Content area
Full Text
IT IS a thought-provoking, even disconcerting thing to be given an award as a "distinguished Christian person of letters," especially an award named for St. Edmund Campion. This brilliant Jesuit, a convert to Catholicism, was, history records, placed on the rack three times in an effort to make him recant his faith. But, though tortured in body, he continued to debate brilliantly with Protestant theologians and won converts among them. He eloquently refuted the prosecution's trumped-up charges of sedition, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered at the age of 41 in 1581.
How much of such persecution and agony, a recipient of the Campion Award cannot but wonder, would he endure for the sake of his religious convictions? It is all too easy a thing to be a Christian in America, where God's name is on our coinage, pious pronouncements are routinely expected from elected officials, and churchgoing, though far from unanimous, enjoys a popularity astounding to Europeans. As good Americans we are taught to tolerate our neighbors' convictions, however bizarre they secretly strike us, and we extend, it may be, something of this easy toleration to ourselves and our own views.
In my own case, I came of intellectual age at a time, the 1950's, when a mild religious revival accompanied our reviving prosperity, and the powerful rational arguments against the Christian tenets were counterbalanced by an intellectual fashion that, a generation after Chesterton and Belloc, saw the Middle Ages still in favor, as a kind of golden era of cultural unity and alleviated anxiety. Among revered literary figures, a considerable number were professing Christians-T. S. Eliot and W. H....