Rev. J. Francis Sofie: A Martyr for the Eucharist: St. Anne Line

Imagine living in world in which simply being a Catholic priest was a capital offense; imagine, too, that in this world, any person who hosted a priest in one’s home or hid a priest from the authorities was guilty of a capital offense. That was the world in which St. Anne Line lived. But what is so amazing in the case of Anne Line is that it was a world into which she knowingly entered. Anne chose to become Catholic at a time when practicing the Catholic faith in England was illegal and punishable even by death.

At her birth, she was given the name Alice by her Protestant parents. Her father was a leading Puritan, and her grandfather helped King Henry VIII in “reforming” the Church in England. When Alice announced to her family, sometime in the 1580’s, that she, her brother William, and her husband Roger were entering into the Catholic Church, they were summarily disinherited from the family. …