Hunted Jesuit

From his satin doublet to the tip of his gilt-handled rapier, John Gerard was the classic Elizabethan gentleman. He was tall and handsomely dark. The son of a noble Lancashire family, he had studied at Oxford, and spoke excellent French and Latin. He was a dashing horseman and a minor authority on falconry and the chase.

But there was one thing that set Gerard apart from other English gentlemen of his time: he was a Jesuit priest. Under the fine doublet he wore a monastic hair shirt. Concealed in his saddlebags he carried a Mass kit and a Latin breviary. For 17 years, John Gerard, S.J., lived an exacting double life, ministering in secret to England's scattered and persecuted Roman Catholics. Last week a modern English Jesuit, Father Philip Caraman, published in the U.S. a new English translation, of Gerard's Latin autobiography (Autobiography of a Hunted Priest; Pellegrini & Cudahy, $3.50) -- the plainly written account of a spiritual mission as thrilling as a modern spy story.

Barred Doors. It was 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, when 25-year-old Father John Gerard, just ordained in Rome, landed secretly in Norfolk,* England. The day after his arrival he barely escaped a trap set by local "priest hunters." In London he found his Jesuit superior and began his ministry, always traveling as a country gentleman of quality.

Gerard found his safest hiding places in the secluded houses of the Roman Catholic gentry. Most of these manors had secret cubicles -- "priests' holes" -- where priests could hide if the house was searched. Gerard describes the end of one nerve-racking search: "Like Lazarus, who was buried four days, I came forth from what indeed would have been my tomb, if the search had continued a little longer."

In 1594 the Queen's marshals caught Gerard in London. Later he was taken to the Tower and questioned about his "accomplices." When he refused to tell where his superior was hiding, he was tortured for two days in the Tower dungeon. For hours at a time he was hung by his manacled hands from the dungeon ceiling, but he never gave his friends away.

In his imprisonment Father Gerard's Christian resignation was tempered by a Jesuit conviction that the Lord helps those who help themselves. His jailer had allowed him to visit a fellow prisoner in another part of the Tower.

Writes Father Gerard: "While we were passing the time of day together, it struck me how close this tower was to the moat encircling the outer fortifications, and I thought it might be possible for a man to lower himself with a rope from a roof of the tower onto the wall beyond the moat." A few weeks later, with the help of confederates outside, he did exactly that.

Rash Adventurers. In 1605, not long after James I* succeeded Elizabeth, Guy Fawkes and some other rash adventurers hatched their abortive plot to blow up King James and his Protestant Parliament. Although Father Gerard knew nothing of the plot, the anti-Catholic reaction was so strong that he had to leave the country. He slipped across the Channel disguised as a servant of the Spanish ambassador.

In his 17-year mission, besides "reconciling" many of his fellow Englishmen to Roman Catholicism, he sent at least 30 men to the Continent to study for the priesthood. "God grant," he told himself after the shores of England slipped away, "that I may always love and dutifully carry the cross of Christ and walk worthily of the vocation to which I am called." The Jesuits gave Father Gerard other offices to perform, e.g., rector of a house of philosophy at Liege, confessor to the English College at Rome. But he never saw England again.

* Whose ducal family, the Howards, one of the oldest in England, were Roman Catholics, as they are still.

* English Roman Catholics were chagrined to find King James as poor an exponent of religious toleration as Queen Elizabeth. By Catholic account, Scottish James actually sought Catholic support for himself when he first moved to London, changed his mind when he found himself popular with his Protestant subjects. On viewing his first cheering English crowd, the story goes, James turned to a councilor and said, "Na, na, guid fayth, wee's not need the Papists now."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.