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Dom Bede Camm (1864-1942), Monastic Martyrologist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Dominic Aidan Bellenger
Dominic Aidan Bellenger*
Affiliation:
Downside School
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Extract

One of the soldiers asked him what religion he was of. He readily answered, ‘I am a Catholic’ ‘What!’ said the other, ‘a Roman Catholic?’ ‘How do you mean a Roman?’ said Father Bell, ‘I am an Englishman. There is but one Catholic Church, and of that I am a member.’

These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 30: Martyrs and Martyrologies , 1993 , pp. 371 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1993

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References

1 Quoted in Camm, Bede, A Birthday Book of the English Martyrs, 1908), 11 Dec. (un-paginated)Google Scholar.

2 Edwards, Bede, The Jesuits in England (London, 1985), p. 239.Google Scholar

3 See Lunn, David, The English Benedictines 1540–1688 (London, 1980), pp. 121—45 Google Scholar.

4 See Scott, Geoffrey, Gothic Rage Undone. English Monks in the Age of Enlightenment (Bath, 1992), pp. 145–70.Google Scholar

5 Camm, Bede, A Benedictine Martyr in England (London, 1897)Google Scholar. Translated into French by the nuns of Ste-Croix of Poitiers and published as Le Bienheureux John Roberts (Paris and Maredsous, 1930).

6 Camm, Bede, Anglican Memories (London, 1935), p. 6.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 17.

8 Obituary of Camm, Dom Bede, Downside Review, 60 (1942), p. 333.Google Scholar

9 For a checklist of Camm’s Papers, see Bellenger, D. A., ‘Two antiquarian monks: the papers of Dom Bede Camm and Dom Ethelbert Home at Downside’, Catholic Archives, 6 (1986), pp. 11—14.Google Scholar

10 Camm, Bede, Forgotten Shrines (London, 1910), p. vii.Google Scholar

11 Hodgetts, Michael, Harvington Hall (Birmingham, 1991), p. 7.Google Scholar

12 Ibid.

13 Moss, Fletcher, Pilgrimages to Old Houses, 4 vols (privately printed, Didsbury, 1906), 4, p. 211.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 1, pp. vii—viii.

15 Ibid., 4, p. 256.

16 Girouard, Mark, The Retum to Camelot (London, 1981), p. 202.Google Scholar

17 Norris, Henry, Baddesley Clinton (London and Leamington, 1907)Google Scholar.

18 Garner, Thomas and Stratton, Arthur, Domestic Architecture of England during the Tudor Period, 2 vols (London, 1911)Google Scholar.

19 Forgotten Shrines, p. 1.

20 Ibid., p. 312.

21 Martindale, C. C., The Life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, 2 vols (London, 1916), 2, pp. 179–80.Google Scholar

22 Bede Camm, MS diary, 1912 (Downside Abbey Archives, 3004).

23 Bede Camm, Preface to E. M. Wilmot-Buxton, A Book of English Martyrs (London, 1915), p. vii.

24 Ibid., p. vi.

25 Bede Camm, ed.. The English Martyrs (Cambridge, 1929), p. vi.

26 Forgotten Shrines, p. 254.

27 Camm, Bede, The Foundress of Tyburn Convent, Mother Mary of St Peter (Adèle Garnier) (London, 1934), p. 89.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., p. 97.

29 Ibid., p. 101.

30 Ibid., p. 116.

31 Bede Camm, MS diary, 26 June 1912 (Downside Abbey Archives, 3004).

32 Dom Bede Camm, Pilgrim Paths in Latin Lands (London, 1923) is a continental version of Forgotten Shrines. ‘I have tried to gather together here my memories of a few of these pilgrimages in the hope that my description of them may prove as attractive as did that of the English shrines. But of course I am fully conscious that I am here treading, for the most part on well-trodden ground; and that there are many who have long frequented the shrines of Italy and France, though they know nothing or little of their own land’ (p. viii).

33 Camm, Bede, Nine Martyr Monks. The Lives of the English Benedictine Martyrs Beatified in 1929 (London, 1931)Google Scholar.

34 Camm, Bede, Tyburn and the English Martyrs (London, 1904), p. 102.Google Scholar