An ex-public
schoolboy who fought in WW2 and cared for lepers in Zimbabwe before he was executed by
Mugabe is set to become the first British martyr since the martyrs of the 16th
century. (In 1970 Pope Paul VI canonized Cuthbert Mayne and 39 British companions -The 40 Martyrs of England and Wales -, who were executed for treason between 1535 and 1679, and the Scottish Catholic martyr John Ogilvie, canonized in 1976.)
JOHN BRADBURNE didn't just look like Jesus, with
his long hair, beard and simple, austere clothes. He also gave his life for
others.
In
September 1979, the English-born missionary, poet and warden of Mutemwa leper
colony in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, was
caught up in the country's civil war, the Rhodesian Bush War.
His friends
told him to flee the imminent arrival of the bloodthirsty ZANU-PF guerillas who
thought he was an informer. But he insisted on remaining with the lepers.
When the guerillas came, they bound John's hands, took him on a forced march and humiliated him. They made him
dance and sing, got him to eat excrement and dangled young women in front of
him, before interrogating him and subjecting him to a rigged trial.
They
offered him the chance to escape so long as he left the country and abandoned
his beloved flock. He refused and, when he knelt down to pray, they shot the
58-year-old in the back, leaving him half-naked by the side of the road.
He was
buried in a Franciscan habit, as he had requested, in a cemetery 11 miles
outside the capital city, Salisbury, now Harare.
Born in
Westmorland in 1921, he was the son of an Anglican rector and amazingly enough a relation of
Lord Soames, last Governor of Southern Rhodesia, who oversaw the independence
of Zimbabwe
in 1980, soon after John's death.
After
private schooling at Gresham's in Norfolk, he fought in World War II with the 9th Gurkha
Rifles, heroically escaping Singapore
when it was invaded by the Japanese in 1942.
After the
war, in 1947, he converted to Catholicism after
staying with the Benedictines of Buckfast Abbey. His desire was to become a Benedictine monk, but the Order would not
accept him because he had not been in the Church for two years. (a common practice for new Catholics). He opted to travel
instead, wandering the world for 16 years, trying his hand at teaching and
forestry, and toiling as a stoker on a steam ship. His only worldly belonging
was a single Gladstone bag.
On trips
home, John stayed with Carthusian monks in England,
and with other religious orders in Israel
and Belgium.
At one stage, he walked hundreds of miles to Rome and lived for a year in the organ loft
of a church in an Italian mountain village.
Throughout
this period, he wrote over 6,000 poems, covering a
wide range of spiritual, natural, elegiac and narrative subject matter. As he
wrote his domestic letters largely in verse, new poems from the recipients are
still occasionally found.
In Rodesia
in 1969, he found his calling in the rundown leper colony of Mutemwa. John had
asked a Jesuit friend, John Dove, if he knew of any African caves where he might
pray. Father Dove took him to the Mutemwa leper colony at Mutoko, 90 miles east of Salisbury.
Where
others had rejected the 80 cruelly maimed lepers, John embraced them and made
his home among them, eventually becoming the warden of the colony. Before he
arrived, the lepers were treated as outcasts, forced to wear bags on their
heads to hide their disfigurement whenever an able-bodied visitor arrived.
In
contrast, John prayed with them, drank with them and slept alongside them. He
bathed their wounds, cut their nails, shooed away the rats that hounded the
colony and, when they died, buried them with dignity.
He built
them a small church, and wrote each leper a poem. With his fine voice and
classical education, he even taught them to sing Gregorian plainchant in Latin.
Before he died, John said that he had only three wishes: to
help lepers, to die a martyr and to be buried in a habit of the Franciscan
Order. He achieved all three.
A service
is held in John’s memory at Mutemwa every year, drawing as many as 25,000
people each time. In 2009 a Mass commemorating the 30th anniversary of his
death was held at Westminster Cathedral in London, England. This
year in 2019, marks the 40th Anniversary of John's assassination. This was marked both in Zimbabwe
at Mutemwa with the pilgrimage and then an exhibition and talks at Westminster
Cathedral on 21 September 2019, where John's relics were showcased for the
first time.
