Ronald Knox

Ronald Knox by Fr Ashley Beck, published by CTS

This is a very interesting and eminently readable brief account of the life of one of the 20th Century's great English Catholics.

Knox was a convert - his father was an evangelical bishop in the Anglican communion.  Like so many converts, he took his Faith seriously, and took the trouble to know it well.

He was also extraordinarily clever and industrious: Captain of the School at Eton, President of the Union (debating society) at Oxford, and winner of many academic prizes.

The Great War had a huge impact on him as he lost many friends: as a clergyman (Anglican at this stage) he felt he could not bear arms himself, and served as a teacher during the War.  His conversion occurred towards the end of the War, the result of a long, slow and at times painful process: his father was vehemently against him converting.

Knox wrote incessantly: both serious and frivolous work, but all of a high quality.  He was also in great demand as a preacher, and was eventually appointed to be the Chaplain at Oxford University.  It was during this time that he wrote one of his best apologetic works: The Belief of Catholics.


However, his major work was his translation of the Bible.  He tried to render it into a comprehensible and timeless English, working primarily from the Vulgate, but always consulting Greek and Hebrew texts and noting variants, and always informed by a Catholic understanding.  This tremendous undertaking - perhaps the last time a single person has translated the whole Bible, rather than a committee or team - was undertaken at the time that he was chaplain to a girls' school that had been evacuated from London during the Second World War.

This was also the period when he wrote The Mass in Slow Motion and The Creed in Slow Motion.  Both of these were originally series of sermons delivered to the girls in his care. They are both completely suitable for reading to (or better with) children now; particularly if you also have access to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, which is the Mass he so carefully illuminates.

He was profoundly shocked by the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan at the end of the war - and by the silence of the Bishops afterwards, and eventually wrote God and the Atom, examining the situation in the light of Faith, Hope and Charity.

After the war, he moved to Mells, where he wrote his favourite book, Enthusiasms, as well as translating Saint Therese of Lisieux's autobiography.  He died at the age of 68 in 1957.

All this is clearly recounted in this biography; but the final chapter is more of an assessment, and here I diverge for Fr Beck somewhat.  Fr Beck writes: "Because so much of his writing and preaching is so firmly centred on the way in which Mass was celebrated seventy years ago, it is perhaps easy to restrict his insights to that form of the Roman rite, and to assume that he would, were he alive now, avoid the 1970 Missal like the plage."  [This position is] "damaging to the Church and false to his memory."  Fr Beck adds in a footnote: " Waugh claims that Knox was unhappy with the liturgical changes introduced in the 1950s such as the revision of the Holy Week rites and small introductions of the vernacular.  However, in The Mass in Slow Motion, Knox makes a number of suggestions which anticipated later reforms[...] One of his constant concerns was the ignorance of the Old Testament among most Catholics, so it is inconceivable that he would not have welcomed the vast increase in Old Testament readings, both on Sundays and weekdays, in the 1969 Lectionary, and the two- and three-year cycles which increased so much the amount of Scripture read at Mass."

I think that Fr Beck is here interpreting from a particular standpoint, and I am not sure his interpretations are accurate.

Firstly, to talk about the Mass 'as celebrated seventy years ago' is slightly anachronistic.  The Mass wasn't celebrated like that for a period of Knox's life, but from centuries back... a fact of which Knox was keenly aware.  Whilst I am sure he would not avoid the 1970 Missal like the plague, I do not think he would have liked it.  To dismiss Waugh's testimony simply because Fr Beck does not like Waugh's snobbishness (as is apparent earlier in the book) seems to me an injustice: I do not believe Waugh would invent such a story about Knox, and the word 'claims' seems prejudicial to me.

The suggestions which Knox made in The Mass in Slow Motion are very close to the ideas of the Council Fathers; but not to the ideas of the committee that produced the 1970 Missal, still less to those of the ICEL translators;  as a translator, Knox would have been shocked by the shoddy and deliberate partisan translation used in the UK: he writes compellingly on why we pray "I believe" not "We believe."  As for the Lectionary, one may wish that Catholics read and study the Bible more, without believing that the yearly cycle (with all the benefits that brings of creating a profound familiarity with the Liturgical Year) should be jettisoned for something with which it is impossible to become familiar.

Having said which, I still recommend this book: all the biographical material is interesting and well written, and I am perhaps being too picky in my irritation with the adoption of Knox to a post-Vatican 2 mentality...  I am sure he would have been a big fan of our current Holy Father.

(Looking for the image of this booklet on the CTS www site, I have failed to find it, so it may be that it is no longer in print...)