A Reading about St John Ogilvie
Adapted from
Butlers Lives of the Saints (Thurston Edition, 1942) March, pp. 179-184.
John Ogilvie
was born in 1579 near Keith in Banffshire. The Ogilvie family, like many
Scottish families at that time, was partly Catholic and partly
Presbyterian,
.
but John's father, though not
unfriendly to the old faith, brought his eldest son up
as a
Calvinist, and as such sent him at the age of thirteen to be educated on the
Continent. There John became interested in the religious controversies
which were popular in France. The best Catholic and Calvinist protagonists took
part in these disputations, which profoundly influenced the intellectual world.
John Ogilvie became confused and uncertain, but he came to fasten on two texts of
Scripture:
"God
wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth," and,
"Come to me all you who suffer and are burdened, and I will
refresh you." He began to see that the Catholic Church embraced all kinds
of people and in her alone could be found men and women of every class. These
reflections and the testimony of the martyrs decided him. To belong to the
Church of the martyrs he became a Catholic and was received at the Scots
College in Louvain in 1596, at the age of seventeen.
He spent the next three years in various educational
establishments. Six months of this period was spent with the Scottish Benedictines
at Ratisbon, studying the arts. Then at the age of twenty he went to a Jesuit
college; he later joined the Society of Jesus, was ordained priest and
eventually found his way, after repeated requests, back to his native Scotland.
He set to work trying to win back his fellow countrymen to the Catholic faith.
Most of his work was concentrated around Edinburgh, Glasgow and Renfrewshire.
But his time was short. His missionary efforts lasted for less than a year. It
was when he was attempting to meet someone who claimed to be interested in
becoming a Catholic that he was betrayed to archbishop Spottiswoode, a former
Presbyterian minister and who was now one of the King's most capable
lieutenants.
For five
months John Ogilvie was subjected to continual harassment, humiliation,
interrogation and torture. He bore all of this with equanimity, courage and
even humour. His spirit could not be broken, and he was able to hold his own
in the involved religious and political questions they put to him in an attempt
to trap him. After his second trial John Ogilvie seems to have been treated
more kindly. The heroism he had shown in prison had been reported far and
wide throughout the country, and even his keepers, including the archbishop,
hoped that he would recant and accept the royal supremacy. Soon, however, a
questionnaire was presented to him which came from King James himself, dealing
with the relations between Church and State. To these John Ogilvie could only
return answers which practically sealed his fate. Although his treatment in
prison grew more rigorous, he continued to write an account of his arrest and
experiences in prison which he had begun earlier, and he managed to smuggle the
sheets of paper to friends outside.
John Ogilvie
was eventually sentenced to death for high treason. But even on the gallows he
was offered his freedom and honours ifhe would renounce his religion. "For
that, he said, "I am prepared to give even a hundred lives." On this
day, therefore, the 10th of March, 1615, John Ogilvie was martyred for his
faith.
Cornelius
a Lapide, the young professor who taught John Ogilvie in Louvain, wrote proudly
in later years that Ogilvie had been his catechumen but became a martyr worthy
to take his place with the martyrs of the early persecutions.
Adapted from Butlers Lives of the
Saints (Thurston Edition, 1942) March, pp. 179-184.
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As a person he was very ordinary, very humble, obviously a great man of deep prayer and dedication 
