Of the Jesuit martyr and English traitor:"You must go to the place from whence you came, there to remain until ye shall be drawn through the open City of London upon hurdles to the place of execution, be hanged and let down alive, and your privy parts cut off, and your entrails taken out and burnt in your sight; then your head to be cut off and your body divided into four parts, to be disposed of at her Majesty's pleasure."
With those words Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chief Justice dispatched the English Jesuit priest Edmund Campion to his death at Tyburn. The year was 1581. The charge was treason. Campion himself was unruffled by the verdict: "It was not our death that we ever feared. … The only thing we have now to say is, that if our religion do make us traitors, we are worthy to be condemned; but otherwise are, and have been, as good subjects as the Queen ever had."
St. Edmund Campion, martyr, lives on as a model of cheerful, gutsy, devout intelligence disciplined toward the single goal of recovering and rebuilding Catholic churchmanship where it had lain in ruins. I was amused and delighted, therefore, to learn that the Jesuit magazine America announced that it will give its 2009 Campion Award to none other than Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Link (here) to Diogenes and his full post at Catholic Culture.
2 comments:
Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! This award could only come from the chasm of ignorance and complacency that embodies the United States of America. What is particularl;y galling is that it compromises the integrity of two fine men, St Edmund Campion and Archishop Williams, neither of whom deserve this gauche insult.
Campion wilfully refused the path to high office in the newly-founded Church of England by embracing Catholicism and entering the Society of Jesus. He was treated abominably during his trial by the Bishop of London and his appointed Protestant divines, all of whom were routed in argument by Campion. On the scaffold he refused the ministrations of a Protestant chaplain.
Archbishop Williams is one of the best theologians in the Church of England (perhaps the best; there are no others living) and a man of holiness and prayer. He is too good for his present job and should have stayed in Oxford away from the lethal political activity in the National Church. Within the General Synod of that Church his counsel is ignored and despised by the liberal ascendency, none of whom have a scrap of his ability.
Cut to the booze-fuelled world of America House in Manhatten, a community of mediocre misfits and disgruntled former editors, journalists and clapped out, retired Provincials. There is not a single member of the community or staff of 'America' that has the remotest understanding of the solecism of giving that empty award to Williams. He is a fool to accept it and Campion's memory insulted by the gift. Why not rename it the Arrupe Award after the Basque naif who got everything wrong for the SJ after Vatican II and whose policies have led to the Society's present malaise? Why insult one of England's premier martyrs? Why didn't Williams turn it down and treat it with the contempt it deserves?
Let me see, the award is being given to a nominal heretic, who is the highest cleric of the religion which martyred the namesake of the award. Is that right?
Who is running this game?
RB
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