Saint Edmund Campion

author

Saint Edmund Campion

1540–1581

Remembered for courage under pressure, this English Jesuit priest and writer became one of the best-known Catholic martyrs of Elizabethan England. His life joins scholarship, secret ministry, and a dramatic final witness that has echoed through history.

1 Audiobook

Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our Universities

Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name of the Faith and Presented to the Illustrious Members of Our Universities

by Saint Edmund Campion

About the author

Born in London in 1540, Edmund Campion was known early for his brilliant mind and gift for speaking. He studied at St John's College, Oxford, where he gained a reputation as an outstanding scholar and orator during a time of intense religious change in England.

After a period of inner conflict over faith and conformity, he left England, was received into the Catholic Church more fully on the Continent, and joined the Society of Jesus. In 1580 he returned secretly to England as a missionary priest, serving Catholics who were practicing their faith under danger and surveillance.

Campion was soon arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and executed at Tyburn in 1581. His written defense of his mission and his calmness in the face of death helped make him a lasting symbol of conscience and conviction; he was later canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.