Dom Bede Camm (1864-1942), Monastic Martyrologist

Extract

One of the soldiers asked him what religion he was of. He readily answered, ‘I am a Catholic’ ‘What!’ said the other, ‘a Roman Catholic?’ ‘How do you mean a Roman?’ said Father Bell, ‘I am an Englishman. There is but one Catholic Church, and of that I am a member.’

These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.