Strangers and Nomads: Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales

In Strangers and Nomads Dudley Plunkett provides an invaluable resource for devotions to the martyrs of England and Wales, that we may seek their intercession for our own urgent spiritual needs today. The canonised martyrs are presented in date order, according to their feast-days, together with the Collect prayer from the Roman Missal and other sources. The inspirational witness of the martyrs is made all the more vivid by the inclusion of many contemporary testimonies to their bravery, and, wherever possible, of their final words at their martyrdom. The lives of forty-three Catholic martyrs are profiled against the back-ground of the Reformation in England and Wales. As the political and religious authorities became increasingly determined to stamp out all expression of the Catholic faith by persecution in the penal times, the country’s religious past came to be viewed through the eyes of the Reformers. However, there remains another less well-recognised history, and Dudley Plunkett evokes this with his portrait of the survival of the Catholic faith through loyalty to Peter, reverence for the Blessed Sacrament and the Mass, and devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, all so heroically demonstrated by the martyrs who were hounded and tormented, and treated like strangers and nomads (Hebrews 11:13) in their own land.