Stages on the Road by Undset Sigrid

Author:Undset, Sigrid [Undset, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
Published: 2012-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Robert Southwell, S.J.:

PRIEST, POET, MARTYR

It was in one of the new Catholic churches in England—I do not remember which, but I believe it was one of the churches in Newcastle. I had entered it one day, when I was over there in 1928. The walls of this church were covered to a certain height with white tiles, each of which bore the name of an English saint, from the early days of Roman missionaries and Anglo-Saxon martyrs and Fathers down to the martyrs of Tudor and Stuart times. The two first names that I happened to see, from the bench where I was kneeling, were those of Ven. Edmund Arrowsmith and Ven. Robert Southwell. I will not pretend that the idea was very attractively carried out—glazed white tiles with green lettering have, to say the least of it, an unusual effect in the decoration of a church. But the intention was clear enough—to express the way in which all churches have been built up. Before the cathedrals there were the catacombs; since then objects of value have been piled about our altars, but beneath every altar slab there must be a “tomb”—a shrine with the relics of a martyr—and upon the tomb the chalice with the precious Blood of Christ must stand. All the impressive splendor with which the Mass has gradually been surrounded ought in any case to remind us of Masses which were celebrated in haste and secrecy, while death lay in wait beside the very altar, and priest and congregation knew, whenever they received the sacraments, that this might be the viaticum.

1

When Henry VIII broke with Rome, it was not his intention to make a Protestant country of England. It is incorrect to speak of Henry VIII’s “divorce”—Henry was sufficiently versed in theology not to imagine that marriages can be dissolved. As quite a young man he had been married to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, and when dispensation was granted for this marriage nobody believed that Catherine and the sickly, half-grown Prince Arthur had ever lived together as husband and wife. (The father of Arthur and Henry, Henry VII, had himself thought of marrying his dead son’s bride, in order to retain her dowry and the family connection. However, he saw in time that after all this was more than his people would stand!)

The eldest son of Henry VIII and Catherine died when a few months old, and afterwards the Queen bore one dead or death-doomed child after another—her daughter Mary alone grew up. When it became clear to everyone that Queen Catherine would never give England a prince, the idea occurred to the King that he must be able to find a pretext for putting away his wife and marrying a French princess. Cardinal Wolsey favored the plan. He was one of those Renaissance princes of the Church who brought disgrace and injury upon her, but he served the new political ideas of the age with great strength of will and with an

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