This book gives us for the first time all the saints in the new Calendar, approved in 2000. It is not intended as an antiquarian exercise. The splendid men and women in its pages are an intrinsic part of our national heritage; they helped form the Christian civilisation of our country over the centuries.

Where the teaching of history in schools today often means simply the 20th century (in fact one of my nephews, a history graduate, only studied the Second World War and its aftermath for his entire degree), this book would be an excellent resource in Catholic schools, giving the whole span of our past.

Each ‘life’ is a couple of pages at most and all are introduced with a pithy quote: for instance, St Alban, our first martyr, at his trial, ‘If you wish to know the truth about my religion, know that I am a Christian and am bound by the laws of Christ’. Source material is provided at the end of each chapter, as well as ‘places to visit’ – reminding us that this is not an armchair exercise: to go on pilgrimage to a holy site, even if it is just the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in search of St Aelred, can be an act of filial piety, a tribute to our steadfast forebears. We are a land of shrines and sacred places, not just one of ‘shopping and sport’, as Aidan Nichols OP recently described it.

It is always possible to learn new things from lives of the saints. It was Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, who gave us the words Anno Domini in the supreme division of history, a phrase we must now fight to keep from being superseded by the bloodless - and meaningless - ‘Common Era’. Gregory the Great was only Pope for 13 years, demonstrating that a life of enormous religious significance does not need human time to work out the urgent promptings of the Holy Spirit. St Theodore of Canterbury, administrator of genius, gave us the beginning of our parochial system. There is a most charming story told of him that, travelling through England to supervise the Church, he discovered St Chad, Bishop of the Mercians, humbly walking round his diocese on foot. Theodore lifted Chad onto a horse ‘so that he would travel faster and uphold the dignity of his office’.

Among these lives, those of our reformation martyrs stand out in strong relief. They, more than any others, remind us that the price of steadfastness may be very costly. St Margaret Clitherow refused to plead in order to protect her family from the ordeal of a courtroom, thereby incurring the most brutal of penalties: being crushed to death, a process that took 15 dreadful minutes. St Anne Line stoutly declared at her trial, ‘I am sentenced to die for harbouring a Catholic priest and so far am I from repenting for having done so, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.’

My own favourite, not yet canonised so not among this roll of honour, is Blessed Humphrey Pritchard, barman at the Catherine Wheel pub in Oxford, executed on 5 July 1589. At his trial he was taunted for his ignorance by university men; when he said he died for being a Catholic one of them jeered that he couldn’t explain what that meant. Blessed Humphrey, unlettered and unsophisticated, replied with immortal dignity, ‘What I cannot say in words I will seal with my blood.’

The book has been edited by Marcus Holden, a deacon who is due to be ordained next year. His co-authors are Fathers Nicholas Schofield, Gerard Skinner and Richard Whinder, all young priests recently ordained to the Southwark and Westminster archdioceses. They give us hope for the future of the Church in our land as they carry the torch for a new generation, in the only Olympiad that really matters: to fight the good fight and run the race to the finish, as St Paul, great athlete and gold medallist for God, reminds us.

© 2004 Francis Phillips

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