John Plessington

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St John Plessington (c. 1637 – 19 July 1679), also known as John Plesington, William Scarisbrick and William Pleasington, is one of the Roman Catholic Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.^[1]

Born at Dimples Hall, near Garstang, Lancashire, England, the son of Robert Plessington, a Royalist Roman Catholic, and Alice Rawstone, a family thus persecuted for both their religious and political beliefs. Educated by the Jesuits at Scarisbrick Hall, then at the Royal College of Saint Alban at Valladolid, Spain and then Saint Omer's monastery in France, he was ordained in Segovia on 25 March 1662. He returned to England in 1663 ministering to covert Catholics in the areas of Holywell and Cheshire, often hiding under the name William Scarisbrick. He was also tutor at Puddington Old Hall near Chester. Upon arrest in Chester during the Popish Plot scare caused by Titus Oates, he was imprisoned for two months, and then hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of being a Catholic priest. From the scaffold at Gallow's Hill in Boughton, Cheshire he spoke the following:

But I know it will be said that a priest ordayned by authority derived from the See of Rome is, by the Law of the Nation, to die as a Traytor, but if that be so what must become of all the Clergymen of the Church of England, for the first Protestant Bishops had their Ordination from those of the Church of Rome, or not at all, as appears by their own writers so that Ordination comes derivatively from those now living.

He was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, and canonized and made one of the Forty Martyrs on 25 October 1970 by Pope Paul VI. There is now a school called St. John Plessington in England which has just won TES School of the Year 2010 out of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Memorial

There is a memorial tablet to him located in the entrance porch of St Werburgh's Catholic Church Grosvenor Park Road Chester. Just a short distance from the spot he was executed on.

References

↑ List of 40 martyrs, accessed 20 July 2008

External links

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Persondata
Name	Plessington, John
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Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death	1679
Place of death

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