Do we Expect Persecution?

Dedication of a memorial plaque to seven Jesuit priests hanged drawn and quartered at Tyburn and interred at S Giles in the Fields

A sermon preached in the week of prayer for Christian Unity at Evensong to mark the unveiling of a plaque to commemorate the burial at S Giles in the Fields of seven victims of the "Popish Plot". Bishop Paul McAleenan, Auxiliary Bishop in the Diocese of Westminster was in choir, and the plaque was unveiled by Fr Dominic Robinson SJ, Parish Priest of The Church of the Immaculate Conception Farm Street

1 Cor 1:25 The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men

The Plaque at S Giles Church

A little while ago we were having one of those meetings in which we were thinking about the mission action planning of the church over the next few years. Then in the midst of all this strategizing, someone asked simply, Do we expect persecution?

A foolish question? But the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger thanmen; and the wisdom of God is Christ Crucified.

The events which bring us to gather here, and specifically in this church, were a sordid tale of power politics, greed, and lies. But it is history shot through with the light of glory, as God confounds the wise of this world with His foolishness, and counters deceitful cunning with courageous truth. We who don’t expect persecution are challenged to think about how we live and witness in our polity and in our time.

S Giles in the Fields

How often in scripture God is described as a just judge. There was a just magistrate in London in 1678, Edmund Godfrey, and it was fatal for him that Titus Oates came to him with an accusation that there was a catholic plot to kill King Charles II and substitute is brother the Duke of York. Godfrey saw through what was a tissue of lies, as did the King a few days later when powerful supporters who wanted to use the accusations for political ends got Oates in to the Council.

Among them the Earl of Shaftesbury, – you have walked down Shaftesbury Avenue –  who tried to use the moment to weaken the Duke and his supporters on council.  Arrests followed including that of Thomas Whitbread, the superior of the Jesuits in London; nevertheless the King’s party remained strong, and it seemed the accusations would fail.

But Shaftesbury’s henchmen included the young Earl of Pembroke whose mansion stood where Leicester Square now is. Pembroke had killed a man a year or two previously, and although convicted of murder managed to get off. The magistrate who had convicted him of murder was the same Edmund Godfrey. Godfrey now went missing for five days after which his mutilated body was found, spattered with candle wax, on Primrose Hill. There is some evidence he had been held in a house here in the parish of S Giles, and that Pembroke and his men were responsible.

This was enough to shift public opinion and reignite the plot as Shaftesbury aimed at undermining the ministers of the King. There were more arrests, including of Samuel Pepys. But the victims were mainly Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular. Despite the inconsistencies and lies of the prosecution witnesses, the courts believed that the Pope could give a dispensation from the oath to tell the truth and therefore by definition all Catholics must be perjurers, whose defence was inadmissible.

Those who are commemorated on our plaque were executed Tyburn. The slightly more well known story of St Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh the last victim of the Popish plot, is similarly mired in the power politics of Ireland.

S Oliver Plunkett

Now I have gone about this at some length because this explains why these victims of judicial murder were buried specifically here.

King Charles gave the order that they be hanged until dead mercifully to spare them the agonies of the drawing and quartering. And then he ordered that they should be buried in consecrated ground, and specifically here, in the parish, as it were on the doorstep of Lord Shaftesbury and the Earl of Pembroke.

Do we expect to be persecuted? If we suddenly start to think that we might be, then we are taught something about what we are; about what we are to say; and what we are to do.

What are we? 

The prophet Isaiah speaks of the people of God as those who have escaped from nations, turned away from images. Our temptation might not be to the shrines and the idols, but is to other forms of idolatry, to political power, to untruths, to worldly success, to wealth. All things in short which the accusers of our Jesuits showed.

They however just were. They were arrested because of the life they led. Because they were Catholics. They lived the faith because they believed it – as the prayer book puts it – unfeignedly.

We are lucky – they’ve discontinued the gallows at Tyburn. But we can learn from the perspective of those who believed unfeignedly in the shadow of the three leggedmare. They were prayerful and regular in the disciplines of love and service. They kept the law and would not be corrupted: Oates had been a Jesuit for a bit but was thrown out for his immoral life. So the ordinary precepts of Christian living, Bible, Sacraments, love of God and Neighbour. They remind us to go on quietly as we have been called. Foolish: but this foolishness is stronger than the wisdom of the wise.

Then there is what we are to say

One of the outcomes of the Popish Plot was that the powerful realised that the gossip in the new coffee houses, whipped up by popular prints and even sermons needed to be heeded, and could be managed. When they hanged the seven the fact that the crowd listened in respectful silence to their final statements of innocence was noted with fear by those who were stirring trouble. Already the tide was turning. St Oliver Plunkett was the last of the victims.

In England we are freer than many, perhaps most, Christians to speak out. Do we use that freedom? I know for myself that I am often scared to do so; wise to follow the advice of the media mangers, cautious to share my opinions on Twitter because I might be vilified. There is much that might get me in trouble, if I were brave enough. Whether it be around promiscuity and indiscipline in disordered relationships; rejection of the sanctity of human life at both its beginning and its end; the marginalisation and demonisation of the disabled and the poor; the law of God is seen in our day as foolishness – even dangerous; perhaps to be punished. I am afraid to be foolish for Christ in case I end up arraigned in the court of public opinion, my evidence for truth inadmissible, and my fate sealed.

But the foolishness of God is greater than the wisdom of the wise.  We must pray for the grace to be foolish in speaking. 

What are we to do?

He’s buried over the way at S Martin in the Fields, (though there is a memorial at Westminster Abbey) but Magistrate Godfrey showed another sort of foolishness. He did  what was right when it would have been wise to have acquiesced in the lies. He was no saint, but he held to truth; and that way lies sanctity.

We need to pray to be and say and do according to God’s true wisdom. A prayer we make together in all our denominational divisions, for we cannot afford to make it separately; and, as Fr Paul Couturier said in instigating the novena of prayer for Christian Unity, the walls of our earthly divisions do not reach up to heaven. So we may be confident that the saints and blessed who in robes of white worship under the great altar in heaven join that prayer with us, that we may like them have courage to cling to the foolishness of God, which is Christ, and so come with them to the blessed company of all the saints.