Quoting the funny Ronald Knox :

“A good sermon should be like a woman's skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.”

“A baby is a loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
 

Msgr. Ronald Knox . . . born Ronald Arbuthnott Knox on February 17, 1888 . . . was an English priest, theologian and crime writer.

He was born in Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family . . . his father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox who became bishop of Manchester . . . and was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1910, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was appointed chaplain in 1912 but left in 1917 when he converted to Roman Catholicism. He was one of the four Knox brothers (with E. V. Knox, Dillwyn Knox and Wilfred Knox) written about in a joint biography by Penelope Fitzgerald, his niece.

Ronald Knox was a member of the academic staff at St Edmund's College, Ware, Hertfordshire, between 1919 and 1926. While a Roman Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford (1926-1939) and as domestic prelate to the Pope 1936, he wrote classic detective stories. He also wrote and broadcast on Christianity and other subjects.

Monsignor Knox single-handedly translated the St. Jerome Latin Vulgate Bible into English. His works on religious themes include: Some Loose Stones (1913), Reunion All Round (1914), The Spiritual Aeneid (1918), The Belief of Catholics (1927), Caliban in Grub Street (1930), Heaven and Charing Cross (1935), Let Dons Delight (1939), and Captive Flames (1940).

Monsignor Knox's Roman Catholicism caused his father to cut him out of his will. This did not make much difference to his finances, however, as Knox earned a good income from his detective novels.

An essay in Knox's Essays in Satire (1928), "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", was the first of the genre of mock-serious critical writings on Sherlock Holmes and mock-historical studies in which the existence of Holmes, Watson, et al. is assumed. Another of these essays (The Authorship of "In Memoriam") purports to prove that Tennyson's poem was actually written by Queen Victoria.

Knox was led to the Catholic Church by the English writer G.K. Chesterton, before Chesterton himself converted. When Chesterton did convert to Roman Catholicism, he in turn was influenced by Knox. Knox delivered the homily for Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral.

In 1953 he visited the Oxfords in Zanzibar and the Actons in Rhodesia. It was on this trip that he began his translation of the Imitation of Christ. He also began a work of apologetics intended to reach a wider than the student audience of his Belief of Catholics (1927).

But all his activities were curtailed by his sudden and serious illness early in 1957. At the invitation of his old friend, Harold Macmillan, he stayed at 10 Downing Street while in London to consult a specialist. The doctor confirmed the diagnosis of incurable cancer.

He died on August 24, 1957, his body was brought to Westminster Cathedral. Bishop Craven said the requiem at which Father Martin D'Arcy, a Jesuit, preached the panegyric. Knox was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, Mells.

n 1926, for one of his regular BBC radio programmes, Knox broadcast a pretended live report of revolution sweeping across London. In addition to live reports of persons being lynched, his broadcast cleverly mixed supposed band music from the Savoy Hotel with the hotel's purported destruction by trench mortars. Because the broadcast occurred on a snowy weekend, much of the UK was unable to get the newspaper until days later, and a minor panic ensued.

A 2005 BBC report on the broadcast suggests that the innovative style of Knox's programme may have influenced Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, and also foreshadowed it in its consequences. The script of the broadcast is reprinted in Essays in Satire (1928).

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Photo credit: The Ronald Knox Society of North America

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