John Amias (Blessed)

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John Amias, Catholic priest, martyr. There is some lingering doubt about his real identity. One story is that he was indeed John Amias or Amyas, born at Wakefield in Yorkshire, where he married and raised a family, exercising the trade of cloth-merchant. On the death of his wife, he divided his property among his children and left for the Continent to become a priest. There is also a possibility that he was really William Anne (surname), youngest son of John and Katherine Anne, of Frickley near Wakefield. In any case he was a widower and on June 22, 1580 he entered the English College at Rheims to study for the priesthood. He was ordained a priest in Rheims Cathedral on March 25, 1581. It was on June 5 that he set out for Paris and then England in the company of another priest, Edmund Sykes. Of his missionary life we know little. Towards the end of 1588 he was seized at the house of a Mr. Murton at Melling in Lancashire and imprisoned in York Castle. Given the 1585 Act making it a capital offence to be a Catholic priest in England the terrible sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was inevitable. It was carried out outside the city of York on March 16, 1589. His fate was shared by a fellow priest, Robert Dalby. Both were declared Blessed (the last stage prior to sainthood) by Pope Pius XI on December 15, 1929.

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