Saint David Lewis

St. David Lewis, S.J.
David Lewis, engraving by Alexander Voet (1683)
Martyr, Priest, Tad y Tlodion ("father of the poor")
Born	1616 Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales
Died	1679 (aged 62–63) Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales
Venerated in	Catholic Church
Beatified	15 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI
Canonized	25 October 1970, Vatican City, by Pope Paul VI
Feast	27 August

David Lewis (1616 – 27 August 1679) was a Jesuit Catholic priest and martyr who was also known as Charles Baker. Lewis was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales and is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church.

Lewis, the youngest of nine children of Protestant Reverend Morgan Lewis, the headmaster of a grammar school and Margaret Pritchard, a Catholic, was born at Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, in 1616.

At 16 years of age, while visiting Paris, he converted to Catholicism and subsequently went to study at the English College in Rome, where he assumed the alias "Charles Baker", a common practice to avoid spies and informers in the employ of the Crown. He was ordained a Catholic priest on 20 July 1642. Three years later, he joined the Society of Jesus.

My religion is Roman Catholic; in it I have loved above these forty years; in it now I die, and so fixedly die, that if all the good things in the world were offered to me to renounce it, all should not remove me one hair’s breadth from the Roman Catholic faith. A Roman Catholic I am; a Roman Catholic priest I am; a Roman Catholic priest of that order known as the Society of Jesus, I am;"

He was arrested on 17 November 1678, at St Michael's Church, Llantarnam, then in Monmouthshire, and condemned at the Assizes in Monmouth in March 1679 as a Catholic priest and for saying Catholic Masses. Like John Wall and John Kemble, he was then sent to London to be examined by Titus Oates (the originator of the Popish Plot) and other informers.