Rome Conference Mulieris Dignitatum 20 Years on
WOMAN AND MAN, THE HUMANUM IN ITS ENTIRETY
Introduction
Twenty years after the publication of Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem a conference was held in Rome set up by the Pontifical Council for the Laity, on the 7 – 9 February 2008 under this
title. Mulieris Dignitatem is a seminal document, the first Papal letter devoted to a consideration of the role of woman in God’s plan and a wonderfully enriching consideration of Christian anthropology.
Over the three days of the Conference, these themes were explored by a wide variety of women speakers and attended by representatives of 49 bishops’ conferences, and 17 women’s organisations of which The Association of Catholic Women of England and Wales, whom I represented, was one.
Cardinal Stanslaw Rylko, President of the Council for the Laity, spoke of the conference as a ‘positive event’ in recognition of woman’s specific value in face of a ‘gender revolution’, which on the one hand presented women’s identity as a struggle for power against men, ‘a version of the class struggle’, commented the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, and on the other deconstructed the concepts of the different sexes to the point where one’s sex becomes a matter of choice for the individual. God created men and women equal in his sight and complementary, not identical, to each other.
It is to women, that God has entrusted the human person. Safe-guarding the human person is important for the culture of societies. It is pre-eminent in a time where, as one of the speakers said, the most dangerous place for a human being to be is the womb.
Christ’s Openness to the Women He Encountered
As Pope John Paul II wrote, ‘We must open the doors to Christ’. In Mulieris Dignitatem, he reflects on the dignity of men and women, based on Christ Our Redeemer. In this conference, we considered Christ’s evident love of women that we see in the Scriptures. It was to the five-times married woman, living with a lover, and a Samaritan at that, that he first revealed that he was the Christ. We know how he loved Martha and Mary and, indeed, it was not Peter, but Martha who was the first to say ‘You are the Christ’. He allowed the women who ‘went round with him’ and supported him with their money, to set aside their domestic and family duties for that time, in order to perform this specific work.
In the Beginning
The Old Testament tells us that God was not in the wind. It is in men and women that we find him. God, however, is not a monolith. The Three Persons of the Trinity are also a unity. They are different but equal, loving and intimate. Mulieris Dignitatem goes back to the beginning of creation, to Genesis, and discovers for us the solitude of Adam in the garden with the animals and his ecstatic cry when Eve is created ‘This, at last is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh’. They delight in each other, in a ‘unity of the two’, there is no holding back in their happiness. They learn, later, that sin negates that happiness and they cover themselves up, physically and emotionally. The male’s tendency to dominate derives from the broken equilibrium of life in the garden. Men and women in every age have to seek to restore the openness between them. John Paul II, incidentally, speaks of the books of Genesis as a symbolic narrative.
The Need for an Adequate Anthropology
The two, in unity, become three and the family is born. Blanca Castilla de Cortazar, quoted Vatican II that ‘man is the only being in the Universe whom God loves for himself.’ She continued, ‘[Christ] loves me and gave himself for me. Therefore I have value.’ She said that we must overcome sociology to produce an adequate anthropology, an understanding of man, as created by God. Bodies are the expression of the family – changed bodies mean changed people. In sex, men generate life outside their bodies; women generate life within their bodies. In sex the man gives himself and remains in the woman. She keeps his gift within her. Men and women have different gifts to give.
A questioner asked Castilla de Cortazar, why women are not ordained to the priesthood. She replied that it was because women already mediated God to mankind in their actual or (I would add) potential motherhood.
Another speaker considered the ways in which Christianity has promoted women. In the ancient world, they were without rights. In some Eastern religions that believe in re-incarnation, a woman has first to be re-incarnated as a man, before she can exit from life. Whereas the Greek gods raped or took women while they were unconscious when they wanted offspring, God the Father, respecting Mary’s dignity, sent the angel Gabriel to tell her of the future Incarnation of his Son, in order to give her the freedom to assent or dissent. If God had spoken himself, she would have had to obey.
When Christ taught that a man who leaves his wife and marries another commits adultery, marriage gave women equal status, which they had not had before, even in Judaism. As Christianity grew, women received education as religious in convents, which also enabled them to study and deepen their vocation. From this, came the understanding of spiritual motherhood, which indeed can include unmarried women and widows in the world. Women doctors of the Church , St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux are read and loved more than many male doctors of the Church! They speak to people from the heart, with emotion.
Faithful Women under Persecution in England
The conference was given in Italian, Spanish, French and English, with instantaneous translations. One of the few English speakers and one of only two men (apart from the Cardinals) was Professor Jack Scarisbrick, historian and founder of LIFE, who spoke about the contribution of women to the defence of the Catholic faith during the Elizabethan persecution. Not only were there heroic women martyrs, now St. Margaet Clitherow,
St. Margaret Ward and St. Anne Line, but there were many women, who hid priests in their houses, so that the Mass could be celebrated, and supported them financially, but as they refused to attend Protestant services, which was against the law, they suffered heavy fines for non-attendance and were sometimes imprisoned . Professor Scarisbrick estimates that between 70% and 80% of the people in gaol for non-attendance at Protestant services were women. Some prisons were lax, others severe and riddled with ‘gaol fever’, possibly dysentery, and many prisoners died. Other women taught children clandestinely and in the larger houses, which tended to be centres of Catholicism, looked after their servants and their households and prayed in secret.
Women in France after the Revolution
Sr. Grazia Leparco, a Salesian sister, who herself helped to hide Jews during the Second World War, spoke of the new religious orders that were founded in France after the Revolution. At a time when many men gave up the faith, its survival depended on women. The new orders concentrated on working with the poor and deprived. The sisters lived simply and many women joined them. They took Our Lady as the model of the religious life and turned outwards from their convents, focusing less on spiritual perfection and more on helping those in need. Sr. Grazia described female religious life as caring for the human person throughout the world.
Current Threats to Women
Among the many excellent lectures, there was one by Helen Alvare, the representative of the US Bishops’ conference, who spoke of consumerism and the objectification of women, which fosters individualism and minimises the value of family and motherhood. She stressed the need to live above contemporary culture.
Gender ideology, a world culture spread via neo-colonialism from the west to even small villages in Africa was a deep concern of all at the conference. Margherite Peeters from Holland, spoke incisively on this
topic. She noted the growing gap between culture and the Church. Many Christians have lost awareness of the mystery of God, and reduced it to a humanist presentation.
The devaluation of motherhood, where individual autonomy leads to a rejection of openness to life, was a topic that was of great importance to all of us. Maria Elena Lugo’s examination of this subject showed the way in which the organic perspective of unity existing within the person, equally in virginity and in the love between people, can be lost. Pregnancy is underestimated as a phase of maternity. Pregnancy can never be a punishment, because of the baby’s own dignity. The contraceptive model perverts sex from its actual objective. The embryo is seen as human but not ontological, not in relation with God. The conception of a child includes a gift, a gift to the parents from God himself, as he allows them to collaborate with him in the creation of their child. It is a religious collaboration with God.
In our time, ‘the genius of women’ in Pope John Paul II’s phrase is much needed. Women often work quietly, seeing the logic of things with the ‘eyes of the heart’ working to build a society of love.
Group Discussions and Praying Together
In summing up, every continent was seen to suffer from the same problems, though in widely different social contexts. Everyone reported on the importance of women in transmitting the faith and upholding standards of love, through prayer and the sacraments. There are things to unlearn – motherhood and bringing up children are natural acts, where we can depend on God’s grace. In the rich world, they are sometimes seen as strange and almost impossible tasks. The beauty of Catholic teaching was clear to us all and we had, as the delegate from Jerusalem said ‘spent a rich time together.’
The three days of the Conference were bounded by prayer, Morning
Prayer and, of course, Holy Mass. Praying together was deeply moving, we all shared so much in our faith and became a loving sisterhood.
Audience with the Holy Father
We also had the joy of a private audience with our Holy Father, Benedict XVI. He spoke of the ‘macho mentality that ignores the novelty of Christianity, which recognises and proclaims the equal dignity and responsibility of women with respect to men. There are certain places and cultures where women are discriminated against and undervalued just for the fact that they are women. …God entrusts to women and to men… a specific vocation in the mission of the Church and in the world. I think here of the family, community of love, open to life, fundamental cell of society.’ He also strongly stressed the obligation of governments to ensure that all children have a father and a mother, and that it is the state’s role to ‘sustain with adequate social policies’ all that is necessary for the stability of marriages, the dignity of husband and wife and their right to educate their children.
We left the Holy Father and the Conference greatly encouraged, and determined to try again to live our Catholic womanhood, seeking God’s grace.
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