John Plessington
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St John Plessington, (c. 1637 - 19 July 1679), also known as John Plesington, William Scarisbrick and William Pleasington, saint's day 19 July, is one of the Catholic Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
Born at Dimples Hall, near Garstang, Lancashire, England, the son of Robert Plessington, a Royalist Catholic, and Alice Rawstone, a family thus persecuted for both their religious and political beliefs. Educated at by Jesuits at Scarisbrick Hall, then at the Royal College of Saint Alban at Valladolid, Spain and then Saint Omer's monastery in France, he was ordained in Segovia on 25 March 1662. He returned to England in 1663 ministering to covert Catholics in the areas of Holywell and Cheshire, often hiding under the name William Scarisbrick. He was also tutor at Puddington Hall near Chester. Upon arrest in Chester during the Popish Plot scare caused by Titus Oates, he was imprisoned for two months, and then hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of being a Catholic priest. From the scaffold at Gallow's Hill in Boughton, Cheshire he spoke the following:
- But I know it will be said that a priest ordayned by authority derived from the See of Rome is, by the Law of the Nation, to die as a Traytor, but if that be so what must become of all the Clergymen of the Church of England, for the first Protestant Bishops had their Ordination from those of the Church of Rome, or not at all, as appears by their own writers so that Ordination comes derivatively from those now living.
He was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, and canonized and made one of the Forty Martyrs on 25 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI.
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