Word: monsignors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Monsignor Ronald Knox was skittish about moths, mice and telephones. He was at his ease among pogo sticks (once he navigated a flight of stairs on one), the pipe smoke and verbal parry of Oxford common rooms, Latin verse and the English language. Temperamentally an esthete, he nonetheless made sense and clarity the chief goals of his monumental translation of the Bible. Intellectually the most ornamental English convert to Roman Catholicism since John Henry Newman, he was too diffident and self-effacing to aspire to a cardinal's red hat. His was the subtler role of a kind...
Seven years before his death in 1957, Knox appointed one such friend, Evelyn Waugh, novelist and fellow convert, as his literary executor. In Monsignor Ronald Knox (Little, Brown; $5), Biographer Waugh guards his friend's privacy like a medieval moat; whenever the book becomes personal, it is full of private jokes. Waugh's portrait is curiously Graham Greene-like, with Knox's outward urbanity masking a certain amount of inner anguish, his scrupulous conscience making him uneasy at any ease of faith...
...opposition to the translation as it progressed. In return for a modest stipend for living expenses while he was working on the translation, Knox signed over his copyright to the hierarchy. At the time of his death, ?50,000 had been realized from sales of the Knox Bible. The monsignor once remarked "drily but without bitterness" to Waugh that no one had ever uttered a word of thanks to him for this benefaction...