St. Edmund Campion

St. Edmund Campion was born on 25 January 1540 in London and became a brilliant young scholar at Oxford, so gifted an orator that he was singled out for favor by Queen Elizabeth I herself, and a great future in the Anglican establishment lay open before him. Yet his conscience drew him to the Catholic faith, and he left England, was reconciled to the Church, and entered the Society of Jesus, being ordained a priest.

In 1580 he returned secretly to England as a missionary to the persecuted Catholics, ministering in disguise and circulating his eloquent defense of the faith known as "Campion's Brag" and the treatise Decem Rationes. Hunted down and betrayed in 1581, he was imprisoned in the Tower, racked, and offered his freedom if he would conform; he refused. Convicted of treason on false charges, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on 1 December 1581. Canonized in 1970 among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, he is celebrated on that day.