1. Bede Camm is best known for his many works on the English Catholic martyrs, which helped to keep their memories alive in the newly reemerging Catholic Church of Victorian England.
18 Facts About Bede Camm
1. 2.
Bede Camm was born Reginald Percy John Camm on 26 December 1864 in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey, England, the son of John Brooke Maher Camm, a retired cavalryman of the 12th Royal Lancers and his wife, Caroline Arden.
3.
Bede Camm was drawn to the Catholic Church and he became a convert to Catholicism in 1890, received at Maredsous Abbey in Belgium.
4.
Bede Camm was accepted into the novitiate of the abbey on 8 September of that same year and made his first profession as a monk on 8 December 1891.
5.
Bede Camm was then sent to the Pontifical Atheneum of St Anselm in Rome for further studies, where he was solemnly professed on Christmas Day 1894 and ordained as a Catholic priest on 9 March 1895 at the Basilica of St John Lateran, by Cardinal Parocchi.
6.
Bede Camm was then sent to live at Erdington Abbey, one of the first English members in a community of refugee monks from Germany.
7.
Bede Camm developed a strong devotion to the English Martyrs who were being beatified by Pope Leo XIII during that period, seeing them as heroic witnesses to his new faith, who were natives of England.
8.
Bede Camm had just led her new monastic community from Paris, due to the anti-clerical laws recently enacted by Emile Combes, the Prime Minister of the Third French Republic.
9.
In 1909 Bede Camm came to the rescue of the Tyburn nuns.
10.
Bede Camm approached Mother St Peter and offered to help them with a legacy he had received from his father, clearing their debts and funding the construction of a novitiate for their priory.
11.
Bede Camm went on to help develop the site, obtaining more relics and stained glass windows in erecting a larger shrine.
12.
Bede Camm contributed a number of articles on English martyrs to the Catholic Encyclopedia.
13.
Bede Camm spent the years of World War I as a military chaplain, posted first at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, then, in December 1915, in Port Said, Egypt.
14.
Bede Camm served with the military until the spring of 1919.
15.
From 1919 to 1931 Bede Camm served as Master of St Benet's Hall, Cambridge.
16.
Bede Camm retired to Downside Abbey in June 1931 due to ill health.
17.
Bede Camm was later transferred to a Catholic nursing home in Clifton, Bristol, where he died on 8 September 1942.
18.
Bede Camm was buried in the monastic cemetery of the abbey.