Saturday, December 26, 2009

Challoner's Book of Martyrs

Christine reports on the work of Bishop Richard Challoner, who gathered the accounts of the English missionary priests from the days of persecution.
The national history would have you believe the English Reformation was a movement supported by the great majority of the populace happy to throw off the yoke of the papacy, when in fact the truth is far different: a strong and vocal minority of dissidents voiced their complaints to a monarch at first opposed to their rebellion, but who later, for political expediency, embraced their cause and brutally forced it on an unwilling people. Through intermittent persecution and suppression over the next century or so, the Catholic faith slowly died out until, only generations later, one could truly say that England was a Protestant nation. But it was a slow, painful, unhappy process, despite what revisionist historians would have us believe.
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