Edmund Genings

Life and Ministry

Edmund Genings was born at Lichfield in AD 1567, a Protestant by upbringing, sent at sixteen as a page into the recusant Catholic household of Richard Sherwood, who introduced him to the Catholic faith. He converted, traveled to the Catholic seminary at Rheims, was ordained priest in AD 1590 at the age of twenty-three (an exceptionally young age, allowed because of the urgent need on the English mission), and returned to England in disguise as a sea-captain a month after his ordination. He served only seven months on the mission in London before his arrest.

Circumstances of Death

On 7 November AD 1591 the pursuivant Richard Topcliffe burst into the house of Mr Swithin Wells at Gray's Inn Fields while Genings was actually saying Mass. Genings, fully vested, refused to stop the consecration even at sword-point; he finished the Mass under the eyes of the searchers, then accompanied them quietly. Tried at the Old Bailey for the felony of being a Catholic priest within the realm, convicted, sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, he was executed at Gray's Inn Fields outside the very house in which he had been arrested, on 10 December AD 1591. His sister, present at the execution, recovered one of his quartered remains (a thumb) and preserved it as a relic; it survives today at the convent of the English Augustinians at Hoddesdon.

Legacy

Genings was canonized in AD 1970 with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His witness is the witness of the consecration that could not be interrupted — the priest who, with the elements already on the corporal, refused to break the act of the sacrament for the men come to kill him. His youth (twenty-four at his death) made him the youngest of the canonized Forty. His sister's preservation of the thumb is one of the more remarkable family stories of the English recusant tradition: a Protestant convert sister to a Catholic convert priest, gathering the relic of his execution to carry into a convent abroad.