Pilgrim Ways

Chapter Chapter Fourteen The Recusants It is thanks to the Tyburn nuns and to men like Dom Bede Camm, who worked tirelessly to bring artifacts and martyrs' relics to Tyburn, that we have access to so much invaluable information about the martyrs and their families. Dom Bede, who was born in 1864 and died in 1942, was painstaking in the research he undertook for Forgotten Shrines. For today's pilgrim wanting to trace the footsteps of the Catholic martyrs back to their homes and to their local communities this Edwardian publication still remains one of the best sources of material available. A pilgrimage to the recusant sites might follow the footsteps of the Benedictine historian as he brought back to Erdington Abbey the material which he had gathered.

Dom Bede: Modern Pilgrim Dom Bede passionately believed that through the act of pilgrimage something of the holy and the sacred would rub off on the inquirer. Of the recusant homes he wrote: "The air of mystery and romance which seems to exhale from the crumbling walls of these old houses, irresistibly moves those who come across them to curiosity if not to reverence." He believed that at the dawn of the twentieth century "we are beginning to understand the extraordinary loyalty of these recusants, so faithful to the sovereign who persecuted them just because they were so true to the religion of their fathers." The son of an Anglican clergyman, and himself ordained for the Anglican ministry, Dom Bede was not only a Catholic but also a priest and Benedictine monk. In 1903 he had met Marie-Adele Garnier, the foundress of the Tyburn Convent, a meeting which would profoundly affect the course of his life. Dom Bede loved the martyrs of England and Wales and he venerated the foundress of Tyburn, so he gave himself tirelessly to the task of telling the story of the martyrs and to developing the shrine at Tyburn. He gave retreats to the sisters, preached at many celebrations in honour of the martyrs or the conversion of England and Wales, and he worked tirelessly to raise funds to establish Tyburn and to help the emerging community of monks on Caldey Island..

In 1913 he transferred his membership of the community at Maredsous in Belgium to the English Benedictine community at Downside. In 1993 another monk of Downside, Dom Aidan Bellenger, published a memoir commemorating Dom Bede's work. Dom Bede was born at Sunbury Park in Middlesex. His father had served in the Twelfth Lancers and he had been educated at Westminster School and Keble College, Oxford. He became a Catholic in 1890 and became well known as an exponent of the cause of the English martyrs. His early books included A Benedictine Martyr in England, In the Brave Days of Old, and Blessed Sebastian Newdigate. They were followed by his two volume Lives of the English Martyrs Declared Blessed By Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and 1895 and A Birthday Book of the English Martyrs. Forgotten Shrines was perhaps his mots memorable and accomplished piece of writing, recording as it does the mystery and romance which so moved him to curiosity and reverence." He described his book as "an attempt to satisfy such legitimate curiosity.". Dom Aidan says that Dom Bede may have drawn on the writings of Fletcher Moss, whose Pilgrimage To Old Houses appeared, privately printed, between 1903 and 1906. He was also influenced by Dom Odo Blundell, a Benedictine monk at Fort Augustus Abbey who wrote Ancient Catholic Homes of Scotland (1907) and the Catholic Highlands of Scotland (1907).