Edmund Campion, S.J.

St. Edmund Campion is the patron of numerous Jesuit education institutions around the world, owing to his illustrious career as a scholar at Oxford University and his heroic witness to the Catholic faith in the face of opposition, torture and ultimately death.

Devotion to him at Saint Louis University has a long history. Not only have faculty and students been gathering each week under the title of the "Campion Society" for more than 25 years, but the Jesuit Superior General in office at the time of Campion's beatification in 1886, a Swiss Jesuit named Anton Maria Anderledy, was a graduate of SLU. He promoted veneration of Campion throughout the world. Saint Louis University presents the Campion Award each year in his honor.

The Campion Award

Each year, the Catholic Studies Center at Saint Louis University presents the Edmund Campion Award to major public figures who have fostered fruitful dialogue between Christianity and culture in new and creative ways. 

Campion was himself a model of the docta pietas, the learned devotion, that St. Ignatius wished to characterize Jesuit education. 

A distinguished scholar of Classics at Oxford University before he entered the Society of Jesus, Edmund Campion was a beloved teacher and accomplished playwright at the Jesuit College in Prague and ultimately a martyr for the Faith in his native England.