He longed to be a martyr

	St. Thomas Garnet When: died 1608 in England What: Missionary Feast: June 23 Canonized: 1970 as one of the English and Welsh Martyrs

It's common for children, when they first hear the stories of the martyrs, to long to do the same. It's also common, as we age, "to come to our senses" and lose interest in martyrdom.

The latter certainly wasn't the case for St. Thomas Garnet, who twice chose to engage in missionary work in 17th century post-Reformation England, which eventually led to his death.

Thomas was the son of Richard Garnet, a Catholic and scholar at Oxford University. He also was nephew to Fr. Henry Garnet, a Jesuit who, along with Guy Fawkes, was arrested and killed for taking part in the Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt to blow up the English Houses of Parliament and kill King James I.

When he was 16, Thomas was sent to college in France, then with several other students, to the English Jesuit college at Valladolid, Spain. They apparently took a circuitous route, because the trip took 14 months and included his being arrested and imprisoned briefly in England.

Eventually though, he finished his theological studies and was ordained a priest. With that, he and Blessed Mark Barkworth were sent to England, where for the next six years "I wandered from place to place to recover souls which had gone astray and were in error as to the knowledge of the true Catholic Church."

Shortly after the Gunpowder Plot was discovered, Thomas was arrested and imprisoned. Because he had been staying at the house of a conspirator and was related to another, British authorities hoped to gain more information from him. But he wouldn't cooperate and after several months was deported to Flanders, along with 46 other priests.

Once in Europe, he went to Louvain and entered the Jesuit novitiate. The following year, he was again sent back to England, but this time he was there for only six months when he was arrested after being betrayed by an apostate priest.

He was charged with high treason, accused of being a priest of Rome and of returning to England in defiance of the law. At his trial at the Old Bailey in London, he refused to confirm or deny that he was a priest. Nor would he take the new oath of supremacy, which declared that the British king outranked everyone, including the pope.

But three witnesses declared that he was a priest and he was condemned to die. On the scaffold for the gallows, he admitted that he was a priest and a Jesuit and again refused to take the supremacy oath. He was hanged, then drawn and quartered.

Such religious persecutions played an important role in the colonizing of America and the freedom of religion clause in the U.S. Constitution.