Blessed Arthur Bell

Blessed Arthur BellAlso known as

  • Francis Bell

Memorial

Profile

Studied at Saint Omer and at the Royal College of Saint Alban, Valladolid, Spain. Ordained in Salamanca, Spain in 1618. Joined the Franciscans in 1618. Worked in Douai and Gravelines in France, and Brussels, Belgium. He returned to England to minister to covert Catholics in 1634. Arrested and condemned to death for the crime of being a priest. One of the Martyrs of England, Scotland, and Wales.

Born

Died

Venerated

Beatified

Additional Information

Readings

Dear countrymen, give ear to me, and as you desire to be delivered from your present miseries put an end to your sins; for without doubt your enormous crimes are the cause of the calamities under which you groan. But above all I exhort you to renounce heresy, in which you have been so long engaged; for this (with grief I speak it) has cut you off like putrid members from the body of Christ, and like dead branches from the tree of His Church. But if you resolve to persist in loving darkness more than light, long afflictions will attend you, and certainly many calamities and miseries threaten this city and the whole kingdom unless they desist from persecuting priests and Catholics. See and consider, I beseech you, the afflictions with which God has begun visibly to punish you, and be assured that all these punishments are tokens of His love, and a proof that He would not destroy you but as it were by constraint. I repeat, these chastisements, civil wars, and calamities are inflicted to bring you from shipwreck into the haven of the Catholic Church. Abuse, then, no longer His mercy, nor force him to destroy you by obstinacy in your evils. – Blessed Arthur, speaking from the scaffold to the spectators at his execution

MLA Citation

  • “Blessed Arthur Bell“. CatholicSaints.Info. 10 October 2021. Web. 24 April 2024. <>