Loyola University Maryland - Evergreen / Green and Gray Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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cally in Germany. Fathers Clavius and Kircher are outstanding. The former, known as the Euclid of the 16th Century,” intimate friend of Galileo and esteemed by Kepler, Brahe, and so forth, more than any other man is responsible for the execu- tion and defense of the Gregorian Calendar. To him we owe our present method of reckoning the years and seasons. Kircher was an intellectual giant, specialized in volcanic study. On one occasion he had himself lowered into Mount Vesuvius to measure the crater. His ”Mundus Subterraneus” is a pioneer work in subterranean physics. He was the father of the study of hieroglyphics, having correctly supplied missing portions of the Pamphy- lian obelisk. He gave impetus to the comparative study of Aryan languages, wrote medical treatises, formed an artificial language, perfected one of the earliest count- ing machines, a speaking tube and aeolian harp. Finally, he was the inventor of the magic lantern, the forerunner of our modern motion pictures and left behind Crowds attend Jesuit Morality Play, ijth Century 22

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Peter Canisius receives Stanislaus Study works of the heretics he was hammering, works lately indexed by Trent but still read by nearly all the other Catholics in Germany. He wrote a Catechism that ran 200 editions in 18 languages before he died, that has lasted to the present. He rarely seems brilliant in the usual sense, but he was one of the kindliest and humblest men that ever lived and hence won his campaign in a series of seemingly lost battles. Saint Peter Canisius had been received into the Society by Peter Fabre, an angelically kindly saint himself. Canisius is a doctor of the universal Church. In the five German speaking “Provinces” as early as 1626 there were over 100 col- leges and academies. The Thirty Years War blocked the Jesuits’ efforts for a time, but it is interesting to note that Tilly, Wallenstein and Piccolomini, the famous military chieftains, were Jesuit pupils. Among the pulpit orators who later developed in Germany were Jenigen, Hunolt, Tschupick, Schneller and Wurz. Science seems to be the peculiar genre in which the Jesuits excelled scholasti- 21

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him a wealth oj written material on mathematics and physics. Today Father Theodor Wulfs name is known to physicists, Erich Wasmann, the biologist, is still living. Co-Patron of Poland, Stanislaus Kostka, the Polish prince in his teens trudged a 1,000 miles, escaping a brother anxious to harden him and was received by Peter Canisius into the Order. Stanislaus has been for centuries a saint everybody loves along with John Berchmans and Aloysius Gonzaga. The bones of another Polish saint. Saint Andrew Bobola, were recently brought out of Russia to Rome by living Jesuits then on a relief expedition to the land of Communism. T Jl hi , he scaffold is the symbol of English Jesu- its. Tyburn Hill welcomed them. Let’s select Edmund Campion, the Oxford youth, who read a poetical address to Queen Elizabeth. No man, except Newman, The scaffold m England, the symbol of the Jes- was aped so assiduously by the Oxford undergraduates as was this future Hopki Jesuit. Even though constantly importuned by Elizabeth and Dudley to share the government’s favors, he joined the Society of Jesus at Rome and, when the English Mission was conceived by Father Robert Parsons, he returned to England and there, working mostly under cover and in disguise, he helped keep thriving the hard-driven faith of his co-religionists. At last, when apprehended by government agents, he was thrown into the Tower and tortured. After being severely racked, he requested a public disputation. This was granted him by the Queen, and before Elizabeth and all the great Protes- tant divines, for four days, he literally stood without chair, table, or time to prepare, undefeated by the arguments bombarding him from all sides. Once, when Campion martyred on Tyburn Hill 23