Saint John Ogilvie

Saint John Ogilvie was a Scottish Jesuit, priest, and martyr. Raised a Calvinist, he embraced the Catholic faith as a young man, and years later he returned in secret to his homeland to serve the Catholics there. In 1615 he was hanged in Glasgow. The Church commemorates him on March 10, the day of his death.

He was born about 1579 at Drum near Keith, in the Scottish county of Banffshire; the exact date is not certain. His father, the nobleman Walter Ogilvie, brought him up in the Calvinist confession and sent him, as a boy in his early teens, to study on the Continent. There John listened to the religious disputes of his age, and in 1596, at the Scots College in Louvain, he was received into the Catholic Church.

He then studied with the Benedictines in Regensburg and with the Jesuits in Olomouc. In 1599 he began his novitiate in the Society of Jesus at Brno, and in 1610 he was ordained a priest in Paris. He worked in Rouen and for two years asked the superior general of the order to send him to Scotland, where celebrating Holy Mass was then punished with loss of property and exile, and on a further conviction even with death.

In November 1613, after twenty-two years away, he landed at Leith near Edinburgh. He went by the name of Watson and passed himself off as a horse dealer. He celebrated Holy Mass before dawn among a few trusted people, visited the sick and prisoners, and reconciled with the Church those who desired it. His ministry lasted less than a year.

In October 1614, in Glasgow, he was betrayed by a man who pretended that he wanted to return to the Church. Ogilvie was brought before the Protestant archbishop of the city and thrown into prison. Over the following months he was interrogated and tortured to make him name the Catholics he had served. He was kept in chains, and for eight days and nine nights he was not allowed to sleep. According to Catholic accounts he gave no one away. In his cell he wrote in Latin an account of his imprisonment, which was carried out page by page.

King James VI sent him questions about the authority of the pope and of the king. Ogilvie answered that in temporal matters he was obedient to the king, but in matters of faith he would not acknowledge his supremacy. On March 10, 1615, a court in Glasgow condemned him for high treason, and the sentence was carried out that same afternoon. At the gallows Ogilvie said that he would gladly give his life for the king and that he was dying for his faith alone. According to tradition, at the last moment he threw his rosary into the crowd. He was buried among the condemned, and his grave has been lost.

Pius XI beatified him on December 22, 1929, and Paul VI canonized him on October 17, 1976. He is the only canonized Scottish martyr of the Reformation era. Paul VI said on that occasion that the martyr had helped to vindicate religious freedom and is to be not a sign of discord but a help on the way to unity. In 2010, in Glasgow, Benedict XVI held him up as a model for the priests of Scotland.