If anybody hears a strange sound coming from St. Edward Campion’s reliquaries in Rome in Prague, no doubt it is the saint spinning at high velocity after hearing about this story.
Jesuit magazine America has given the 2009 Campion Award to The Most Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. [reference]
Yes an award named after the great saint and martyr who continually risked his life and ended up giving it for the Catholic faith is now given to an Anglican. St. Campion never compromised his Catholic faith in any way and returned to Britain as a priest knowing the risks involved providing the underground Catholics the sacraments. At the same time he continued writing against Anglicanism including his famous Ten Reasons written a week before his capture. In it he goes through scripture, discusses the nature of the Church, discusses the Church fathers, sophism, history, and the witness of the Church. The witnesses he described were all saints of course obedient to the Holy Father.
Nothing America Magazine does should surprise me, but this caught me by surprise in that while it would have been a great parody in the Onion – the real life version is not so funny.
Hat tip Diogeses who has some choice words as always.
I do wonder exactly what the Anglican Archbishop did to earn this honor from a Jesuit magazine. Must have been when Rowan Williams lectured the Pope on women’s ordination last year. Or maybe it was the “Archbishop” complaining about the Apostolic Constitution and saying “it put us in an awkward position.” Rowan Williams has done nothing ecumenically to bring the Anglican church closer to the Catholic Church. If anything he has added to the harm being done within his communion by making it ever harder to ever have a fuller reconciliation. If there was an anti-Campion award than surely Rowan Williams would deserve that. “Archbishop” Williams meeting with the Pope last year was a interesting development. It is certainly nice to see the somewhat friendly terms that goes beyond the polemics of the past. But friendly meetings that bear no real fruit and end up business as usual are not worth much.
It does beg the question about who did indeed deserve this award with this Jesuit saint’s name on it? If America Magazine was actually faithful to the Church the awardee no doubt should have been Pope Benedict XVI. The Pope achieved in part this year what St. Campion desired. That is a large group of Anglican returning to the Church. The Pope’s Apostolic Constitution “Anglicanorum Coetibus” made this much easier to bring this group back into the fold and setting a new path to make this happen. This new Apostolic Constitution not only clears the way to bring in the Traditional Anglican Communion, but other Anglicans/Episcopalian groups/individual. Surely St. Campion rejoiced over this in Heaven – America Magazine; not so much.
13 comments
Why would any young man join an order that has become a joke? An enemy plotting the Jesuit’s destruction couldn’t do a better job than these ‘light in the lofer lefties’ They’ve even got Roger Haight giving talks on the website homepage.
Shameful half men.
They should think on, as Diogenes wrote, how St Edmund died.
This kind of stuff could not even be made up.
There are several young men entering the Jesuits here in Texas (Austin diocese) and the promising thing is that they will be, God willing, reformers bringing back the Jesuit order to its orthodoxy.
Leaving aside his role as the Anglican leader, Rowan Williams is a much admired theologian. Father Timothy Radcliffe, for one, is someone who draws on his writings.
That Fr. Timothy Radcliffe draws on the writings of Rowan Williams tells us something about Fr. Radcliffe’s writings.
Read rather Fr. Jaki on the chaotic thought of Rowan Williams, who ends by defending Arius against Newman.
Don’t tar all the Jesuits with the same brush! There are lots of great Jesuits. But this is just BIZARRE.
It seems some need to be reminded they are priests of the Society of Jesus, not the society of Judas.
Maybe those Jesuits aren’t real Catholics and should become Anglicans.
No, wait. It’s the Anglicans that you expect to become Catholics.
You’re right Jeff. I was wrong. This is a humorous blog. Keystone Catholics.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot — out.
*headdesk* Oh good grief. I’m an Anglican, and even I think that’s insane. This sort of thing doesn’t help the efforts for real Christian unity at ALL. Simply ignoring real differences rather than facing them head on and working through them makes it all look like a sham.
Sigh.
My father, Jesuit-educated at Loyala in Chicago, banned America when I was in high school.Can’t remember what article from the magazine I brought up – as required – for the discussion at the dinner table – but he had this frozen look on his face. I graduated in 1970!
I’d be more worried if they were producing priests at their far-left schools.
This is almost as infuriating as the Anglican audacity of calling Thomas More and John Fisher saints and naming some of their churches after them.
By the way, you typed Edward instead of Edmund at the start of your post.
Maybe I should have saved a WTF award for the magazine. Dang, I already gave out two to Martha Coakley and Pat Robertson.
BMP
thomas beat me to it. i always knew the saint as edmund. used to be when i thought anything jesuit was for the good. now no more. i hope my school (Ateneo de Manila) has not gone the “wayward” way.