Blessed John Adams, Robert Dibdale and John Lowe

Blessed John Adams, Robert Dibdale and John Lowe were English priests who, during the reign of Elizabeth I, secretly ministered to Catholics, each in a different place. Condemned for their priesthood alone, they died together at Tyburn in London on October 8, 1586. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them on the day of their death, October 8.

The Catholic Mass was then forbidden in England, and priests were trained in colleges on the Continent. A law of 1585 made the presence in the kingdom of a priest ordained abroad high treason, punishable by death.

John Adams came from Martinstown in Dorset and had been a minister of the Church of England before he became a Catholic. After studying in Reims he was ordained a priest in 1580, and in 1581 he returned to England, where he worked mainly in Winchester and in Hampshire. Father William Warford, who knew him, remembered him as pious and very hardworking, a man who helped many people, especially the poor. Imprisoned in 1584, he was deported from the country with other priests in 1585, but after a short stay in Reims he returned and was arrested again.

John Lowe was born in London around 1553. He too had been a minister of the Church of England before his conversion. He studied at Douai and was ordained a priest at the English College in Rome. From the end of 1583 he ministered in London, where in May 1586 he was taken to the Clink prison.

Robert Dibdale came from a Catholic family in Shottery near Stratford-upon-Avon. He studied in Rome and in Reims. He was ordained a priest in Reims in 1584 and then became chaplain to the Peckham family at Denham in Buckinghamshire. There, together with other priests, among them the Jesuit William Weston, he performed exorcisms over several people believed to be possessed, which drew many onlookers. Older priests opposed these practices, and Catholic historians of the early twentieth century concluded that these people were most likely not possessed but suffering from hysteria.

In the summer of 1586 Dibdale was arrested as well. At Newgate all three were condemned for high treason because they had been ordained priests by the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The priest Anthony Tyrrell, who had gone over to the authorities and informed against the imprisoned priests, contributed to the verdict. Later, in a moment of repentance, he admitted that he had accused them falsely and asked for their prayers. The sentence was carried out at Tyburn: the condemned men were hanged, disemboweled and quartered.

Catholics venerated them as martyrs from the beginning. Saint John Paul II beatified them on November 22, 1987, in Saint Peter’s Basilica, in a group of eighty-five martyrs killed in England, Wales and Scotland. In his homily he said that the priests among them wished only to feed their people with the Bread of Life and the word of the Gospel, though this meant risking their lives.