Bear with me for a brief history lesson.
In the sixteenth century, the testosterone level of King Henry VIII led to the near destruction of Catholicism in England. Henry moved from wife to wife, hoping to sire a male heir, and ended up in schism from the Church. Saint Thomas More faced martyrdom under Henry.
But it was really under Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I that England codified the first modern police state aimed specifically at eliminating Catholics and their priests. The Catholic faith, which had been at the heart of English life at the beginning of the sixteenth century, nearly disappeared in a wave of persecution and harassment from the government and its spy network. By the 1570s any observer of the English Catholic scene would have agreed that the Church was dying.
It was death by a thousand cuts, caused by Elizabeth’s policy of isolating the Catholic community, denying it priests to celebrate the sacraments, and imposing a host of fines and humiliations that left it leaderless and apathetic. For all intents and purposes, Catholicism in England had become criminal.
But a backlash was coming. A devoted group of young Catholic men were considering a mission to their own land, even if it meant torture and death upon capture by the authorities. Many would cross the channel to Europe to study for the priesthood, vowing to return to invigorate and renew the Catholic faithful of England. One of them wrote in the late 1570s:
Listen to our heavenly Father asking back his talents with usury; listen to the Church, the mother that bore us and nursed us, imploring our help; listen to the pitiful cries of our neighbours in danger of spiritual starvation; listen to the howling of the wolves that are spoiling the flock. The glory of your Father, the preservation of your mother, your own salvation, the safety of your brethren, are in jeopardy, and you can stand idle? … [S]leep not while the enemy watches; play not while he devours his prey; relax not in idleness and vanity while he is dabbling in your brother’s blood!6
That was straight from the pen of a youthful Edmund Campion.
A Champion of Truth
As a brilliant young student at Oxford, Campion had caught the eye of Queen Elizabeth, and it appeared he was on the path to glory: a high rank in the Church of England and perhaps a sterling career in government or law. In 1568 Campion was ordained to the Church of England, a first step on this path.
But Edmund’s conscience intervened. Within four years, the young man with an established reputation as a scholar and writer, and with an assured position in the new Church hierarchy, threw it all away. He would become a Catholic priest and commit himself to rejuvenating the Catholics of England as a member of the newly founded Jesuit order.
In 1580 Father Campion returned to England. He was told to serve the Catholic faithful there and have nothing to do with battling those who persecuted the Church. And his arrival was instantly invigorating. He created “buzz,” this bright young star, both within the Catholic community and in government circles that feared these dedicated Catholics returning to their homeland. They particularly feared this “one above the rest notorious for impudency and audacity, named Campion.”7
The life of these new missionaries could not have been more difficult. They hid from house to house, celebrating clandestine Masses, while spies were constantly tracking their movements, the law always on their heels. Catholic homes included “priest holes,” small openings behind walls into which a priest could be stuffed at a moment’s notice when the law came banging at the door. To this day, restoration workers in old English Catholic homes stumble across sixteenth-century hiding places that had been forgotten to time.
But Father Campion longed to do battle. In a letter to government officials, he begged for the opportunity to defend the Faith in order “to win you to heaven, or to die upon your pikes.”8
To Catholics it was a stirring call to hope; to the government it was a war cry, and Campion’s was a voice to be silenced at all costs. Finally he was caught, uncovered when a local authority found loose plaster in a Catholic home and took a crowbar to it.
Taken to London under armed escort, Campion went to trial four months later, charged in a trumped-up plot of mass conspiracy to murder. It was a calculated attempt by the government to avoid any intellectual or theological arguments with the learned Campion. But who knows if he could have responded? He had been tortured on the rack while confined to the Tower, so much so that at his trial he was unable to raise his hands to take an oath.
The results were a foregone conclusion. Campion was found guilty. Led from the Tower along the muddy streets of London in a driving rain, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered before the assembled crowds. He was forty-one years old. He was canonized as a martyr for the Faith on October 25, 1970.
Saint Edmund, and many of his fellow martyrs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, saw a Catholic faithful that had been beaten down by a propaganda machine that painted Catholics and the Catholic Church as the very enemies of enlightened English culture. And that’s what they wanted to answer, at the risk of their lives. They did it for one reason: to save souls. They had to stand up for truth, no matter the cost.
They were prudent.
Contrapasso with Dante
When I was a kid, I had fantasies of being a basketball player. And I mean fantasies. I was the shortest kid in class — girls included — and would have been one of the shortest in the class behind me at Christ the King School in Yonkers, New York. But I ate and drank basketball.
Day in and day out, winter, spring, summer, or fall, I was out there shooting baskets. A right-hander, I’d practice for at least one day a week using only my left hand. I’d shoot shot after shot, dribble forward, backward, side to side. Layups, hook shots, set shots, and free throws — I’d shoot twenty-five of each at a time. As a result of all that work, I almost reached average, which was pretty good for a kid who hadn’t hit sixty inches in height by eighth grade.
Basketball became such an obsession that I would actually dream of it. And the dream was always the same, like that college dream of showing up for a final in a class you had forgotten to take. I would be on the court, right under the basket. Everybody else would be all the way up at the other end. They would throw a pass down to me, and there I would be, all alone, looking at a simple layup. I’d shoot it as I had practiced a million times before in my driveway, and the ball would bounce off the rim, back into my hands. I’d shoot it again and bang it off the backboard. A third shot would miss, and, desperate, I’d take a final shot before being enveloped by a horde of defenders. And miss again. Four of the easiest shots in the world, and I couldn’t put it in the basket. I’d wake up with the sweats, and decades later I can remember that sense of helplessness.
I didn’t realize that I was dreaming Dante’s Inferno. In the Divine Comedy Dante punishes sinners by contrapasso. The punishment mirrors — or counterbalances — the sin committed in life. As Charles Dickens put it in A Christmas Carol, “we wear the chains we forged in life.” My little basketball hell was standing under the basket with a wide-open shot and missing it for all eternity.
Just outside the first circle of hell, Dante positions those who “lived / a life worthy of neither blame nor praise.”9 These souls are so unreflective, so lacking in passion, that neither heaven nor hell will accept them. They spent their lives refusing to take any sides, to mount any battles, to live for any cause. Not only did they fail to search for truth; they refused to recognize its existence. Their lives reflect benign mediocrity.
Dante describes the monster Geryon, the personification of fraud:
His face was the face of any honest man,
it shone with such a look of benediction;
and all the rest of him was serpentine.10
Such are the opposite of prudent men. They refuse to seek out the truth, and their own desires — even if those desires are to spend a lifetime laying low — are their only true quest. Dante condemns them contrapasso, to an eternity of running