The English Martyrs: Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell & Companions
December 1
The early years of Protestant rule in England meant persecution of the Catholic Church. Death and torture for Catholics was the order of the day. Blood flowed freely from the gallows and in the torture chambers of England. The Society honours today its members who were martyred though they were martyred at different times and places, but for one cause - for standing by Christ and his Church with the Pope as its head. Reading the accounts of their lives one stands wonderstruck at the sagacity, stamina, and intrepid courage shown by them.
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The English Martyr Saints are : Edmund Campion, Alexander Briant, Henry Morse, Robert Southwell, Nicholas Owen, Henry Walpole, Thomas Garnet, Philip Evans, David Lewis, Edmund Arrowsmith.
The Blessed are : John Cornelius, Thomas Holland, John Nelson, Ralph Ashley, Francis Page, Peter Wright, Thomas Cottam, Thomas Whitbread, John Fenwick, William Harcourt, John Gavan, Antony Turner, Thomas Woodhouse.
"The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun, it is of God, it cannot be withstood, so the faith was planted, so it must be restored."
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St. Francis Xavier - Restless for Christ
(7 April 1506 - 3 December 1552)
December 3
St. Francis Xavier was born on April 7, 1506 in the family castle of Xavier in Navarre, not very far from the birthplace of St. Ignatius. Highly gifted, he was ambitious to make a name for himself in the intellectual world of the time and had gone to Paris to achieve his ambition. Here he came in contact with Ignatius and this changed his life from a fashionable gentleman to a servant totally in love with Christ. From then on he was a different man ever thirsting to live for Christ and to bring people to him.
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Sent to India by St. Ignatius he spent himself working and traveling for ten years to make Christ known. The coasts of India from Goa to Madras , the East Indies, Japan and China were his field of work. He is the declared patron of mission work of the Church, and even called the apostle of India together with St. Thomas. Thoroughly exhausted, he died on the island of Sanchian, off the coast of China, athirst to enter China. His incorrupt body was brought to Goa and can still be seen at the Bom-Jesu Church.
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