Posted on 06/30/2020 7:23:37 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
Archbishop Oliver Plunkett earned the last Catholic martyr’s crown in Britain on this date in 1681.*
Product of County Meath blood and Italian seminary, Plunkett had been back floating around Ireland as its chief prelate since 1670. In this decade, the English-imposed laws burdening Catholics had been relaxed; Plunkett was able to minister his flock, openly at first and after 1673 as a fugitive whom Irish authorities did not much wish to pursue.
Plunkett’s safety speedily expired with the emergence in England of the Popish Plot, a security panic catalyzed like its modern-day analogues by equal parts bad faith and malice.
The concoctions of an opportunistic fabulist caused the English populace to become convinced in 1678 that a vast and treasonable Catholic conspiracy menaced the land; in its day, it was a delusion held so widely and deeply as to cow into silence and compliance all skeptics, even King Charles himself. Charles’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, the Earl of Essex, cynically leaned into the hysteria by whipping fears of a Plunkett-hatched invasion of Ireland by the French, although he well knew that Plunkett was “of a … peaceable temper & … comforable to ye Government.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Noted that they saved his head.
St. Oliver Plunkett, pray for us.
Now that’s an Oliver worthy of praise.
My boss sent an ‘inspirational quote’ to three hundred employees today by Oliver Cromwell. What an insult to an Irish Catholic!
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