Campion Day
St Edmund Campion SJ was martyred on 1st December 1581.
1st December is the day on which his Feast is celebrated in the British Province of the Society of Jesus. St Edmund Campion is regarded as patron of the British Jesuit Province and his feast day is marked in Jesuit communities, parishes and schools. On 1st December we celebrate the ten saints and eighteen beati, martyrs of the British Province.
In the calendar of the English Church, St Edmund Campion is remembered on 4th May along with all the men and women martyred for the Catholic faith in England between 1535 and 1680.
The Life of St Edmund Campion SJ
Edmund Campion was born in 1540, the son of a bookseller in Paternoster row, just behind St Paul's Cathedral in London.
He grew up amid the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century following the break between Henry VIII and Rome.
Campion went to the local grammar school and then, age 12, to the new Christ's Hospital school for orphans and the poor. in August 1553, he was chosen to make a ceremonial address to Queen Mary as she passed through London. Campion was able academically and went to St John's College, Oxford, at the age of 15 (which was not unusual in those days). He was awarded his degree in 1564 and became a Fellow of the University. In 1566, he was again chosen to make a formal speech of welcome before the new Queen, Elizabeth I, when she visited Oxford. Much impressed with Campion, Elizabeth ensured he had friends and patrons at Court.
Campion was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church.
Increasingly Campion came to believe that the Protestant church was not the true continuation of the Christian faith and that only in the Catholic church would he find a home. He resigned his position at Oxford..
Campion went to Dublin in 1570 and was involved in the establishment of a university there.
With the excommunication of Elizabeth I by Pope Pius V in 1570, everything became much more difficult for Catholics and people like Campion who were unsure of their religious allegiance.
Campion became a Catholic and went to the new seinary for English Catholics founded at Douai in France. He was ordained subdeacon and then walked, barefoot, to Rome to become a Jesuit in April 1573. Campion pursued his studies as a Jesuit and taught in the Jesuit College in Prague. He was ordained priest in 1578.
Campion was pusuaded, against his better judgement, to join the new mission to England. On 16th June 1580, Fr Robert Persons SJ landed at Dover, the Superior of the new mission. On 24th June, Campion followed, disguised as a jewel merchant. Campion moved between the houses of Catholics (the Recusants) who practised their religion in secret. At one such house, Lyford Grange in Oxfordshire, he was betrayed and arrested on 17th July 1581, barely a year after he had set foot in England.
He was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower of London and tried at Westminster Hall in November
The Feast Day of St Edmund Campion is celebrated on 1st December. With him are celebrated his fellow martyr St Alexander Briant SJ, and St Robert Southwell SJ who was martyred on 21st February 1595. All were made saints by Pope Paul VI in 1970 along with 37 others (the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales).
St. Edmond had at least one vision of Our Lady.
Before he was arrested Campion spoke of a "great day!"
"No other day was in my mind, I protest, than that wherein it should please God to make a restitution of faith and religion. Whereupon, as in every pulpit every Protestant doth, I pronounced a great day, not wherein any temporal potentate should minister, but wherein the terrible Judge should REVEAL ALL MEN'S CONSCIENCES and try every man of each kind of religion. This is the day of change, this is the great day which I threatened." - From 'Edmund Campion a Life' by Evelyn Waugh
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