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Biography

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John Wall was born in 1620 in Lancashire, in the north of England, to a recusant Catholic family of some means that had remained attached to the Roman Church after the English Reformation. Because Catholic education was forbidden in England, he was sent as a young man to the English College at Douai in the Spanish Netherlands. He later studied in Rome and was ordained a priest there in the 1640s. After further time on the Continent he entered the Franciscan community at the convent of St Bonaventure in Douai in 1651, taking the religious name Joachim of Saint Anne. The English Franciscans of Douai belonged to the Recollect reform of the Order of Friars Minor and trained men specifically for the dangerous mission to Protestant England, where the mere presence of a Catholic priest had been made high treason.

In the mid-1650s he was sent back across the Channel as a missionary. For more than twenty years he worked in secret among Catholics in Worcestershire and neighbouring counties, often using aliases such as Francis Webb. He is closely associated with Harvington Hall, a recusant gentry house famous for its priest holes, and with other Catholic households that sheltered clergy. His ministry consisted of celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, and sustaining a scattered community that lived under recusancy fines and the constant threat of informers. The work was clandestine by necessity: Elizabethan and later statutes still treated ordained Catholic priests found in England as traitors.

The fabricated Popish Plot of Titus Oates in 1678 produced a new wave of anti-Catholic arrests. Wall was seized in December 1678 at Rushock Court near Bromsgrove, where he had been serving as a chaplain, and was imprisoned in Worcester. Brought to trial in 1679, he was condemned for his priesthood alone. He was offered his life if he would take the Oath of Supremacy and abandon the Catholic faith; he refused. On 22 August 1679 he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Red Hill outside Worcester. He was among the last Catholic priests put to death in England under the penal laws for the exercise of their ministry.

Devotion to Wall persisted among English Catholics. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 among a group of English and Welsh martyrs, and was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His individual liturgical memorial is kept on 22 August, the date of his execution; he is also commemorated with the other Forty Martyrs. Relics associated with him have been preserved in various Catholic churches, though the precise original burial of his remains after the quartering is not established with complete certainty in the surviving sources.

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