Medicine against seasonal sentimentality

 From Fratellino on the Brothers' Facebook page:

For the readers' convenience, I have copied the text of the poem from the post onto the site as well. The author, St. Robert Southwell, was a Jesuit priest and one of the Forty Holy Martyrs of England & Wales. St. Robert was, like many of the persecuted priests of Elizabethan England, an English priest educated in Douai, France who ministered covertly to the Recusant population. The plot to place the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne through the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I led to suspicions towards one of the families St. Robert ministered to, and through a lascivious and possibly coerced affair with one of the family's daughters, the Queen's chief priest-hunter, Richard Topcliffe, was able to arrest St. Robert. After weeks of torture at the behest of Topcliffe and the Queen, St. Robert was sent to the gallows, where the raging mob eagerly tugged at his suffering body and cut it into pieces. 

The Burning Babe ~ St. Robert Southwell, S.J. 1595

"As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,

Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;

And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,

A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;

Who, scorchéd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed

As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.

“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,

Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuél wounding thorns,

Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;

The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,

The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiléd souls,

For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,

So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”

With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,

And straight I calléd unto mind that it was Christmas day."

And that's what Christmas is REALLY all about, Charlie Brown.