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Britain's outstanding Roman Catholic scholar, most versatile writer, and gentlest man died this week. Msgr. Ronald Knox, 69, No. 1 convert to Catholicism since the Oxford movement, left both the monumental and the diverting behind him: a masterful translation of the Bible, a classic Limerick, a definitive history of Christianity's hot-blooded sectarianism and six popular detective novels. But it was perhaps as a man that he exerted his deepest influence on those around...
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was the sixth child of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester (both of his grandfathers had also been Protestant clergymen). Religion began to serve him at the age of 15; when a friend came down with typhoid, Ronnie lived on bread and butter for six weeks. His friend died, and Knox prayed for him 15 minutes each day "with my hands held above the level of my head, which is not as easy as it sounds." At 17, he vowed himself to celibacy. At 24, he became the Anglican chaplain of Oxford University's Trinity College...
Five years later, in 1917, Ronald Knox resigned and entered the Roman Catholic Church. "Authority played a large part in my belief," he said later. In his new church, too, Knox was ordained to the priesthood, and soon he was back at Oxford, this time as a Catholic chaplain. For 13 years there-boom years among undergraduates for Marx, sex and sneering at authority-wispy Father Knox made his rooms a gathering place for the university's most glittering wits. It was then that he began producing smoothly turned detective novels, e.g., The Body in the Silo, The Viaduct...
Hives Ready to Swarm. Knox's humor sparked and crackled through everything he did. Writing of the Mass, he remarked that the recurring word or emus (let us pray) "serves as a useful sort of alarm clock to wake us up at various points." Speaking of non-Roman Catholic denominations, he said: "With all respect to them ... all the identity discs in heaven are marked RC." His most widely quoted witticism is also one of the most famed Limericks in the language, kidding Bishop Berkeley's doctrine that things exist only when observed...
Such was Ronnie Knox's reputation for wit that the shock at Oxford was great when in 1939 he was assigned by his archbishop to make a new translation of the Bible. He retired to a friend's house in the country and set to work; it was to take ten years, at the average rate of 24 verses a day, and today it is an approved version. World War II provided some interruptions-especially when Knox became confessor to a group of evacuated teen-age girls billeted in the same house. But his sermons to them...