Feast Day: February 27
Canonized: October 25, 1970
Beatified: December 15, 1929

Anne Line was born Alice Higham in Essex, England, in 1563. The daughter of a Puritan, she converted to Catholicism in the 1580s along with her brother William and Roger Line, the man she would marry in 1583. Under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, celebrating Catholic Mass was illegal, and Roger was arrested while attending Mass and sent into exile where he died in 1594. The widowed Anne stayed in London, where she worked to shelter Catholic priests in a safe house started by Jesuit Father John Gerard.
 
Anne was arrested during a raid on Candlemas, February 2, 1601, during the blessing of candles to be used at the Candlemas Mass. She was sent to Newgate Prison, and put on trial on February 26 for the felony crime of aiding a seminary priest. Sentenced to death by hanging the next day, Anne told the bystanders: "I am sentenced to die for harboring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand."

Anne Line was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929. She was canonised by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales who were executed between 1535 and 1679 during the English Reformation.
 
Connecting to Blest Are We^® Parish and School, second edition
Grade One, chapter 6