John Amias
English Roman Catholic priest and martyr
John Amias (died 16 March 1589) was a Roman Catholic priest who was martyred in England. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.
Life
There is some doubt about his early life and his real name. One story is that he was indeed John Amias or Amyas, born at Wakefield in Yorkshire, England, where he married and raised a family, exercising the trade of cloth-merchant. On the death of his wife, he divided his property among his children and left for the Continent to become a priest. There is also a possibility that he was really William Anne (surname), youngest son of John and Katherine Anne, of Frickley near Wakefield.
Regardless of his actual name, on 22 June 1580, a widower calling himself "John Amias" entered the English College at Rheims to study for the priesthood. He was ordained a priest in Rheims Cathedral on 25 March 1581. On 5 June of that year Amias, set out for Paris and then England, as a missionary, in the company of another priest, Edmund Sykes. Of his missionary life we know little.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Amias” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.