St Edmund Campion, SJ Translated by J. H. P.

This is the third installment of the classic apologetics work Ten Reasons (Decem Rationes) by the Jesuit Martyr, St Edmund Campion. The book was originally published in 1581, when St Edmund had secretly returned to England to minister to the persecuted Catholics. St Edmund included with it the famous Campion’s Brag which made clear his intentions were to win souls not engage in politics and asked for a safe conduct to debate with the Protestant clergy. Copies of Decem Rationes were placed on the benches of St Mary’s University Church in Oxford before the start of the Service of Commemoration. The enraged leaders of the Protestant Church initiated one of the greatest manhunts in English history. Campion was eventually caught, tortured and executed at Tyburn; but not before he gave an heroic witness to the reasons supporting the Catholic Faith. Speaking for all missionaries in his Brag, Campion wrote: “Be it known to you that we have made a league, all Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England, cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair of your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun. It is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: so it must be restored.”

FIFTH REASON: FATHERS
At Antioch, in which city the noble surname of Christians first became common, there flourished Doctors, that is, eminent theologians, and Prophets, that is, very celebrated preachers (Acts xiii. 1). Of this sort were the scribes and wise men, learned in the kingdom of God, bringing forth new things and old (Matth. xiii. 52; xxiii. 34), knowing Christ and Moses, whom the Lord promised to His future flock. What a wicked thing it is to scout these teachers, given as they are by way of a mighty boon! The adversary has scouted them. Why? Because their standing means his fall. Having found that out for certain beyond doubt, I have asked for a fight unqualified, not that sham-fight in which the crowds in the street engage, and skirmish with one another, but the earnest and keen struggle in which we join in the arena of yon philosophers, Foot to foot, and man close gripping man.
If ever we shall be allowed to turn to the Fathers, the battle is lost and won: they are as thoroughly ours as is Gregory XIII himself, the loving Father of the children of the Church. To say nothing of isolated passages, which are gathered from the records of the ancients, apt and clear statements in defence of our faith, we hold entire volumes of these Fathers, which professedly illustrate in clear and abundant light the Gospel religion which we defend. Take the twofold Hierarchy of the martyr Dionysius, what classes, what sacrifices, what rites does he teach? This fact struck Luther so forcibly that he pronounced the works of this Father to be "such stuff as dreams are made of, and that of the most pernicious kind." In imitation of his parent, an obscure Frenchman, Caussee, has not hesitated to call this Dionysius, the Apostle of an illustrious nation, "an old dotard." Ignatius has given grievous offence to the Centuriators of Magdeburg, as also to Calvin, so that these men, the offscouring of mankind, have noted in his works "unsightly blemishes and tasteless prosings." In their judgment, Irenaeus has brought out "a fanatical production": Clement, the author of the Stromata, has produced "Tares and dregs": the other Fathers of this age, Apostolic men to be sure, "have left blasphemies and monstrosities to posterity." In Tertullian they eagerly seize upon what they have learned from us, in common with us, to detest; but they should remember that his book On Prescriptions, which has so signally smitten the heretics of our times, was never found fault with. How finely, how, clearly, has Hippolytus, Bishop of Porto pointed out beforehand the power of Antichrist, the times of Luther! They call him, therefore, "a most babyish writer, an owl." Cyprian, the delight and glory of Africa, that French critic Caussee, and the Centuriators of Magdeburg, have termed "stupid, God-forsaken corrupter of repentance." What harm has he done? He has written On Virgins, On the Lapsed, On the Unity of the Church, such treatises as also such letters to Cornelius, the Roman Pontiff, that, unless credence be withdrawn from this Martyr, Peter Martyr Vermilius and all his associates must count for worse than adulterers and men guilty of sacrilege. And, not to dwell longer on individuals, the Fathers of this age are all condemned "for wonderful corruption of the doctrine of repentance." How so? Because the austerity of the Canons in vogue at that time is particularly obnoxious to this plausible sect which, better fitted for dining-rooms than for churches, is wont to tickle voluptuous ears and to sew cushions on every arm (Ezech. xiii. 18). Take the next age, what offence has that committed? To read more...