With Twelfth Hour Love

From The Catholic Thing:

Those who suffered for their beliefs in these places of infamy, including the Tyburn martyrs and St. Maximilian Kolbe, have long since gone before us. Silenced for their beliefs by regimes much stronger than their poor capacity to resist, their voices should have been extinguished forever. These simple markers should be the only remnant of their overpowered and seemingly futile witness. 

And yet, it is the tyrants and regimes themselves which have fallen away, powerless and defeated. The gates to Auschwitz-Birkenau today swing open, empty and deserted. The all-encompassing power that manned the guard towers and supervised the trains has long since passed away. The gates of Hampton Court now welcome day visitors, its hallowed tenant, Henry VIII, reduced to empty legend. But the gates of Tyburn Convent joyfully welcome consecrated souls offering their lives in prayer for that Faith and Truth, which all the King’s horses and all the Queen’s men could never conquer. 

The crypt of Tyburn Convent houses the Martyr’s Chapel, a stunning collection of precious relics of the brave men and women – lay faithful, priests, and religious, who preserved the Faith in England under the reign of terror. Among the quotes inscribed upon the crypt walls are words spoken by Carthusian Prior John Houghton. “I am bound in conscience, and am ready and willing to suffer every kind of torture rather than deny a doctrine of the Church,” he declared from the scaffold of Tyburn Hill, London, on May 4, 1535. 

From his cell in Bell Tower, St. Thomas More, himself soon to be martyred, famously witnessed the procession to Tyburn of these Carthusian martyrs, noting to his daughter Margaret, “these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to a marriage.” (Read more.)