Who Are These?
By Sr Ann Catherine Swailes o.p. Address given at the Fisher Mass 2018
Why are we here this afternoon? Another way of framing that question would be to borrow words from our first reading and ask, with the seer of the apocalypse, who are these, clothed in white robes, and whence have they come? When we speak of St John Fisher as a member of that white robed army of martyrs, what kind of a claim are we making for him, and what can it possibly have to do with us? What, in other words, is martyrdom, and why should we care about it? Is there even any sense we can possibly make, on this sunny Bank holiday afternoon in Cambridge, of the notion that martyrdom might be our vocation? After all, there must have been sunny spring time afternoons in the Cambridge career of St John Fisher when this would have seemed as unthinkable as perhaps it does to us.