St. Edmund Campion

Who they were

Edmund Campion was the ornament of Elizabethan Oxford, a speaker so brilliant that the Queen herself marked him for greatness. He walked away from the career, reconciled to the Catholic Church, became a Jesuit, and in 1580 was smuggled back into an England where his priesthood was treason.

He expected to be taken quickly. The document he left for that event, dashed off in half an hour and known ever since as Campion's Brag, is one of the great pages of English prose: he announced to the Privy Council that he had come to preach the Gospel, to minister the sacraments, to instruct the simple, and that the expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun, it is of God, it cannot be withstood. For thirteen months he rode the priest hole circuit and printed the Decem Rationes on a hidden press. Betrayed and racked in the Tower, he was then made to debate fresh teams of theologians, which he did from memory, without notes or books. At Tyburn on 1 December 1581 he prayed for the Queen and told the crowd that in condemning him they condemned their own ancestors. He was canonized in 1970.

Why people turn to St. Edmund Campion

Academics and writers whose convictions cost them the career. St. John Henry Newman loved him, and the two of them mark the same road three centuries apart. And anyone practising the faith under a roof where it has to stay hidden, with St. Paul Miki and companions.

How to ask their intercession

Before signing your name to the thing that will cost you something. The Brag's sentence is the prayer: the expense is reckoned.