In spite of the fears of his friend Michael Ramsey that their canonisation would deepen the antagonism between Catholics and Anglicans, St Paul VI believed the blood of the Forty Martyrs would eventually come to heal the wounds of division
In November 1969, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, was worried. Since his appointment in 1961, he had striven to improve relations between Anglicans and Catholics, and in Pope Paul VI he thought he had found a kindred ecumenical spirit. Now he fretted that all his efforts to overcome the years of hostility between Rome and England might come to naught because of a different cause, one that was held as passionately as Ramsey cherished the cause of Christian unity. Indeed, for those behind it, this cause mattered more than any other, for blood had been shed for the Catholic faith. These were the people who had campaigned and prayed for years for the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
On 25 October 1970 their dream would finally be fulfilled, when Paul VI, the man Ramsey had seen as his ecumenical ally, would canonise those who had stood on one side of the deep divide that so scarred Britain from the Reformation until the twentieth century. So fearful had Ramsey been for the ecumenical future, that, 11 months before the canonisation, he allowed The Tablet to publish a memorandum previously only seen by those lobbying for these men and women who died for their Catholic faith in England and Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be raised to the altars.
Ramsey began with an air of resigned concern. “I am increasingly convinced that the canonisation would be harmful to the ecumenical cause in England and that it would encourage those emotions which militate against the ecumenical cause,” he wrote. He continued in magnanimous mood, warning that Anglicans were at fault as much as Catholics for not letting the past go: “In England our past history creates inevitable difficulties for ecumenical progress. Nobody familiar with our English history need be surprised at this. There is not only the prejudice of ultra-Protestant people but there is also the ‘siege mentality’ which is still apt to possess Roman Catholics in England.”