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Reflection on Today’s Feast

By Fr. Tim O’Brien, SJ

My first extended encounter with Saints Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell took place in the library, not the chapel. I was working on a project about martyrdom in the sixteenth century, especially how it was represented in images. Leafing through a 1584 book that depicted English Catholic martyrs, I stopped on the grisly scene of Campion’s death. He was suspended from the gallows, while in the foreground other martyrs are depicted as being dismembered and boiled down. Interestingly, the Protestant authorities responsible for their deaths were presented in ancient Roman garb, not the clothing of the sixteenth century. This was because the book as a whole sought to link the contemporary experience of persecution to Christ himself, and to show continuity between the present English experience and preceding martyrs of the Church. 

I lingered with that image for quite a while. Earlier in the day, I had been looking at another well-known book from the period, which offered visual representations of English Protestants who had been killed by Catholic authorities just a few decades before Campion’s death in 1581. I sat in the library for a while, feeling some of the weight of that dark history.

Taking a pause from my academic analysis of these sources and of the complicated past to which they point, I found myself moved in spirit. As I considered Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, and my other fellow Jesuits who died as martyrs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the words of the “Suscipe” came to my mind. At the conclusion of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius invites us to pray:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it. All is yours, dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me only your love and your grace, for this is enough for me.

In the end, what moved me that day was the degree to which Campion, Southwell, and their companions placed everything back in the hands of the God who had made them, loved them, and called them. Campion was a scholar, Southwell an accomplished poet, to say nothing of the skills and talents of their companions. But what we remember today is that they offered everything they had back to the Lord in freedom, up to and including their very lives. We remember that they were given the grace to live the words they had earlier prayed. 

Much has changed, often for the better, since Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, and their companions gave their lives in witness to their faith. What has not changed is the relevance of a basic question their martyrdom poses: to what extent am I handing back to the Lord all that I have been given? Is God’s love and grace enough for me, this day and every day?

Sts. Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and Companions, pray for us!

Fr. Tim O’Brien, SJ, is the associate vice president for mission at the College of the Holy Cross in Worchester, MA.

Previous Reflections

December 29, 2021 – By Fr. George Collins, SJ

Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, “Heroes Work Here” signs popped up at nearly every hospital and long-term care facility in the country where the elderly and infirmed were dying in great numbers from the covid-19 virus.  The signs were intended to honor and show respect for the doctors, nurses, certified nursing assistants, therapists, kitchen workers and housekeepers who continued to show up each day to care for the sick and elderly so much in need of their loving care, despite the life-threatening danger posed to them and their families each day they did so.

In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic raged, I was in the relative comfort of my shuttered retreat house in Morristown New Jersey, where I was stationed at the time, and I wondered how these men and women found the courage and strength to continually show up each day and face the threat and horror of the virus that swirled around them every moment of the day. I was not sure I would have had that strength or courage.  In fact, I doubted that I would.

Ever since the 1976 movie Marathon Man, starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, in which Olivier’s character, Dr. Szell, used a dental drill to torture Hoffman’s character, while continually asking the question, “Is it safe?” I was fairly certain that given the first sign of danger or torture, I would simply cave in and say or do anything to be released from even the threat of such pain or suffering. 

Despite my own lack of courage, or perhaps because of it, ever since my entrance into the Society of Jesus, I have always been drawn to the Saints we celebrate today.  Edmund Campion, SJ, Robert Southwell, SJ, and companions who make up the group known as the Jesuit Martyrs of England and Wales, each showed extraordinary courage and bravery in a time of religious upheaval and turmoil in Elizabethan England.  Their courage and bravery have always inspired and encouraged me.  Campion, who had accepted ordination as a Deacon in the Anglican Church, and who had enormous opportunities offered to him by the Queen Elizabeth herself, if he but adhered to that direction, instead tended to his conscious and eventually chose to return to the Catholic faith, became a Jesuit and chose to serve Christ alone and the faith handed on by the Apostles and led by the Christ’s vicar on earth.  It would cost him his life after excruciating tortures and indignities. They were heroes!

Today, having lived for the past year and half as superior of Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts, home to some eighty elderly or infirmed Jesuits, I have a new appreciation for the relative abundance of heroes in our midst.  Indeed, heroes do work at Campion.  The men and women who continue to show up and care for the Jesuits at Campion inspire me every single day.  Heroes also live at Campion.  I have also been inspired daily by the elderly and infirmed Jesuits, who so graciously deal with the crosses they bear.  Each day, with great dignity, and with the love and grace of God poured out upon them in word, sacrament and in the daily love and support showered upon them by our employees and by each other, they continue to be on mission with Jesus as they pray for the Church, the spirit-filled resurrected body of Jesus the Christ here on earth, and for the Society of Jesus. 

None of us will likely be asked to suffer and offer witness in the manner of Campion, Southwell and the English martyrs we celebrate today.  Nonetheless, look around, wherever you find yourself today.  No doubt, despite the multitude of problems that confront our country and the world community, there are Saints in our midst.  They may be extraordinarily gifted people like Campion and Southwell, but most likely they will be ordinary people like most of us.  Ordinary people with a host of challenges and obvious limitations, who nonetheless turn to God each day and ask for the grace to keep our eyes firmly focused on Jesus who invites us to be his companions on mission. 

God’s love and grace, made known most fully in his Son Jesus, was the fuel that allowed Campion, Southwell, the English Martyrs to bear such great witness despite their obvious humanity.  It is also the fuel for all of us ordinary men and women, and truly, God’s love and grace is “enough” for all of us.