Saint Who?
Saints Who Promoted the Rosary
Saint John Ogilvie
Priest and martyr († 1615)Feast: March 10
John Ogilvie was born in Scotland in 1579 and raised Calvinist. But at age seventeen, while a student in Belgium, he chose to become a Catholic. Two years later, he joined the Society of Jesus, and was ordained a priest in 1610.
After three years working in France, he asked to be sent on mission to Scotland. It was a dangerous mission, with little visible fruit. But he persevered, ministering to the Catholics in hiding and endeavoring to win new converts. Then an informer, disguised as a potential convert, betrayed him to the authorities. Father Ogilvie was cruelly tormented, but refused to betray his faith or his fellow Catholics. He also kept his sense of humor, telling a questioner: “I fear death as much as you do your dinner.” He was condemned to death.
Ogilvie’s final gesture on the scaffold was to toss his rosary beads into the crowd. They struck the chest of a Calvinist nobleman who happened to be passing through town. This man wrote later: “Religion was the last thing I was then thinking about…yet from that moment I had no rest. Those rosary beads had left a wound in my soul…. I became a Catholic. I abandoned Calvinism, and this happy change I attribute to the martyr’s beads, and to no other cause.” Ogilvie was canonized by Paul VI in 1976.
Beloved Father, through the intercession of
Saint John Ogilvie, strengthen your priests with
hope, courage, and devotion to the rosary.
