Episode 16. Our patron saint

I hadn’t known it when growing up, but we have a patron saint. I can’t actually trace him all the way back, but Arrowsmith is an uncommon enough name that we are somehow related.

Saint Edmund Arrowsmith SJ (1585 – 28 August 1628) is one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. He was baptized Brian, but he chose to go by the confirmation name, Edmund. Edmund was born at Haydock, England in 1585. In 1605, at the age of twenty, Edmund began to study for the priesthood. He was ordained on 9 December 1612. He ministered to the Catholics of Lancashire until around 1622, when he was arrested and questioned by the Anglican Bishop of Chester. Edmund was released when King James I of England ordered all arrested priests be freed. He joined the Jesuits in 1624. In the summer of 1628, Fr. Edmund was reportedly betrayed by a man named Holden, who denounced him to the authorities. He was convicted of being a Roman Catholic priest in England. He was sentenced to death, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Lancaster on 28 August 1628.

Edmund Arrowmith was beatified in 1929 and canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales by Pope Paul VI in 1970. His hand was preserved and kept by the Arrowsmith family as a relic until he was beatified.

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His hand it now available for viewing in the Catholic Church of St Oswald and St Edmund Arrowsmith, Ashton-in-Makerfield. His feast day is Aug 25.

 

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