Patrick Anderson

Patrick Anderson

A Scottish Jesuit, b. at Elgin in Morayshire in 1575; died in London, 24 September, 1624. he was the nephew of Dr. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, a faithful adherent of Mary Queen of Scots, and her ambassador at the French Court. After completing his education at the university of Edinburgh, he entered the Society of Jesus at Rome, in 1597, and in due time acquired a reputation as a linguist, mathematician, philosopher, and divine. In 1609, he was appointed to the Scotch mission, where his labours were highly successful and his hairbreadth escapes from the pursuivants truly marvelous. He left Scotland for Paris to meet his superior, Father James Gordon, late in 1611. father Anderson undertook to supply the great dearth of missionaries in his native country by collecting nearly one hundred youths in Scotland, all of them most eager to serve God and the Church. In 1615 he became the first Jesuit Rector of the Scots College in Rome, founded fifteen years before by Pope Clement VIII. Returning to Scotland, he was soon after betrayed by a pretended Catholic, and committed to the Tolbooth jail, Edinburgh, where, in the daily expectation of torture and death, he displayed the heroic intrepidity of a true martyr. He was finally set at liberty on the petition, it is supposed, of the French Ambassador who requested to have him for his confessor.

Father Anderson has left us some valuable and interesting letters relating to his missionary labours in Scotland; these letters may be found in the London "Month" for December, 1876. No one was better qualified to bear witness to the state of the Church in Scotland during the reign of James the First. In 1623 he published "The Ground of the Catholicke and Roman Religion in the Word of God" a work which shows he had carefully studied the scriptural argument for the Catholic Faith. While imprisoned in Edinburgh, he also compiled the "Memoirs of the Scotch Saints", formerly in manuscript at the Scots College in Paris.

Letters of Father Patrick Anderson, 1611-20, in Letters and Notices (Rochampton, Nov., 1867). 98-149; Oliver, Collections toward illustrating the Biography of the Scotch, English, and Irish members of the Society of Jesus (London, 1845); Forbes-Leith, Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI (new ed., London, 1889), pp. 317-346' J.F.S. Gordon, The Catholic Church in Scotland (1874), 516, 517; Dictionary of National Biography, V; Catholic directory (1855).

EDWARD P. SPILLANE