Word: campion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even before he became the Jesuit Provincial (in 1945), sharp-featured Father D'Arcy had an unusually widespread influence. As Master of Oxford's Roman Catholic Campion Hall (for more than a decade), he turned its three-story building into a religious museum of valuable paintings, rare books, tokens. His urbane charm and cultivated mind have influenced a quarter-century's crop of Oxonians and helped bring many a British highbrow into his broadbrowed church...
...Gallows in the Rain. Gayest feather in any Jesuit hat was "Campion's Brag." This document, written for use after his almost certain arrest, circulated beforehand and made him famous. In it he asked for three audiences: with the Privy Council, the Masters of the Universities, and the lawyers of the realm, to prove the truth of his faith...
...Queen and her ministers could not ignore a challenge so dashing and so well known. After they caught Campion they imprisoned and racked him, then sat him on a stool at four "conferences." Campion held his own, in distress chiefly because his replies were not being taken down in full. "I wish to God I had a notary," he said. On Dec.1,1581, he was dragged through the rain to Tyburn gallows and faced death gently with a,prayer for the Queen...
Says Waugh: "It was an age replete with examples of astounding physical courage. Judged by the exploits of the great adventurers of his time, the sea dogs and explorers, Campion's brief achievement may appear modest enough; but these were tough men, ruthlessly hardened by upbringing, gross in their recreations. Campion stands out from even his most gallant and chivalrous contemporaries . ._. by the supernatural grace that...
...mind of Campion's biographer, supernatural grace clearly bears a relation to a certain kind of gaiety. It would be interesting to know how Catholic critics might relate it to the gaiety and polish, unique in modern English writing, of A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. To judge by Brideshead, at any rate, Evelyn Waugh may sense a similarity between his mission as a writer of comedy and Campion's as a priest: "to crie alarme spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith many my dear Countrymen are abused...