THE ENGLISH COLLEGE ROME (Part 1)

In Penal Times, when Catholicism was outlawed and seminaries closed, it was the intention of the Establishment that Catholicism would die out in this country. They reasoned that if there were no priests to celebrate holy Mass, to preach, and teach the faith, then it would be completely eradicated. Alas, the authorities reckoned without such as Cardinal William Allen!

Cardinal Allen’s solution to the lack of priests in England was to found seminaries on the continent for the education and training of boys and young men from that wounded country. The first of these seminaries was founded at Douai in Flanders in 1568. Then, in 1576, The Cardinal converted the English Hospice in Rome into a seminary and its first students arrived in 1577. Since this was a time of persecution in their homeland, it was expedient that the students assumed an alias. David Lewis entered the English College in 1638, when he was 21 years old, and assumed the alias of Charles Baker. He was ordained there in July 1642.

Many of the students at the English College had volunteered for the ‘English Mission’. After ordination they would return home to minister to their beleaguered Catholic countrymen who, despite Government hopes and penalties, clung resolutely to the Old Faith! The priests undertook this mission in the full knowledge that the rest of their days would be spent in peril, finding shelter where they could and tending to their flocks amid the ever present dangers of betrayal, arrest and execution.

The College produced a long line of priests who, for their faith, suffered imprisonment or exile. More than forty former students were martyred. The first, or protomartyr, was St Ralph Sherwin who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1st December 1581. The last alumnus to suffer martyrdom was St David Lewis who was executed at Usk on 27th August 1679. Because of its many martyrs, the College has been known as The Venerable English College since 1818.

FEAST OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY

Today we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. On this day in 1571, the great naval Battle of Lepanto was fought between an alliance of Christian Countries and the Ottoman Empire. Our Lady’s intercession had been invoked and a Rosary Procession had taken place that day in Rome. In thanksgiving to the Virgin Mary, Pope Pius V instituted the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. In acknowledgement that the victory was the fruit of the Rosary, Pope Gregory XIII, in 1573, changed the name to the Feast of the Holy Rosary. The Feast was kept on the first Sunday of October but, in 1913, Pope Pius X changed the date of the celebration to 7th October. Another change came in 1969 when Pope Paul VI changed the name to Our Lady of the Rosary.

Although there have been changes to the name and date of the Feast of the Holy Rosary, one thing has remained constant. That is the sincere devotion to Mary and the Holy Rosary. Through the centuries, Catholics have turned to Mary in times of joy and times of sorrow. In the Mysteries of the Rosary, and accompanied by Mary, they have walked with Jesus from Bethlehem to Calvary and beyond.

Even during the life of King Henry VIII, those who clung to the Old Faith also clung to Mary. Ten years after the bloody martyrdoms began, Henry’s famous flagship, ‘Mary Rose’, went down off the Isle of Wight in 1545. In the early 1980s ‘Mary Rose’ was raised and many well preserved items were recovered. Among the recovered items was a wooden Rosary! Some long ago Tudor sailor’s love of Mary and the Rosary was stronger than all the King’s wrath.

In Penal times, both in England and its overseas colonies, the Rosary helped keep the faith alive. With no priest available to celebrate Mass and the Sacraments, Catholics would gather in secret to recite the Rosary. In Penal Days in Ireland, the Penal Rosary, a string of ten beads designed to be used discretely up a sleeve or in a pocket, was widely used. Not many original Penal Rosaries survive, but modern versions are readily available.

The martyrs too were devoted to Mary and the Rosary. St Henry Walpole, St Luke Kirby, and St Thomas Garnet, to name but a few, mounted the gallows steps with the ‘Hail Mary’ on their lips. Some sources say that St John Boste was saying the Angelus as he mounted the gallows while other sources state that he was praying the Rosary. Angelus or Rosary, John Boste sought the assistance of the Mother of God!

Shortly before his execution, twenty-five year old St Alexander Briant wrote to the English Jesuits; “The same day that I was first tormented on the rack, before I came to the place, giving my mind to prayer, and commending myself and all mine to Our Lord, I was replenished and filled up with a kind of supernatural sweetness of spirit; and even while I was calling upon the name of Jesus and upon the Blessed Virgin Mary (for I was saying the Rosary), my mind was cheerfully disposed, well comforted, and readily prepared and bent to suffer and endure those torments which even then I most certainly looked for."

St John Ogilvie was martyred at Glasgow Cross on 10th March 1615. He had secreted on his person his treasured Rosary beads and, after he was pushed off the gallows steps, he triumphantly flung his beads into the crowd. It was said that the beads were caught by one of his enemies who eventually became a Catholic.

The Blessed Virgin Mary herself has asked us to pray the Rosary daily. On this beautiful Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, let us be diligent in responding to her plea.