Zooming in from
outer space, Campion College is found nestled at coordinates 18.0189361°N and
76.7711198°W, the 105 Old
Hope Road address of the top school in Liguanea, Kingston where it all started
for philanthropist and Eucharistic Catholic Minister Joe Issa, as a champion
for the education of Jamaican children.
Issa, who was
born five years after the Catholic School opened in 1960, entered it in the
late 1970s while the Jesuit Fathers still taught a variety of subjects.
Today, Campion College “is one of the top three choices for GSAT exams and
is widely considered to be a prominent educational facility due to its 1st
place in academics for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) in
2013,” said Wikipedia, a feat believed to be heavily influenced by the
brilliance and persecution of its patron saint Edmund Campion.
Like Campion’s
motto, Issa has remained steadfast in
faith and work, just like its patron saint, the Catholic martyr who was
executed for his faith at Tyburn in London on December 1, 1581.
According to
Catholic Online, Edmund Campion, the son of a bookseller was born in London
where he was raised a Catholic. At the
young age of 15 years, he got a
scholarship to St. John’s College in Oxford
and became a fellow when only seventeen.
His brilliance
is said to have attracted the attention of such leading persons as the Earl of
Leicester, Robert Cecil, and even Queen Elizabeth.
It said “he took the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Elizabeth head of the church in England and
became an Anglican deacon in 1564,” stating that “doubts about Protestantism
increasingly beset him, and in 1569 he went to Ireland where further study convinced him
he had been in error, and he returned to Catholicism.”
Campion was “forced to flee the persecution unleashed on
Catholics by the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V,
and went to Douai, France, where he studied theology, joined the Jesuits, and
the following year went to Brno, the of judicial authority of the Czech
Republic and an important centre of higher education, with 33 faculties
belonging to 13 institutes of higher
learning and about 89,000 students.
It was there
that Campion undertook the period of training and preparation for membership of
the Catholic faith. “It often includes times of intense study, prayer, living
in the community, studying the vowed
life, deepening one’s relationship with God, and deepening one’s
self-awareness. It is a time of creating a new way of being in the world,” said
Wikipedia.
He is said to
have taught at the college of Prague and in 1578 was ordained there.
He and Father Robert Persons are believed to have been the first Jesuits chosen
for the English mission in 1580, according to Catholic Online.
“His activities among the Catholics, the distribution of his Decem rations
at the University Church in Oxford, and the premature publication of his famous
Brag (which he had written to present his case if he was captured) made him the
object of one of the most intensive manhunts in English history,” the online
publication said.
Campion is believed to have been “betrayed at Lyford, near Oxford,
imprisoned in the Tower of London, and when he refused to apostatize when
offered rich inducements to do so, was tortured and then hanged, drawn, and
quartered at Tyburn on December 1 on the technical charge of treason, but in
reality because of his priesthood.”
He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the
forty English and Welsh Martyrs. His feast day is December 1, Issa’s birthday.
The
co-educational Jesuit high school was founded on January 5, 1960, by Archbishop Samuel Emmanuel Carter,
S.J., the sixth of seven children of the late Wilfred and Marie Carter of 61
Hagley Park Road in St. Andrew.
By August 26
that year ground was broken, and the
two-storey structure of eight classrooms with
accommodation for 240 pupils was formally blessed on March 20, 1961, by the Rt. Reverend John J. McEleny, S.J., D.D., Bishop of Kingston, and was
dedicated to the memory of Mr
Martin A. Waters of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., whose bequest along with
other benefactors, according to Wikipedia, made the erection possible.
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