St. Edmund Campion, S.J. A Model For Today's Modern Jesuit

Ignatian Corner: Jesuits "brag" about Campion
By: Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.
11/28/07

His name was Campion-as in Campion Center at Saint Joseph's University. More formally, he was Edmund Campion, S.J., who lived as an Englishman, died as a martyr, and wrote a grand self-defense called "Campion's Brag." Born in London in 1540, he was caught in the English Reformation; and though Roman Catholic by birth, he and his parents became Protestants.

At Oxford, young Campion was brilliant-glorious as a student and so as a
professor that his students called themselves "Campionists."

Chosen at 26 years of age to welcome Queen Elizabeth to Oxford, he was so outstanding that the Queen tried to enlist him in her service. Campion had other plans: ordained an Anglican deacon, he was preparing to be a priest. But his studies brought him back to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1573, he became a Jesuit, taught and directed plays in Prague, was ordained a priest in 1578, and again won fame as a preacher in Prague. In 1580, he was called to help found the famous "English Mission" and minister to the Catholics there. The dangers, though, were quite real; though his mission was spiritual, he and his fellow Jesuits could easily be-and were-accused of treason against the Queen. They had to assume disguises, and Campion-presenting himself as a jeweler-landed at Dover on the morning of June 25, 1580. He had 17 months to live.

Reentering England, he described his mission in a statement now called "Campion's Brag." His "cause," he wrote, was "of free cost to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reforme sinners, to confute errors-in brief, to crie alarme spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance."

"I never had mind," he continued, and "am strictly forbidden . . . to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy of this realm." He would, though, gladly enter into religious disputation-even with "the Queen my Sovereign Ladye"-so that "by good method and plain dealing" he might secure justice for English Catholics. He ended with a moving address to "The Lords of Her Majestie's Privy Council": "Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posteritie shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes." And touching our Societie, be it known to you that we have made a league-all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England-cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons."

The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be
withstood.

So the faith was planted: so it must be restored." And if he must die,

"I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almightie God,
the Searcher of Hearts, who send us His grace, and set us at accord before the day of payment, to the end we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten."

Convicted on false charges of treason, he died a traitor's death. On Dec. 1, 1581, he was hanged at Tyburn in London-near today's Marble Arch-then "drawn and quartered," which meant he was taken down from the gallows, then had his chest cut open and his heart and intestines ripped out. Fr. Edmund Campion was declared a saint in 1970. His feast-day is Dec. 1.

Link to original article in the Hawk (here)