Discovering the Past to Appreciate Joe Issa’s Passion for Education

Zooming in from outer space, Campion College is found nestled at coordinates 18.0189361°N and 76.7711198°W, the 105 Old Hope Road address of the top school in Liguanea, Kingston where it all started for philanthropist and Eucharistic Catholic Minister Joe Issa, as a champion for the education of Jamaican children.

Issa, who was born five years after the Catholic School opened in 1960, entered it in the late 1970s while the Jesuit Fathers still taught a variety of subjects.

Today, Campion College “is one of the top three choices for GSAT exams and is widely considered to be a prominent educational facility due to its 1st place in academics for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) in 2013,” said Wikipedia, a feat believed to be heavily influenced by the brilliance and persecution of its patron saint Edmund Campion.

Like Campion’s motto, Issa has remained strong in faith and work, just like its patron saint, the Catholic martyr who was executed for his faith at Tyburn in London on December 1, 1581.

According to Catholic Online, Edmund Campion, the son of a bookseller was born in London where he was raised a Catholic. At the young age of 15 years he got a scholarship to St. John’s College in Oxford, and became a fellow when only seventeen.

His brilliance is said to have attracted the attention of such leading persons as the Earl of Leicester, Robert Cecil, and even Queen Elizabeth.

It said “he took the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Elizabeth head of the church in England and became an Anglican deacon in 1564,” stating that “doubts about Protestanism increasingly beset him, and in 1569 he went to Ireland where further study convinced him he had been in error, and he returned to Catholicism.”

Campion was “forced to flee the persecution unleashed on Catholics by the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V, and went to Douai, France, where he studied theology, joined the Jesuits, and the following year went to Brno, the of judicial authority of the Czech Republic and an important centre of higher education, with 33 faculties belonging to 13 institutes of higher learning and about 89,000 students.

It was there that Campion undertook the period of training and preparation for membership of the Catholic faith. “It often includes times of intense study, prayer, living in community, studying the vowed life, deepening one’s relationship with God, and deepening one’s self-awareness. It is a time of creating a new way of being in the world,” said Wikipedia.

He is said to have taught at the college of Prague and in 1578 was ordained there. He and Father Robert Persons are believed to have been the first Jesuits chosen for the English mission in 1580, according to Catholic Online.

“His activities among the Catholics, the distribution of his Decem rationes at the University Church in Oxford, and the premature publication of his famous Brag (which he had written to present his case if he was captured) made him the object of one of the most intensive manhunts in English history,” the online publication said.

Campion is believed to have been “betrayed at Lyford, near Oxford, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and when he refused to apostatize when offered rich inducements to do so, was tortured and then hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on December 1 on the technical charge of treason, but in reality because of his priesthood.”

He was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 as one of the forty English and Welsh Martyrs. His feast day is December 1, Issa’s birthday.

The co-educational Jesuit high school was founded on January 5, 1960 by Archbishop Samuel Emmanuel Carter, S.J., the sixth of seven children of the late Wilfred and Marie Carter of 61 Hagley Park Road in St. Andrew.

By August 26 that year ground was broken and the two-storey structure of eight classrooms with an accommodation for 240 pupils was formally blessed on March 20, 1961 by the Rt. Reverend John J. McEleny, S.J.,D.D., Bishop of Kingston, and was dedicated to the memory of Mr. Martin A. Waters of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., whose bequest along with other benefactors, according to Wikipedia, made the erection possible.