DIES MEMORABILIS

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On the twenty-first of every November we observe a day, in common with all Benedictines of the English Congregation, that, as the two words at the head of this article indicate, is a memorable day for all belonging to our Congregation.

Briefly, it commemorates the somewhat remarkable event that this little essay is attempting to describe.

On that day, in the year 1607, an English Benedictine, ninety years old, was, so far as was known at the time, the only surviving member of the Congregation in England. Owing to the successive spoliations and persecutions of religious houses and their communities during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and, after the respite of Mary’s reign, of Elizabeth, most of the monasteries in England had been seized by one or other of these monarchs and many of the monks killed or driven into exile. Many, of course, escaped this fate, as did so many Catholics throughout England, and saved their lives and to some extent their fortunes by conforming to the new order of things. This is true unfortunately of several Benedictine Abbots. But the illustrious names come down to us of other Abbots who refused to give way and who met death according to the will of their persecutors; some being hung in the entrance door ways of their own abbeys.

Owing to all this, as has just been said, only one Benedictine Monk was known to be alive in England and he, at this date or shortly before it had been in prison for about forty years. His death would certainly come soon in the ordinary course of things, and it must have seemed, to all interested in the great and ancient Order, that it would become wholly extinct in England.

The old man who is the subject of this paper was named Sigebert Buckley. He had been as a young monk a member of the Community of St. Peter’s Monastery at Westminster under the famous Abbot Feckenham. Something of the importance and extent of this Monastery can be realized from the fact that its Abbey Church was the grand and venerable building now known to all visitors to London as Westminster Abbey. Dom Sigebert undoubtedly shared the opinion of everyone else that with his death the Benedictine life in England would come to a close. As his one absorbing ambition and longing was, so we are told, to see it revived in his own country, he must have had little to console him on that score during the closing years of his imprisonment.

It was at all events in the year 1607 that the great event that is celebrated on the twenty-first of November occurred.

Portsmouth Abbey in the shadows of Old Monastery, Downside Abbey and Fort Agustus Abbey

Among the Catholic exiles living in foreign countries, there were several young Englishmen who had become students for the priesthood, and who were looking forward to being sent back to England on the dangerous mission of helping to bring back the English people to the old faith. Among these were two who had joined the Monastery of St. Justina of Padua, in Italy, and so had become Italian Benedictines. Soon after their novitiate was ended, they were permitted by their Superiors to join a band of missionaries who were re­turning to England. It is well known that, at that time, for a priest to say Mass in England or to preach or in any way to propagate the faith meant punish­ment by death. Nothing, however, could deter the young religious who were resolved to help restore the Catholic faith in their fatherland or to give up their lives in the attempt. As has been said, two of them were young English­men who had joined a Benedictine monastery in Italy. It was their great desire not only to take part in the missionary work in England, but to do so as members of an English Benedictine Community.

While these thoughts were in their minds, probably before their return to England, they heard of the survival of this old Benedictine, Dom Sigebert, and determined to go and see him and to make the request that he would affiliate them to his own Community, if in any way this could be done. As his own Community consisted of himself alone, he certainly had the right to do this, if anyone had it—in fact, it had been established a short time before this by those who knew all the circumstances, that, as Dom Sigebert Buckley was the only Benedictine monk in regular standing left in England, he in­herited in his own person, both legally and canonically, all the rights, priv­ileges, and powers that belonged to the Congregation as a whole. As a result of this, on that late November day in the year 1607, he received these two young Benedictines—English by birth, but belonging to an Italian House— as members of his own Community, all that was left of the famous St. Peter’s Monastery of Westminster.

The names of these young men were Robert Sadler and Edward Maihew, and the fact that they joined at exactly this critical time, when the only monk left in England was ninety years old, is what has made the day a Dies Memorabilis from then until now. The old man who was nearly or totally blind at the time, and who died three years afterwards, in the reign of James I, was the connecting link which saved the long Benedictine line in England from total extinction. With the reception of these two young monks, the Congregation began the recovery that finally has brought it to its numbers and strength in the present day.

Looking back in the other direction from this memorable day, we can trace the unbroken history of Benedictine life in England to the landing of St. Augustine, afterwards called St. Augustine of Canterbury, who had been sent from the Monastery on the Caelian Hill by Pope Saint Gregory the Great, (the patron saint of our Priory), and who landed with his forty companions at Ebbsfleet, England, in 597.

The continuity of all the Benedictine Houses of the English Congregation today in England and America with the Houses before the Reformation, was saved by this one man and he, ninety years old, blind and feeble, and with a record of over forty years in prison as a confessor of the Catholic faith.

(Published in Portsmouth Raven 1940 -41)