Saint John Ogilvie

John Ogilvie, SJ (1580 – 10 March 1615) was a Scottish Jesuit priest. For his work in service to a persecuted Catholic community in 17th century Scotland, and in being hanged for his faith, he became the only post-Reformation Scottish saint. Ogilvie was brought up a Calvinist and sent to continental Europe to further his education. His interest piqued by the popular debates going on between Catholic and Calvinist scholars, he took up studies with the Benedictines, and then with the Jesuits. He became a Jesuit and was sent to Scotland, where he worked among the few Catholics in the area of Glasgow. Arrested after less than a year, he was hanged at Glasgow Cross in 1615. John was the eldest son of Walter Ogilvie, a respected Calvinist who owned the estate of Drumnakeith in Banffshire. His family was partly Roman Catholic and partly Presbyterian. At the age of twelve he was sent to continental Europe to be educated. He attended a number of Catholic educational establishments, under the Benedictines at Regensburg in Germany and with the Jesuits at Olmutz and Brunn in Moravia. In the midst of the religious controversies and turmoil that engulfed the Europe of that era, he decided to become a Catholic. In 1597, aged seventeen, he was received into the Catholic Church by Cornelius a Lapide S.J., professor of sacred scripture at Leuven, Belgium. Ogilvie joined the Society of Jesus in 1599 and was ordained a priest at Paris in 1613. After ordination he served in Rouen in Normandy where he made repeated requests to be sent to Scotland to minister to the few remaining Catholics in the Glasgow area. (After the Scottish Reformation in 1560 it had become illegal there to preach, proselytise for, or otherwise endorse Catholicism.) It was his hope that some Catholic nobles there would aid him, given his lineage. Finding none, he went to London, then back to Paris, and finally returned to Scotland in November 1613 disguised as a horse trader named John Watson.