St John Southworth (d. 1654)

I haven't posted in a while. This article on the Universalis website for today caught my eye. The other saint for today is St Cyril of Alexandria who championed the cause of Orthodoxy regarding the two natures of Christ at the First Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D.
However St John Southworth's story really spoke to me about standing for the faith against all the power of the state being placed against you. It made me realize how much we owe the martyrs who gave everything they had to be true to the Lord and to the Church. It makes my petty struggles seem so small. I hope this blesses and encourages you all. May I encourage you to study the lives of the Saints who have gone on before. The Book of Hebrews states that they are a "great cloud of witnesses" who watch over us. The Book of the Apocalypse (Revelation) speaks of the prayers of the martyrs and saints praying for those of us here in the Church Militant. We are all one body in the Lord, death does not separate us from them. We can petition them to pray and intercede for us for they are not dead, they are more alive than we are, because they are in the very presence of the Lord Jesus.

John Southworth is normally lumped in with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, and only in the diocese of Westminster, where he died, is his feast kept separately, on the anniversary of his execution. But if he was worth canonising, he is worth knowing; for saints are not canonised to make up an arbitrary quantity.
John Southworth was the only English martyr to suffer under a dictatorship. The English Civil War ended; the King was executed; the Elizabethan Prayer-Book outlawed; freedom of conscience proclaimed. But Catholics, who had been accused of plotting against the King, were still persecuted when there was no King; they had been fined for refusing to accept the Prayer-Book, and they were still persecuted when there was no Prayer-Book; all they asked was freedom of conscience for themselves and their countrymen, and it was denied them. Priests had to come and go, in secret, in fear of betrayal and death, as they had done for more than a generation.
He first came to the attention of the authorities in 1637, when Westminster was devastated by the plague, and he was seen visiting an infected house. There could be only one reason for anyone to visit the sick under such dangerous circumstances, and so he was arrested and charged with being a priest. On that occasion the authorities quietly set him free; but such clemency enraged the Puritans, and, seventeen years later, in 1654, when they were in power, they had their revenge.
At his trial, it was open to John Southworth to plead Not Guilty to the criminal and capital charge of being a priest – most of the missionaries did, to cause as much trouble as possible to the persecutors. But he did not. If he had pleaded Not Guilty, the court might have acquitted him (as it was, the judge wept as he passed sentence): he would have saved his life, but he would have been denied the glory of solidarity with all the other English martyrs. Although the penal laws remained in force, perhaps the sight of such an obviously innocent man being tortured to death discouraged their application; for it was 24 years before the next priest was martyred. And no doubt his prayers have helped to win the temporary liberty of conscience that England now enjoys, imperfect and threatened though it may be.
May the prayers of all martyrs, everywhere, win true liberty for us all.

-from www.universalis.com for Sunday, June 27th