The Witty Monsignor

Britain's outstanding Roman Catholic scholar, most versatile writer, and gentlest man died this week. Msgr. Ronald Knox, 69, No. 1 convert to Catholicism since the Oxford movement, left both the monumental and the diverting behind him: a masterful translation of the Bible, a classic Limerick, a definitive history of Christianity's hot-blooded sectarianism and six popular detective novels. But it was perhaps as a man that he exerted his deepest influence on those around him.

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was the sixth child of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester (both of his grandfathers had also been Protestant clergymen). Religion began to serve him at the age of 15; when a friend came down with typhoid, Ronnie lived on bread and butter for six weeks. His friend died, and Knox prayed for him 15 minutes each day "with my hands held above the level of my head, which is not as easy as it sounds." At 17, he vowed himself to celibacy. At 24, he became the Anglican chaplain of Oxford University's Trinity College.

Five years later, in 1917, Ronald Knox resigned and entered the Roman Catholic Church. "Authority played a large part in my belief," he said later. In his new church, too, Knox was ordained to the priesthood, and soon he was back at Oxford, this time as a Catholic chaplain. For 13 years there--boom years among undergraduates for Marx, sex and sneering at authority--wispy Father Knox made his rooms a gathering place for the university's most glittering wits. It was then that he began producing smoothly turned detective novels, e.g., The Body in the Silo, The Viaduct Murder, to help pay for the tea and anchovy toast.

Hives Ready to Swarm. Knox's humor sparked and crackled through everything he did. Writing of the Mass, he remarked that the recurring word or emus (let us pray) "serves as a useful sort of alarm clock to wake us up at various points." Speaking of non-Roman Catholic denominations, he said: "With all respect to them ... all the identity discs in heaven are marked RC." His most widely quoted witticism is also one of the most famed Limericks in the language, kidding Bishop Berkeley's doctrine that things exist only when observed:

There once was a man who said: "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad."*

Such was Ronnie Knox's reputation for wit that the shock at Oxford was great when in 1939 he was assigned by his archbishop to make a new translation of the Bible. He retired to a friend's house in the country and set to work; it was to take ten years, at the average rate of 24 verses a day, and today it is an approved version. World War II provided some interruptions--especially when Knox became confessor to a group of evacuated teen-age girls billeted in the same house. But his sermons to them and other schoolgirls made two lucid little books for laymen on Catholic fundamentals: The Mass in Slow Motion and The Creed in Slow Motion.

For 30 years, in the midst of his other work, Knox labored lovingly on a history of Christian sectarianism, "mastering my authorities in trains, or over solitary meals, taking notes on rough pieces of paper and losing them." He titled the work Enthusiasm, and described the typical "enthusiastic" movement as beginning with "an elite of Christian men and (more importantly) women" trying to live closer to the Holy Spirit than their neigh-- bors. "More and more, by a kind of fatality, you see them draw apart from their coreligionists, a hive ready to swarm. There is provocation on both sides . . . Then, while you hold your breath and turn away your eyes in fear, the break comes; condemnation or secession, what difference does it make. A fresh name has been added to the list of Christianities."

Face to Face. About 18 months ago, Ronald Knox, working on a translation of the Autobiography of Ste. Therese of Lisieux, began to feel poorly. In January he had surgery for cancer of the intestine, and the doctors found the disease so far advanced that his condition was hopeless. But before he had known how ill he was, Knox had accepted an invitation to deliver the prestigious Romanes Lecture at Oxford in June. He was still determined to do it.

Frail, grey, seated on the dais with a physician hovering in attendance, one of the greatest translators of his day spoke of his art with characteristic modesty, common sense and fun. But behind the gentle, witty deprecation of Ronald Knox's last public words lay his light-filled rendering of the Bible as Catholics may read it generations hence:

At present, we are looking at a confused reflection in a mirror; then we shall see face to face; now, I have only glimpses of knowledge; then, I shall recognize God as he has recognized me.

*Which drew the equally famed anonymous reply:

Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd,

I am always about in the Quad;

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by Yours faithfully, GOD.

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