St. Edmund Campion

Patron Saint of the Press

Edmund Campion’s father was a bookseller in London. The future martyr was born around 1540, and at the age of fifteen was given a scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he was known for his intelligence and his sweet, yet fiery, disposition.

Gifted with oratory, he was chosen to lead a public debate before Queen Elizabeth, and readily won her goodwill and patronage as well as that of the powerful William Cecil and the Earl of Leicester.

By 1571, he was a suspected person in England. Reconciled to the Catholic Church in France, he was received into the Society of Jesus in Rome in 1573. As there was not as yet an English Province, he was assigned to the Austrian Province and entered the novitiate in Brunn, Moravia.

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