Word: knoxs
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Even before he became an Anglican priest and took the chaplaincy of Trinity College, Oxford (1912), Knox was a "Romanizer." He was attracted to the rituals, vestments, "Mariolatrous hymns" and incense that his father among others was bent on stamping out. As a family joke Ronald once scented his father's private chapel with incense. Wrote Knox: "I can't feel that the Church of England is an ultimate solution...
...refused an army chaplaincy on being asked what he would do for a dying man and answering "Hear his confession and give him absolution." The correct military answer was: "Give him a cigarette and take any last message he may have for his family." In the spring of 1915 Knox drew up 31 propositions pro and con his submitting to the Church of Rome, but it was not until September 1917 that the pros...
...Oxford (1926) as Roman Catholic chaplain to the undergraduates, dispensing port and bananas along with basic spiritual nourishment. He never proselytized, regarding himself "as the shepherd with the crook, not the fisherman with the hook." Determinedly antimodern (he was 66 years old when he saw his first movie), Knox spoofed the pretensions of science by offering a lecture on the newly audible sounds of "vegetables in pain." He was a classic conservative who spoke of putting up "some kind of barrage against this revolting...
Once when a young couple sought to have their infant baptized in the vernacular, Knox snorted: "The baby doesn't know English, and the Devil knows Latin." Despite the seemingly arrogant assurance of some of his publicized dicta (e.g., "All the identity discs in Heaven are marked R.C."), Knox went through ordeals of parched spirituality, notably in respect to prayer. He once wrote: "In the great bulk of my prayers, vocal and mental, all my life, I have not felt I was talking to God in his presence, but rather apostrophizing him in his absence...
Enter Lady Acton. As Waugh tells it, Knox was in depression toward the end (1939) of his Oxford chaplaincy. As a writer, he deplored what he referred to as two decades of potboiling. (Among other works he had churned out six popular detective novels to help foot the port-and-banana bills.) A glowing young convert, Lady Acton, and her husband gave Knox a psychological lift by offering him a writing retreat and private-chaplain status at their country estate, Aldenham. With this haven in view, Knox secured the English hierarchy's commission to translate the New Testament. From...