Daily Martyrology for December 1

At Tyburn, in 1581, St. Edmund Campion, He studied and taught at Oxford. He became uncomfortable with the Elizabethan religious settlement and went to Douai. He joined the Jesuits in Rome and made his novitiate in Bohemia. He was one of the first Jesuits sent to minister to Catholics in England. There he published several documents defending his faith and mission. After two years he was arrested and tortured, but would not relent. He and two companions were condemned and brutally executed.

In 660, at Noyon, St. Eligius, bishop. He was a skilled goldsmith who became master of the mint for King Clotaire II in Paris. He became wealthy and founded several monasteries. He was made bishop about 640, at the same time his friend Audenus was made bishop of Rouen. Eligius was a zealous bishop who was especially concerned to disabuse his people of superstition. He worked with the saintly queen Bathilde (January 30) to free and protect slaves. He is the patron of veterinarians.

In 1539, Blessed Richard Whiting, Hugh Faringdon and John Beche, abbots and martyrs. Whiting was a Cambridge graduate who refused to surrender the monastery of Glastonbury to King Henry VIII’s commissioners. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at the monastery along with two of his monks. Abbots Hugh of Reading and John of Colchester were also executed for refusing, after initial equivocation, to accept the royal supremacy over the church and the dissolution of their monasteries.

In 1964, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Blessed Anuarite Nengapeta, martyr. Sister Marie-Clementine Anuarite was a young Congolese nun who worked as a teacher during a tumultuous period of Congolese history. Simba rebels took her and the other sisters into custody. After some days, when she refused the sexual advances of a Simba officer, she was beaten, stabbed and shot.

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Our daily martyrology was written by Fr. Hugh Feiss, OSB. Copyright © 2008 by the Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID 83338.