Pope St Pius X and Hilaire Belloc

I came to McNabb through Belloc (having admittedly arrived at Belloc in the first place through Chesterton) and I place here a somewhat arbitrary piece that I wrote a while back on Belloc and St Pius X. It was prompted by an article of Belloc's reprinted in The Bellocian, the journal of the Hilaire Belloc Society (of which I was for a while the Secretary), and has little obvious merit beyond the fact that it exists and deals with two great men.


It is often remarked that when Pope St Pius X died shortly after the outbreak of the First World War it was from a broken heart. This should not be surprising: a Pope who had fought continuously, with tremendous energy and courage, to “restore all things in Christ” during his eleven year Papacy found himself confronted in his last days by a war whose eventual quasi-apocalyptic qualities were already adumbrated at its onset by the ferocity of the German onslaught: “all things were to be destroyed in Man”.

Just a few months before he died, and before the War began, the saintly Pope was visited by a man who likewise saw that the world, always a battleground between God and Satan, between the Church and the non-Catholic powers of the day, was balanced upon a knife-edge. And indeed, the man concerned, Hilaire Belloc, was himself also in his personal life standing upon a very precipice of desperate unhappiness. On February 2nd 1914, the feast of the Purification, Elodie, his American wife of nearly 18 years, had died. In the immediate aftermath of that death, Belloc later claimed that he had only been kept from utter despair by the ministrations of the remarkable Dominican, Father Vincent McNabb. In his barely mitigated misery, he had then decided to set off for the Eternal City, a city Elodie had loved but which they had never visited together. Belloc’s state of mind was still critical: as he wrote the month of his journey to Rome to a close friend, John Phillimore – “I am in peril of my intelligence and perhaps of my conduct and therefore of my soul. I am like a man shot in the stomach and through the spine.”

In Rome Belloc managed to obtain an audience with the Holy Father. It was not his first with that Pope. Some years earlier, in April 1906, he had been sent on behalf of the English episcopacy to explain to the Vatican the difficult situation that then obtained in his country with regard to Catholic education. At that time Belloc had just become a Liberal Member of Parliament and was directly engaged in visibly opposing his own Party in the matter of the provision of confessional education. The Pope then, very interested as he was in attempts by secular powers across Europe to reduce or neutralize the influence of the Church, was keen to hear of how secularization in education was being pushed in England: and Belloc was seen as the man who better than anyone else could explain the nature of this political combat. The audience in 1914 was obviously of a very different sort. It was brief, if also – to use Belloc’s word – “splendid”. The Holy Father blessed several medals for the Belloc children. Belloc later remarked, perhaps surprisingly, that “the Pope is looking older but less unhappy than when I saw him eight years ago”. This audience seems to have represented something of a turning point in Belloc’s psychological – indeed spiritual – recovery. He always carried the sadness of Elodie’s death with him, and the outward signs of his permanent mourning were always there clearly to see. But he was no longer faced by the black gulf of incomprehension that had threatened to swallow him up.

Belloc always set great store on the corporate, visible nature of the Church, and on Her Visible Head on Earth. Belloc revered Pope St Pius X’s predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, as “the greatest Pope since the Reformation”, and was always keen to meet future Popes in person: which he managed with regard to Popes Benedict XIV, Pius XI and Pius XII, as well as Pope St Pius X. Meeting the Vicar of Christ was ever a great consolation and inspiration for Belloc, who in his constant struggle against his natural spirit of pagan scepticism required some tangible sight and presence to sustain the Act of Will which, under God, preserved his Faith.

It is unsurprising that the Pope’s death a few months later came as a shock to Belloc as indeed it did to the whole Catholic world. Some short time after that death, Belloc wrote an article on the Pope for The British Review (it was reprinted in The Tablet in 1951, from whence I have it). In it, after lamenting the general failure amongst non-Catholics in England to see the Pope’s demise as the significant political event it indeed was, he assesses the comparatively short reign of St Pius X. Two things he considered of most vital importance: one was the Pope’s refusal to cede the rights of the Church in France to the French government, which led to the confiscation of French ecclesiastical property by the secular authorities - and the other was the Pope’s combat against modernism. One represented the Church’s fight against the enemy without, against the political forces generated since 1789 in support of “the Rights of Man” and in defiance of the Rights of God. The second represented the Church’s fight against the enemy within, against a spiritual malaise, born of the intellectual anarchy of the Reformation, weaned by the Enlightenment, and brought to its coming of age by the Revolution. One was a fight for the Church’s practical powers and privileges, for her temporal survival: the other was a fight for the very Truth which animated Her.

Of these two struggles, Belloc thought the former was of greater moment. There were a number of reasons for this, principal amongst which was Belloc’s underestimate of the guile, contagiousness and serpentine durability of that heresy of heresies, Modernism. But this particular point we shall touch upon when we come to consider Belloc and Modernism. Another reason why Belloc considered the political battle in which the Church was engaged to be of principal importance was no doubt connected with the manner in which he would downplay his own private, personal Faith. He was, by his own admission, one with which all who knew him would happily have concurred, an instinctive, natural sceptic. His belief in the Church found strongest expression in his belief in Her as a force, a personality, an institution acting upon history and upon men. His life was spent in the service of the hierarchical, civilizing Church. The political and cultural attachments of the Church he was in many respects more cognizant of and sensitive to than Her theology or mysticism. The affair in France struck him as a symptom of the eternal conflict between the Church and the World, and the Pope’s solution to it struck him as a sign of the Church’s eternal strength - in its willingness to sacrifice wealth, worldly, temporal success, respectability and good standing for the Immutable Principles of Her own Divine Constitution.

In short, the situation in France was this (to quote Belloc): “From a series of historical accidents…, certain of the strongest political emotions in the French people, half their memories of the struggle for national independence, and nearly all their passionate attachment to a democratic form of government had become associated with a quarrel between Church and State; with a quarrel, that is, between the Democratic State and the hierarchic organization of the Catholic Church….In such a circumstance, all that are the organized enemies of the Church, the wealthy Huguenot and the ubiquitous Freemason, the Jewish newspaper owner and financier, combined in a strict alliance and delivered their assault upon the Catholic position…. [The enemy] held out to the Church what was morally the property of the Church as a bribe. If the Church would accept a form of administration in this property which was not Catholic at all but presbyterian, then the property should be set free, and the Church should have the material means whereby to live. If she would not so put on her enemies’ uniform, her resources should be taken from her and she would die.”

The Pope remained steadfast before this bribe. “He resolutely refused anything whatsoever save the full and exact admission of the Church’s rights, and since these were denied he sacrificed against much strong advice from good and devout men, and against all the results of immediate calculation, the bread and meat of the Church in Gaul.” Belloc considered this action to be as prophetic as it was symbolic. And to consider today how lightly our current Holy Father seems to lay down the Rights of God and the Church before the Rights of Man!

In singling out as also vital Pope St Pius X’s struggle against Modernism, Belloc was not quite so foresighted. For Belloc thought, when he penned this article late in 1914, that the Pope had killed Modernism. Belloc, hard-headed, not given to vague thinking or mystical feeling, or that duplicitous hybrid of the two that wormed its way even into the hearts and minds of good and devout men both during the Pope’s reign and thereafter, could not believe that Modernism had any real strength. This did not lead him to underestimate the importance of the Pope’s decisive actions against it – but it led him to conclude that such actions had been entirely successful. He believed that the Pope had killed it, not through brutality or persecution, as others – oversensitive types, largely - might have seen it, but rather through the simple re-statement of Thomistic truths and the clear expression of Catholic Truth. “[In the Pope’s actions] there was an absence of what friends call breadth and enemies compromise and an absence of what men call subtlety save, indeed, the subtlety that always accompanies clear thinking and whose sharpest manifestation is irony. This irony was abundantly present in the rejection and swift destruction of the weak-headed modernist folly.”

He thought that Modernism was no more than a muddle-headed stupidity, of the sort that seems to recur in Man from time to time. Perhaps he under-estimated the virulence of Modernism because he had no time himself for speculative theology. He saw Modernism simply as an inane attempt to reconcile opposites: “it had its roots…. in the unreasoning speculations of Protestant Germany, and it was stamped throughout with that which the plain man will always call “sentiment” – that is, the desire to have your cake and eat it too.” (Belloc was wary of sentiment. He would not allow it to muddle his thinking when it came to the Faith. ) He failed to see that coiled at Modernism’s heart, ordering its admittedly often contradictory principles, there was a cunning that spoke with forked tongue and which lay behind all Sin and Error. The “weak-headed modernist folly” was in fact far too canny, evil and dangerous to die so easily.

The Pope’s great attack on modernism, an intensification of the combat undertaken by his predecessors, began of course with the encyclical Pascendi in October 1907. Belloc was delighted with this attack, even if he felt that Modernism had “only a local and restricted influence”. In a letter written very shortly after Pascendi was issued he rejoiced: “have you seen the Pope’s gentle remarks to the Modernists? They are indeed noble! I could not have done it better myself. He gently hints that they cannot think - which is true. The old Heretics had guts, notably Calvin, and could think like the Devil, who inspired them. But the Modernists are inspired by a little minor he-devil with one eye and a stammer, and the result is poor.”

Even 15 years later, in his book Survivals and New Arrivals in which Belloc clearly prophesied the neo-pagan assault of unReason and immorality – indeed perversion – upon civilization and upon the Church, he still thought that “Modernism in the technical sense of the word is pretty well dead”. Belloc was notably over-optimistic on this point (in contrast to how his views are usually portrayed!), as indeed he was concerning the Fate of the Church in the late Twentieth Century. In that same book he considers as less likely Maritain’s then current conviction that the Church would shrink to become a small but intense remnant standing apart in an increasing flood of Paganism as unrealistic than his own belief that the Church would continue to grow from strength to strength – as it was indeed so growing when he wrote Survivals and New Arrivals. Belloc was convinced that people outside the Church would increasingly see Her for what She really was: the sole effective defender of the common sense and common morality of Man and of Reason. He thought the assault of neo-Paganism and the solvent influence of “the Modern Mind” would both break upon the impenetrable bulwarks of the Church. He never dreamt that a Pope, and many bishops in the Church with him, would let them in the through the windows of a reckless and foolhardy “aggiornamento”.

While Belloc maintained his opinion of Leo XII as the greatest Pope since the Reformation there can be little doubt he considered Pope St Pius X to be the holiest. Already in this article of 1914 he refers to the “actions of the Saint” as prophetic. He speaks of him as “a man inspired by sanctity”. And Belloc saw as the note of his holiness simplicity. This simplicity, the hallmark of Pope St Pius X’s reign “stood composed of a few very clear principles like a carefully constructed classical thing of cut stone standing against a flood. For as the note of that reign was simplicity of principle rigidly applied, so the note of the society which it had to meet and subtly to dominate was one of very rapid and anarchic change.”

Belloc may have got it wrong about Modernism – but he truly appreciated the greatness of the Pope who had dedicated his life to the struggle against it, and to the combat for the Rights of the Church in an increasingly anti-Christian age. No prophet can be expected to see all eventualities – and how many good Catholics could have dreamt of the horrors that Vatican II has brought in its wake?

David Jones and the Holy Mass

Before I continue with more McNabbiana, I will drop in a short article on David Jones which I wrote for Mater Dei and which also appeared on Seattle Catholic. If McNabb speaks principally to my soul, Jones speaks principally to my 'cultural intellect', although he does not leave my heart untouched (Belloc very often speaks to my heart). Jones knew McNabb, although I think the artist (in many media) found the friar a little forbidding at times, and he had a number of disagreements with him (most notably over the Eucharistic theology of Maurice de la Taille SJ). It was the decidedly peculiar Eric Gill who brought them together. David Jones himself was not a straightforward man and has his own peculiarities, but he deserves great recognition for the strong Catholic focus of his writings in particular.

It is fascinating to consider that Jones served in the trenches at the Somme only a few miles away from where another Catholic author of note was serving, both imbibing the scene around them, subconsciously soaking up the terrible and glorious atmosphere of friendship and destruction, creating within them a hard kernel that would grow into the great fruits of their future works. The other writer to whom I refer is of course JRR Tolkien, and on many levels - if not stylistically - they have similarities as artists and deal with many of the same themes in their work - history, myth, culture, 'the long defeat'. Both of course loved the ancient Liturgies of the Church and were very greatly dismayed when the modernists dismantled them. I mean to write an essay on what unites them and what separates them but it has so far got no further than a dream.


Not many people know of David Jones. Even amongst those who should comprise part of his natural constituency – literate British Catholics – he is largely a forgotten man. Yet Jones, in his works, exemplifies much that was creative and insightful about the Church before Vatican II, the Church that so many neo-Catholics, fence-sitters and outright progressives now deride as sterile and mindless. Moreover, he simultaneously encapsulated many of the artistic and philosophical tensions of the twentieth century, which tensions were themselves bound up in the ‘long defeat’ that is Vatican II and its aftermath.

David Jones was born in 1895 in London. His father, also London born, was of Welsh Chapel up-bringing, his mother was English and Anglican. From an early age he showed great artistic potential and he was enrolled in Camberwell Art School at the tender age of sixteen. He joined up with the Royal Welch Fusiliers early in 1915, and spent the rest of that apocalyptic struggle in the trenches, except for two brief absences, one in late 1916 after suffering a wound at Mametz Wood in the aftermath of the dreadful Somme assaults, and one late in 1918, from trench fever, during the last desperate German offensive. He remained a private for the whole period. He was scarred by his experiences – a later history of nervous breakdowns could with ample justice be traced back to his war years – but they also influenced his art and later writings tremendously. A glimpse of Holy Mass offered by a priest in a barn not far from the Front Line was a significant factor in the process which led him after the war to become a Catholic. He was formally brought into the Church by Father O’Connor, GK Chesterton’s confessor, friend, and model for “Father Brown”. These years immediately following the 1918 Armistice were a period of great fruitfulness in conversions for the Church – D B Wyndham Lewis and J B Morton are just two other converts of this period who became great Catholic writers (and, in their case, also humorists – I feel another article coming on!).

Over the next fifteen years, his stock as an artist, engraver and illustrator of books rose immeasurably, until in his last years he was counted as one of the greatest living British artists, especially for his watercolours (Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, thought him the greatest British watercolourist since Blake). At the beginning of this period he had fallen in with Eric Gill at Ditchling (where he learned engraving and calligraphy), met Father McNabb, fallen in love with Gill’s daughter, Petra, got engaged to her (it came to nothing), moved with Gill to Wales, and, returning to London, become a member of the influential “Seven and Five” group of modern artists (until he was “thrown out” for being behind the times). Today, his reputation still stands high enough for several of his works to be seen on the walls of the Tate (not that that is perhaps much of a clear commendation these days).

However, it is as a writer that his reputation – amongst those who have heard of him – still stands highest. He came late to writing. His first written work (which I think his best) was In Parenthesis, an epic prose-poem, semi-autobiographical, concerning the wartime experiences of Private John Ball, which ends (as did Jones’s first stretch of war service) in the battle for Mametz Wood. He wrote it before, during and after a series of nervous breakdowns which afflicted him during much of the 1930s. It was finally published in 1937 to great critical acclaim and won the only literary award then available, the Hawthornden Prize. TS Eliot wrote a preface for it and referred to it as “a work of genius”. For some years afterwards Jones struggled with a second book on his later war experiences, The Book of Balaam’s Ass which he never completed, finding those later war years impossible to set down without great anguish to himself, and without failing sufficiently to manifest their extraordinary mechanical horror and inhumanity. Eventually, in 1952, he published another long poem, The Anathemata, which effectively involves the whole historical sweep of Western European development, from the retreat of the glaciers through to modernity, hinging (obscurely) upon the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Holy Mass. The Anathemata is probably considered his greatest work (W H Auden referred to it as “probably the finest long poem written in English this century”), although I am tempted to think that such a largely academic judgement has grown up principally upon account of the complexity and difficulty of that work. Academics have an especial liking for matters difficult to grasp and impatient of easy comprehension: a preference for arcane and complicated literary works can sometimes serve as shorthand for self-identifying the interested academic as particularly “deep” or “cerebral”. I find The Anathemata in part almost unreadable and seldom a pleasure to recite or read. Footnotes (Jones’s own) clutter it up and frequently threaten to swamp the page in abstruse reference. Other, shorter poems, came out later in Jones’s life, some broken off from his failed work, The Book of Balaam’s Ass, some separate and discrete endeavours: these can be found collected in The Sleeping Lord (1974). He was made a Companion of Honour early in 1974 and died, alone, in the Calvary Nursing Home in Harrow, in the Autumn of that year. He never married, and left no children

This biographical portrait does not do Jones justice. In particular, it does not do justice to the depth of his Faith, to the extent to which Holy Religion influenced, indeed formed and filled his ouevres, especially with regard to the written word. Jones was very interested and attached to the Catholic liturgy and he lamented the passing of the Old Mass. He was one the great and artistic good whose names were affixed to the letter to The Times of 6th July 1971, imploring the Catholic authorities, even if only on grounds of its unparalleled cultural merit, to retain the Old Rite. Just as his first exposure to the Catholic faith came from the Mass, witnessed through the crack of a barn door just a few hundred yards from the shell-cratered horrors of the Front Line, so the last poem he was working on was “The Kensington Mass”, dedicated to Fr O’Connor, an exploration of the ancient liturgy and its connection to Celtic and English myth and culture, which opens:

“clara voce dicit: OREMVS
et ascendens ad altare
dicit secreto: AVFER A NOBIS…
and in lowly accents
he says the rest
should you be elbow-close him
you may catch his
soft-breathed-out
PER CHRISTVM DOMINVM NOSTRVM”

Yet in truth, Jones, in his art, literature and in some of his opinions, is not someone with whom traditional Catholics will always agree or sympathise. In poetry he ranks alongside Pound and Eliot as a High Modernist (while that term is not to be confused with theological modernism there is an inescapable kinship between the two phenomena). Jones’s poetry does not rhyme and some will claim it isn’t really poetry at all, but dissonance and confusion. Belloc would have looked at it quite askance (as far as I know, it is not known what Belloc actually thought of Jones: Jones did however contribute an essay on The Myth of Arthur to a volume of essays celebrating Belloc’s seventieth birthday). As with all (artistic) modernism, Jones’s poetry is stylistically fractured and difficult to follow at times; it is highly personal and replete with quite arcane and obscure references to Celtic and Old English literature, history and myth, all inter-twined with parallel or analogous references to the Life of Christ, His Sacraments and the Faith. Like all Modernists he struggled in the post-War period with what he saw as the chasm that divided Edwardian England (Europe) and the modern age: unlike Pound, the new to him was strange and unfamiliar and he wanted to act as a pontifex, a builder of bridges between the old cultures and truths and the new bastard age. His style was the new style, reflecting the new environment (which he in part loathed: he detested the abasement of language and technological megalopolitan culture, so-called), but his content was the old high matter of Celtic and pre-modern England, of myths and old tales, of Christ and of the Faith.

David Jones attached great importance to the liturgy of the Church, not just as a practising Catholic but as a poet. When Jones became a Catholic, under the influence of Eric Gill he read Maritain’s Art et Scholastique (translated by Father O’Connor, interestingly enough) and developed a rich understanding of the Thomist definition of art, which he saw as intimately related to the meaning of sacrament. In a sacrament, something is effected, is made: the form of the sacrament symbolizes and effects that making. In art, the thing painted, written, sculpted, is likewise made: the effect of a piece of art is utterly bound up with how that piece of art has been written or drawn, with the words, their sound and meaning, with the paint, its colour and application. After Gill, Jones considered Man to be a natural maker, homo faber, and saw that art, sign-making and sacraments were all natural to him. All pagan religions had sacraments of a sort often foreshadowing the Sacraments proper of Holy Mother Church, of Christ.

Jones saw the Liturgy of the Mass as the most symbolically rich and developed of the rites surrounding a Sacrament, and the form and meaning of the immemorial Latin Rite gave life to much of his poetry, from The Anathemata, through early Mass poems such as Caillech and The Grail Mass through to the unfinished The Kensington Mass. The Liturgy was also important in Jones’s eyes because it helped “plug man into his past”, in a way which was becoming increasingly difficult in modern times. As he once wrote: “Quite apart from the truth or untruth of it [the theology of the Mass], only by becoming a Catholic can one establish continuity with Antiquity”. Jones became very anxious when he heard of plans to abolish the Old Rite, fearing “an unbridgeable discontinuity” in the one area – the Catholic religion – which still formed a bridge with Man’s past. (He has already lamented many of the earlier changes to the Church’s Holy Week Liturgy.) So much of what Man was could only be properly grasped in the light of his past, and since the Great War so little of that past, of history, of ancient literature and culture and myth, was still extant in the hearts and minds of Western Man save what the Church had, as in the post-Roman Dark Ages, sheltered from the barbaroi of modernity.

Jones spent some time in Jersusalem in the mid-30s, recuperating in the aftermath of one of the more severe of his nervous breakdowns. The sight of British soldiers patrolling the New Testament streets much as Roman auxiliaries had patrolled them at the time of Christ made a great impression on him. Empires, whether British or Roman, were never a source of joy to Jones (he agreed with St Augustine that empire was theft), but he acknowledged the signal part that the Roman Empire had unwittingly played in the establishment and development of the Catholic Church. The thought that Christ has died on the Cross, that momentous event, the very fulcrum of History, of human existence, witnessed by bored or baffled soldiers, servants of an Empire no less glorious, no less cosmopolitan, no less sure of itself than the British Empire already waning in his day, fascinated him. A great number of his poems, many incomplete and printed posthumously in The Roman Quarry, concern themselves with the Empire, and with often stunning anachronism place modern ideas or dialogue in a Roman setting to better illumine the ‘nowness’ of Christ’s Incarnation and Death and the sameness of so much of the modern that yet so foolishly despises the old. One poem deals with a conversation between a particularly cunning Judas and Caiphas. In another, The Fatigue, a Roman officer addresses his men, who, unbeknownst to them all, are going to set in motion the Passion of Christ by arresting the troublesome Galilean in the Garden of Gethsemane. In another poem, set at a Roman dinner party taking place during the events of Holy Week, with great dramatic irony guests discuss, in a flippant manner reminiscent of some 1920s London fling, the success of the Roman policy of religious toleration, the desperate fanaticism of Jewish sectaries, and the final, permanent victory of the Roman Way over superstitions and local religions.

All this may make Jones seem more a poet of ideas than of words.. He was, however, enormously gifted with words and could write as beautifully and movingly as he could arcanely or obscurely. Here, from In Parenthesis, he describes the night parade before his battalion moved down to the trenches for the first time:

“Cloud shielded her bright disc-rising yet her veiled influ-
ence illumined the texture of that place, her glistening on
the saturated fields; bat-night-gloom intersilvered where she
shone on the mist drift,
when they paraded
at the ending of the day, unrested
bodies, wearied from the morning,
troubled in their minds,
frail bodies loaded over much,
..‘prentices bearing this night the full panoply, the complex
..paraphernalia of their trade.”

He did indeed carry within him many of the tensions of the century in which he lived, but he lived – and died – a Catholic and his poetry is full-blooded in its Faith. Interestingly, Jones’s written works are enjoying something of a (comparative) revival: this is of course a two-edged sword. As many people may through his works catch some glimpses of the Truth as may attempt to veil that Truth with commentaries on Gender and Race in the poesis of David Jones or Jones: Man, Myth and the Marxist Dialectic. Still, he has not suffered from his Catholicism like some others, for example the great historian and historiographer (awful word) Christopher “Tiger” Dawson. For that at least we should be grateful.


[PRACTICAL ADVICE: If any reader should be inspired or browbeaten by this article into reading some Jones, I recommend, indeed ORDER, that you begin with In Parenthesis. I further recommend that you read a good portion of the beginning of the book aloud, at one sitting, with a good deep glass of red at your elbow, in order to build up the proper and necessary momentum. Finally, I suggest that you avoid reading about his works, as more than enough brain-numbing, over–complex commentary has been written about them to stifle the interest of even the most ardent enthusiast, but rather read them yourself without benefit of academic murk.]

Prolegomenon (the beginning bit)

It was one of those evenings. A psychologically and spiritually draining journey home after an exhausting day of tedious yet anxious work (the worst sort): a journey on a crowded train full of braying men and painted ladies, and myself, a sinner. And I thought of Fr Vincent McNabb. I heard him speak of the need to “flee to the fields”; and my spirit soared and then dived as I embraced the ideal and then considered the reality, neither justly. I decided to join the maddening throng and build up a blog – ghastly word – to give expression to my devotion to Fr McNabb, and to allow me to spread my thoughts and writings like (I hope) beneficent manure before all those who might care to come and read them. May this garden grow!

I’ve written a fair bit of stuff over the last few years – not all of it about McNabb: Belloc is another hero of mine – which I will place here in the coming days and weeks, so that it has some sort of home. Elements of it will have appeared before, on Seattle Catholic or elsewhere in internet terms; or in low circulation traditional Catholic newsletters and journals; or indeed in the pages of the Catholic home-schooling newsletter heroically begun by my magnificent wife, Faith in the Home. One lengthy piece (which I will no doubt post piecemeal) is the text of an address I gave to the Hilaire Belloc Society conference at Plater College, Oxford, in 2003 on the great man’s Parliamentary ‘career’. I will also, most importantly, post here excerpts from the writings of Fr McNabb.

I will end for the moment here. I have many journeys home like that described above (indeed, I am just about to set out on one) and I will certainly have many more to make before the end. The Nazareth Measure after which I have named this blog is important to me, as it ought to be to all those with the Faith, and indeed to all those living simply by the light of the natural moral law. I hope the very next post will make this clear. I only wish it were as important to all those under whose laws and social engineering we suffer. Few are the pagan cultures of old which became so denatured as our own or pagan societies whose life and spirit became so vile or echoingly empty as that in which we must live.

As I have written somewhere else (as you will discover if you get any further than this): "Only the family, and particularly the Catholic family, can provide the necessary foundation for a rebaptism of society."

What is the Nazareth Measure?

Perhaps one of Fr McNabb's best-known books is his 1925 collection of essays and articles on matters social and economic (all studied in terms of their underlying moral foundation) called The Church and the Land. In one of its essays, entitled Nazareth Measures: an Open Letter to the next Prime Minister, Father McNabb writes:

“...the NAZARETH MEASURE of length and weight and worth is the Family – that terrestrial “Holy and Undivided Three”. Let no guile of social usefulness betray you into hurting the authority of the Father, the chastity of the Mother, the rights and therefore the property of the Child. Social and economic laws are more subtle but not less infallible than physical laws. No programme of good intentions will undo the mischief caused by an interference with family life. As well as try to arrest a thrown bomb by a plea of good intentions as try to prevent the final ruin of the State by the plea that our ruin of the family was well-intentioned”

Long after I had forgotten the specifics of much of what else I had read in that book (although some of its best known essays such as A Call to Contemplatives and Authority and Property made a great impression on me) the phrase THE NAZARETH MEASURE stayed with me. Working in Parliament, and thus possibly taking an above average interest in government policies and legislative debates, it became clearer and clearer to me with each passing day that, occasional words from politicians aside, the actions of those ruling our country showed no sign of comprehension of the Nazareth Measure.

Moreover, while Christians might be expected most strongly to fight to protect the family, given their understanding of its sanctification, canonisation if you will, through the eternal verity of the Holy Family, Christ Child, Our Blessed Lady, and her Blessed Spouse St Joseph, the family is also a subject of natural moral law. Even those with no Christian or professed religious beliefs might be expected to come to its defence.

Yet, those in power, professed Christian or not, seemed to regard all those attempting to defend the sacred family as “fanatick”, out-moded and misguided and were only too happy amidst the jubilation of the not yet sated debauchees of the new dispensation of license to raze the defences of the family, the sacred grove of the social forest, in order to accommodate the newfangled and the perverted artificial constructs of a post-Christian and immoral society.

This blog (that word again!) was dreamed up one evening's journey home, after a day of news stories, government initiatives and parliamentary debates, all of which seemed to cohere into a picture of the destruction already wrought and still being wreaked upon the family. The family helped to preserve the natural moral order, at least in part, before the Incarnation, and, since Christ's Birth, Life, Passion, Death and Resurrection, acted to preserve true civilisation and the Faith through the decadence of a disintegrating Roman Empire and the turbulence that followed its dismemberment. Monasteries are rightly credited with the salvation of true culture and society – but without Catholic families the monasteries would not just have been empty – they would not have existed at all.

Only the family, and particularly the Catholic family, can provide the necessary foundation for a re-birth of natural moral law and for the re-baptism of a society fit to have Christ as its King. The Nazareth Measure is vital to help build a country of saints, of holy fathers and holy mothers and children who wish to grow up to serve God in Truth and in Charity. When it is lost to sight or to understanding, the family will fail and true society and culture will fall. When it is kept at the forefront of mind and action it will restore the family to its primacy of honour in the servant State.

Father Vincent McNabb: a voice of contradiction (Part VI)

If it is true that it is possible to tell a lot about a person’s life from the manner of their death then it seems only appropriate that we should now turn to the last long weeks of Father McNabb’s life and to his eventual death.

On 14th April 1943, as he was drawing to the end of his seventy-fifth year, Father McNabb was told by his doctor that he had only a short time to live. That same day he wrote to his niece, Sister Mary Magdalen, a Dominican sister, “Deo Gratias! God is asking me to take a journey which everyone must sooner or later take. I have been told that I have a malignant incurable growth in the throat. I can, at most, have weeks to live.” The following day he preached to the Sisters of Mercy. It was Thursday in Passion Week, and, after a few vivid words of reflection concerning the imminence of the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Father McNabb said:

“And now dear sisters, I have some very good news for you. This is the last time I shall be speaking to you together in this chapel. You know in these days everyone is being called up [this of course was in the midst of World War II] ... I too have been called up!... And for what? To the King of Kings, and that not for the duration but for Life Everlasting! The words of the Psalm, ‘Rejoice at the things that were said to me - with joy I have entered the House of the Lord’, are filling my heart with joy.”

It was to be approximately nine weeks before Father McNabb finally died - and these last two months were as busy a period for him as any that had gone before. He carried on his teaching courses on Aquinas and the Psalms, even offering to start a course on the Angels for as long as he lasted: “I do not now what sort of Angels they will put me amongst, dear children! I am not good enough for the good Angels.” He warned his students that at any time he may have to send them a telegram to say that he was dead.

When the press - Catholic and secular - found out that such a popular figure was about to die they hounded the Dominican Community at St Dominic’s Priory. Father McNabb was determined that his death should be as much a sermon as his life as a Dominican had been. He knew that the last weeks would be difficult. He had been told that he would effectively die slowly of starvation, and may well experience some severe breathing troubles, as the passage of his throat narrowed and finally disappeared. While his strength was still with him he continued to preach and speak across London, marching along its dreary streets in his habit and hob-nailed boots with his heavy ‘McNabb-sack’ over his shoulders. He went to all his choir duties until a few days before his death: although he was able to speak to the end, and his breathing problems were slight, he was not able to eat for about a week, and could not swallow any liquids for three days, before he died. In the end, he collapsed one morning at Prime, on Monday 14th June: he experienced a slight recovery and wrote his last letter, again to his niece, Sister Mary Magdalen. The next day he received the Last Rites and slowly deteriorated until the morning of Thursday 17th June when he summoned Father Prior to his cell (under obedience he was seated on a straight-backed chair - they didn’t dare suggest to him that he should take to his bed!). There, amidst the bare surroundings of a familiar austerity, Father McNabb sang the Nunc Dimittis for the last time, confessed his sins to Father Prior, and renewed his vows. He then became unconscious for half-an-hour, sneezed, and died.

Crowds of people, young and old, rich and poor, but especially old and poor, came to see him, pray for him, and touch his habit as he was laid out in the Lady Chapel at the Priory for three days. The Requiem Mass took place on Monday 21st June: the Church was packed, principally with Catholic luminaries - the streets outside were thronged with the poor from the tenements he had so often visited. As requested, he was buried in a plain deal box, marked with a simple black cross: it was drawn on an open-backed wagon to Kensal Green Cemetery to where amidst even more crowded scenes Cardinal Manning had been carried almost half-a-century before. The newspapers were full of stories and details about his last few days, his death and his funeral. Truly, his last sermon, his death, was what reached his greatest audience. As his Prior, Father Bernard Delaney, said at his funeral:

“All that he [Father McNabb] said, all that he did, all that he was, were the expression of his burning love for his Master, Jesus Christ Our Lord. The cause of God was his consuming passion - the glory, the justice, the truth of God. He was a great Friar Preacher, but he was something more - he was a living sermon.”

There is much more that could be said about Father McNabb. His work for the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ was great: he touched many, many souls, and after his death a small movement started for his beatification. It got nowhere, despite several significant endorsements, largely because his own Dominican family was in two minds about him. Whereas those who perhaps saw less of him considered him a saint, several of his brother friars thought him a play-actor, a rigid and harsh ego-maniac who craved attention and utter obedience. Many of the friars with such negative views appear to have suffered under his authority when he was Prior of Hawkesyard and they were his charges many years ago.

This sense of division comes across in the only (pseudo-)biography of Father McNabb, written by a Dominican pupil of his, Father Ferdinand Valentine (one too young to remember those gruelling Hawkesyard days), who grew from hero-worship to perplexed uncertainty as he wrote the book and encountered views of the man that differed markedly from his own. The greatest asset of this book - more a slightly hysterical quasi-psychological poly-conjectural study of the man than a proper biography or examination of his work - is the appendix which contains a wealth of letters and testimonies that make up over a quarter of its pages. Sadly, Father McNabb has suffered under the pall of this book for many years. In 1996, The Chesterton Review bravely brought out a very useful if rather ambivalent special issue devoted to him: aside from this the only other book dealing with him was one full of peculiar admiration written by E A Sidermann, one of his chief hecklers at Speakers’ Corner and an atheist to boot.

Although some aspects of Catholic social teaching which he championed would certainly be enthusiastically cheered by elements amongst the ‘typical’ May Day anti-capitalist and anti-globalization protesters, and some aspects would be limply applauded at ghastly Justice and Peace hand-holdings across the country by the polo-necked pseudo-Dominicans who sadly even today sometimes pass for St Dominic’s sons, much of what Father McNabb stood for - integral, upright, unapologetic, strong, fervent Catholicism - is of course now out of favour. There can be no doubt that Father McNabb would have been desolated by what passes for Catholicism in so many churches up and down the country, across the world, indeed, today. He would have prescribed as its antidote an apostolate of Catholic Action, but only if it were founded on a strong and well-anchored spiritual life. He knew that our lives - well-lived - would accomplish more than our words.

I will conclude this piece with some more of Father McNabb’s words, and with a prayer of his:

“Some people say, ‘I do not like sermons . I never go to hear a sermon.’ They do not know that these very words are themselves a sermon. They do not realise that every deed done in the sight or hearing of another is a preached sermon. The best or the worst of all sermons is a life led. God made every man and woman an apostle when he made them capable of dwelling with their fellow men and women. The best argument for the Catholic Church is not the words spoken from this pulpit but the lives lived in this Priory and in this parish. We should measure the words by the life, not the life by the words.”

“Bend my stubborn heart, my Master, make my lips truthful. May my prayer be a prayer of truth as well as a prayer of petition. May I desire what I say I desire; and may I desire as first what Thou hast put first, at the head of all our desires - Thy Will, Thy Kingdom, and the hallowing of Thy Name.”

Father Vincent McNabb: a voice of contradiction (Part V)

A little more should now be said about Father McNabb’s life as a friar in order once again to put flesh upon him after such a tedious catalogue of books and anthologies.

Even amongst his fellow Dominicans, as yet untainted by modernism and its laxities, Father McNabb was considered to be an ascetic. As Prior of Woodchester, Hawkesyard and Holy Cross he had developed a reputation for being hard on others, but certainly no harder than he was on himself: and he could always lend someone a sympathetic ear, something he never seems to have had for himself! He ate sparingly - he blamed his “Protestant stomach” - and his face and body demonstrated the hard self-denial of his religious life. He slept on the floor of his cell - which floor he scrubbed daily - and his bed lay unused even through illness and his final death-pangs. He had no chair in his room until the last days of his life when - still refusing to lie on his bed - he finally consented to be seated in a chair. When writing, he knelt at a table surmounted by a crucifix and small statue of the Blessed Virgin: on the table lay his only books, a copy of the Vulgate, his Breviary, and the Summa Theologica. He kept a compendious box of notes, all written on scraps of paper - the backs of cards, used envelopes and the like - on a huge variety of subjects some penned in English, some in Latin, some in Greek and some even in Hebrew (this box is now with the Dominican archive in Edinburgh and is looked after by the oldest Dominican in Great Britain, Father Bede Bailey, a pupil of Father McNabb’s). Everything he wrote was hand-written: he abominated most machinery and had particular a vehemence for type-writers! Hilaire Belloc, who shared many views with Father McNabb, always had a fascination for machinery and considered the type-writer - and the telephone (something else Father McNabb loathed) - as a great boon (Belloc’s handwriting was notoriously slovenly: Father McNabb’s was habitually neat and legible). It would no doubt have been both interesting and amusing to have been a fly-on-the-wall as they discussed the desirability of the ‘automated writing machine’!

Of course, as a religious, indeed, as a Catholic, prayer was central to his life. His profound attachment to Holy Mass and the Office aside, Father McNabb devoted much of his energy to praying and to encouraging others to pray the Holy Rosary. As a man of formidable intellect and deep learning he had nothing but impatience for those who claimed that the Rosary was a prayer, a devotion, for simple beginners, for the unlettered, for those who have not yet ascended to the sublime heights of spirituality. Such people rendered Father McNabb almost speechless with indignation. “The Rosary”, he would say, “is the safest and surest way to union with God through mental prayer”. What impressed him the most about the Holy Rosary was the prayerfulness of many of the faithful who had been taught or had grown up to pray to God through Our Blessed Lady. Again and again he would say: “Most of the contemplatives I have met are in the world, and these have found union with God through the Rosary.” Devotion to the Rosary, he insisted, should be fundamental to a Catholic’s prayer life. As he said during a sermon on Rosary Sunday on 1936:

“The Incarnation is the centre of all our spiritual life.. One of the means by which it is made so is the Holy Rosary. There is hardly any way of arriving at some realisation of this great mystery equal to that of saying the Rosary. Nothing will impress it so much on your mind as going apart to dwell in thought, a little space each day, on Bethlehem, on Golgotha, on the Mount of the Ascension.”

Father McNabb wore a homespun habit - he only had the one at any one time - and marched around London in the same heavy hob-nailed boots from year to year. Over his shoulders as he trudged about the streets he had slung his “McNabb-sack”, a capacious if battered means of carriage for his Vulgate, Breviary, and whatever other books he needed. Although he was not averse to rail travel, or public transport in general, he usually refused to travel by car or by cab: the long distances he had to cover in London from St Dominic’s Priory to the various convents to which he was chaplain, to Speakers’ Corner and to Parliament Hill, he managed on foot and at a startling pace. Hilaire Belloc, who astonishingly still holds the time record for walking between London and Oxford, was full of admiration for Father McNabb’s speed and endurance: indeed, he gave him advice on how to follow his own route from Toul to Rome, famously walked and recounted in The Path to Rome. Father McNabb’s superior would not however allow him the vacation time to accomplish this walk, which he had so wanted to do - at the age of 68 (Belloc had been 31!) - to celebrate the golden jubilee of his profession in the Dominican Order.

There is a moving account of an occasion when Father McNabb actually took a cab back to his Priory. For months he had made sick calls to a young girl - an only child - who was dying. The mother - who had asked him to come - was a Catholic; the largely absent father was not, and moreover was one of his chief hecklers at Parliament Hill. They were a poor family, lodged with another family in a single, small room in a crumbling tenement block near St. Pancras Station. Sadly, the daughter died: McNabb said the Requiem Mass. Just a few weeks later the mother died - she had been ill throughout her daughter’s illness but had said nothing about it to anyone. McNabb again said the Requiem Mass. As he left the graveyard the husband approached him, gave him a flower from a funeral bouquet that Father McNabb had arranged from a pious benefactor, and asked him how he was planning to return to his Priory. The sky was thunderous and rain was beginning to fall. Father McNabb replied that he planned to return as he had come - on foot. The husband - trebly poor now - pulled from his pocket enough money to pay for a cab: at first Father McNabb demurred and then he realised that this was the widower’s mite. With tears in his eyes he accepted the money. He never forgot this instance of simple charity. As he wrote:

“Blessed are the poor! Few things have ever touched me more than that. Out of his poverty he offered me my fare. Imagine that coming from one who has not the faith. What am I to do when I see him next? To kiss his feet would be unworthy of him. I shall pray... that God may give him the consolation of the faith.”

The full extent of Father McNabb’s own charity will of course never be known. What he did privately remained private even after the public death that we will shortly be considering. One known instance may have to suffice. In another rotting block of flats close to Camden Lock lived an old bed-ridden woman. For months, possibly for years, someone came regularly to talk to her, to tidy the room and to scrub the floor. A few weeks after Father McNabb had died, a group of people living in rooms near to the woman’s were discussing who would do the job as the old lady who had come to do the work before had evidently stopped coming. Only the bed-ridden lady’s best friend knew that this ‘lady’ had in fact been Father McNabb, on his way to Parliament Hill, dropping in for an half-hour-or-so to see the old lady.

I touched earlier upon Father McNabb’s homespun habit. When one was worn out he received another - and the donor from 1917 onwards was the Ditchling Community, an artistic variant of the back-to-the-land movement which Father McNabb supported throughout his life. Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler had been the two talents behind its genesis in 1907. Father McNabb acted as the Community’s chaplain - many of the its members became Third Order Dominicans - but nonetheless fault-lines soon apeared. Its attempts to live off the land faltered - most of its members were artists and had little aptitude for real land-work - and gradually it became an artistic rural retreat rather than a self-sufficient community with an artistic bent. Father McNabb was disappointed that the members of the Community had not applied themselves more to the primary thing - to working on the land. On this matter he did not see eye-to-eye with Eric Gill. Eventually, Gill departed for Wales in 1924. Thereafter, despite his enthusiastic advice to all who asked for it to return to the land, to strive for poverty and self-sufficiency away from the stink of the cities, Father McNabb never again attached himself to any particular project as he had to Ditchling.

Indeed, Father McNabb was always concerned with the primary things and saw any work or activity that moved even one stage away from the primary thing as less worthy and possibly less virtuous. As a result he loathed international finance which was as far removed from reality and the primary things as it was possible to go. As he put it, cuttingly:

“Some men wrest a living from nature. This is called work. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called trade. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called finance.”

Before I move on to describe Father McNabb’s death, I feel I must offer up a few examples of his wit in order to derail any growing impression that Father McNabb must have been a miserable fanatic. Father McNabb certainly had a way with words. He was particularly adept at dealing with hecklers. On one occasion during a long disquisition on sin at Speakers’ Corner an Irish woman shouted out: “If I was your wife I would put poison in your tea!”. Grinning, Father McNabb replied: “Madam, if I were your husband I would drink it!”. On another occasion he famously compared hearing nuns’ confessions to being pecked slowly to death by ducks. On a more serious note, he once attended a public meeting on the subject of the Mental Degeneracy Bill then passing through the House of Commons. After listening to various medical experts explaining how they would certify as degenerates, and as a result sterilise, many types with whom Father McNabb was familiar in his pastoral work, the good friar stood up and, having been called to speak by the chairman of the meeting, bellowed: “I am a moral expert and I certify you as moral degenerates!” He stormed out of the meeting to rapturous applause and the meeting broke up in disarray.

Father Vincent McNabb: a voice of contradiction (Part IV)

We must, however, not forget that Father McNabb would never claim originality or even ingenuity for any of the things about which he taught or preached. His great pride - if we are permitted to use that word in this context - was that he taught only what the Church taught: in particular that he taught almost exclusively from Holy Scripture and from the works of the Angelic Doctor. All that may strike us as unique about Father McNabb’s teachings - he himself would never claim anything unique for them, of course - was in their emphasis and application.

And there were many sides to Father McNabb: as well as being the devoted preacher of Rerum Novarum in works such as The Church and the Land, Nazareth or Social Chaos and the aforementioned Old Principles and the New Order; as well as being the ‘celebrity friar’ who appeared at public meetings, who spoke at Speakers’ Corner and at Parliament Hill, and preached at great Catholic funerals such as that of Cecil Chesterton: as well as all this Father McNabb was a busy teacher and a retreat master, in both cases for lay people as well as clerics. His classes on St Thomas - open to all-comers - were very popular; and from his retreats a devotee of his - Dorothy Findlayson - culled sufficient verbatim shorthand notes to have printed, with his permission, a number of slim but rewarding volumes of spiritual advice: Stars of Comfort, In Our Valley, The Craft of Prayer, The Craft of Suffering, Joy in Believing, God’s Way of Mercy and Mary of Nazareth. Most of the chapters in these volumes are meditations on a few lines of Holy Scripture, or a line-by-line analysis of one of the great prayers of the Church.

Father McNabb was also an enthusiast for Chaucer and Francis Thompson and wrote essays on these, and other, poets and writers. His diverse collections of essays are entitled Francis Thompson and Other Essays, Our Reasonable Service, Thoughts Twice-Dyed, From a Friar’s Cell and The Wayside: A Priest’s Gleanings. He was also - it has to be admitted - a rather casual biographer: he wrote a slim work on St John Fisher. He also wrote a number of small books on aspects of Holy Scripture: The New Testament Witness to Our Lady, The New Testament Witness to St Peter, Meditations on St John, St Mary Magdalen, The Doctrinal Witness of Infallibility of the Fourth Gospel. His work, The Life of Our Lord, was written under strict obedience: it is a strange book, full of curious omissions and odd emphases, which unhappily reflects the author’s reluctance to take on such a demanding subject.

Interestingly, the very first book for which Father McNabb was responsible was an edition of the decrees of the First Vatican Council: his first printed pamphlet, entitled Infallibility, was a version of a lecture he had been asked to give to the Anglo-Catholic Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Father McNabb showed great interest in the possibility of the Anglican Church re-uniting with the Catholic Church: he often spoke to Anglican and Anglo-Catholic meetings and expressed great concern for the continuing de-Christianisation of their sect, from which concern sprang his book The Church and Reunion. He also took an interest in the poor Jews of Whitechapel and East London in general, and was held in great affection by the Jewish community there.

In a more theological context, Father McNabb initially made his name as a preacher and teacher - beyond the walls of the Dominican institutions which he served - with his conferences on faith and prayer at the Catholic Chaplaincy of Oxford University. Initially published separately, these conferences - with some slight revisions - were eventually published in one volume, Faith and Prayer, and constitute the most substantial contribution Father McNabb made to more academic theological writing. He also wrote a slim book on the Blessed Sacrament - God’s Good Cheer - a collection of theological essays, Where Believers May Doubt, which concentrates on the relationship between Holy Scripture and scholasticism, and another collection of similar essays, Frontiers of Faith and Reason, which covers a variety of topics from the origin of the epiclesis to a plea for the re-introduction of the Sarum Rites of Betrothal and Marriage.

Aside from these works Father McNabb was also a great contributor to periodicals of many sorts, from GK’s Weekly, where his writings rubbed metaphorical shoulders with those of Chesterton, Belloc and TS Eliot, to the more obvious Catholic periodicals, Blackfriars and the then-orthodox Tablet. While Father McNabb was clearly more than a ‘one-issue man’ it is striking how many of these books and articles touch upon, even dwell upon, matters relating to the social teaching of the Church and to the family.

Father Vincent McNabb: a voice of contradiction (Part III)

That, in breathless and unsatisfactorily cursory summary, was his life. From whence then flowed his high reputation? It flowed from his words, from his works, from the substance of his life.

Now let us look in more detail at the work and thought of Father McNabb. Like every other religious, he took some time to find his own apostolic feet: he was little known to the outside world until his appointment to Holy Cross, Leicester, when a more public apostolate began. As he came into contact, through his apostolate, with more prominent Catholic and non-Catholic figures, he came into greater national prominence as he was asked to write articles and essays, to preach, and to address public meetings of almost every conceivable variety. It was not until he finally settled down at St Dominic’s Priory in Cobbett’s “great wen” at the age of 52 that he found a context for his work and contacts with those able best to assist him in his work and so - per accidentem - became a national Catholic figure. His preaching at Parliament Hill and Speakers’ Corner with the Catholic Evidence Guild were instrumental to this growing renown.

Just as at the beginning of this piece I threw up some quotations concerning Father McNabb to illumine what he meant to his contemporaries, I would like now to cite some quotations from his own works to throw light on what he was saying to those contemporaries.

This first piece is from the introduction to the book, Old Principles and the New Order, published in 1942, which was a collection of his essays printed in Catholic journals over the previous twenty years:

“This book rests upon certain dogmatic and moral principles, certain undeniable facts, and it makes certain practical proposals.

The first principle is that there is a God, our Creator, Whom we must love and serve; and Whom we cannot love and serve without loving and serving our fellow creatures.

The second principle is that the Family is the unit of all social life; and that therefore the value of all social proposals must be tested by their effect on the Family.

The third (psychological) principle is that from the average man we cannot expect more than average virtue. A set of circumstances demanding from the average man more than average (i.e. heroic) virtue is called an Occasion of Sin.

The fourth (moral) principle is that the occasions of sin should be changed, if they can possibly be changed, i.e. they must be overcome by flight not fight.

The great observed fact, of world-wide incidence, is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas) normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue...

...From this observed fact that the industrialized town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be fled,... Flight from the Land must be now be countered by Flight to the Land.”

Who, upon reading this description of city-living as as occasion of sin, does not recall that passage from Cardinal John Henry Newman’s novel, Callista, describing the farm-worker, Agellius, entering the city of Carthage for the first time? -

“The sights now shock and now allure: fearful sights - not here and there but on the stateliest structures and on the meanest hovels, in public offices and private houses, in central spots and at the corners of the streets, in bazaars and shops and house doors, in the rudest workmanship and in the highest art, in letters or in emblems or in paintings - the insignia and pomp of Satan and of Belial, of a reign of corruption and a revel of idolatry which you can neither endure nor escape. Wherever you go it is all the same - you are accosted, affronted, publicly, shamelessly, now as if a precept of religion, now as if a homage to nature, by all which, as a Christian, you shrink from and abjure.”

The occasion of sin which Father McNabb was particularly - but not exclusively - referring to was the temptation placed before poor families living in poor conditions to resort to methods of birth control (“no birth and no control” as G K Chesterton so famously put it - “race suicide” as McNabb put it rather more grimly).

While the state in which so many of his contemporaries lived and worked filled him with grief and anguish - he regularly records in his books the latest statistics concerning the numbers of families living in one room (or even sharing one room) in the filthy and crumbling tenement blocks of London and elsewhere - it was largely amongst these people that he worked, and to these people he ministered and preached. Despite his popularity, and its usefulness to his mission, he was consistent in urging his congregation, his audience, to leave him and to leave London. He encouraged all those who could to desert the Babylon of London - “Babylondon”, as he often referred to it - and vowed to remain behind to serve those who could not, or would not, leave: at least until the way had been prepared by those who had gone before them into the countryside. And it must be remembered that this flight to the Land was no foolish idea: towards the end of Father McNabb’s life the Government was itself was in the face of war to encourage a return to the land, so as to increase agricultural produce from a degraded and untended land.

While objective material poverty may not now - save in exceptional cases - be so great as it was then, before the Second World War, who here would dare say that the various scourges of metropolitan life today are no worse?

Of course, the primary reason for Father McNabb’s detestation of squalid and degrading urban conditions was the effect they had upon family life. The family is the prime unit of Christian society - indeed of any society - and precedes the State in every respect. Father McNabb knew that all economic, social, and political acts had some effect upon the family: it was by their effect upon the family that he would measure their worth or morality. The family was what he called “the Nazareth Measure”. As he wrote in his book, The Church and the Land:

“All our personal and social building, to be lasting, must be trued by the measures of that little school of seers whose names are the very music of life - Jesus, Mary, Joseph!... the Nazareth measure of length and weight and worth is the Family... let no guile of social usefulness betray you into hurting the authority of the Father, the chastity of the Mother, the rights and therefore property of the Child.”

Father McNabb knew the importance of the strength that he had derived from his natural family, and the strength that he daily drew from his new spiritual family, his Dominican community. He always stressed that what changed when he “moved” from his natural family to his supernatural family were not the virtues he pursued but the vows he had taken. He was keenly aware of the need for lay people to be inspired amidst the many snares of the modern world to pursue heroic virtue, to imitate the evangelical counsels so far as their duties of state permitted. In his book, Old Principles and the New Order - a title that sounds quite prophetic to our own ears - he writes about charity, poverty, and obedience:

“[E]ven Catholics have sometimes come to think that the three virtues behind these religious vows were only for religious, whereas the three virtues are binding upon all individuals, and in some measure, upon that grouping of individuals... which we moderns...confusedly call the State’.”

On one level what Father McNabb says here is a truism - we must all strive to be chaste, poor - in spirit, let us say - and obedient: but upon closer examination Father McNabb is pointing out that these three virtues should be as much a daily call to arms as they are to the religious who have professed vows. For after all, as Father McNabb said:

“...the religious men or women who have publicly promised God to keep poverty, chastity, obedience are not thereby bound to more poverty, more chastity, more obedience than if they had remained as lay-folk in the world.”

Moreoever, Father McNabb added:

“[I]t need hardly be pointed out that the poverty of work and thrift, the self-control of virginal and conjugal chastity, the obedience to rulers and to law, are of the greatest social value and need.”

In many articles Father McNabb traced the decadent and withering effect of the State upon society to its neglect of poverty - through reckless expenditure, financial mismanagement, usurious practices - to its neglect of obedience - by going against the natural moral law and the laws of revealed religion - and to its neglect of chastity - by permitting, even encouraging, activities that undermined sexual or conjugal morality. Just as every individual should strive to be poor, chaste, and obedient, so too the State should aim to adhere to these three cardinal virtues.

One of Father McNabb’s hardest lessons to his own and to our generation concerns poverty. People nowadays are especially reluctant to consider what Father McNabb may have meant by poverty when he so encouraged people to embrace it. He was certainly not referring to indigence. To Father McNabb poverty meant having enough for your duties of state but no more: having no excess, no extravagance, no luxury - always giving, as Christian charity dictates, to those less fortunate what you yourself or those for whom you are responsible do not need. Certainly, what constituted “enough” in Father McNabb’s eyes would be considered as much too little by most of our contemporaries and even by most of us. But he was not recommending that we all become mendicants or fall into a life of helpless wretchedness and pauperism - only that we attempt to be self-sufficient, restrict our desires, limit our needs, and give from any over-abundance we possess. Many Catholics throughout the ages have fallen into complacency on this point by retreating behind the wall of “spiritual poverty”, by allowing themselves anything and everything on the basis that they are poor in spirit. Father McNabb of course realised the importance of spiritual poverty; realised that it was possible for a poor man to be more avaricious and more greedy than a rich man. But he also realised the dangers of riches, the difficulty of achieving spiritual poverty when surrounded by excess - and he also realised that the demands of justice and especially of charity required people to have less than they would probably like or would naturally have. Furthermore, he saw the embrace of poverty as a means of defeating the increasing materialism and destitution of the world about him.

Before moving on from the subject of poverty, I will leave you with this excerpt from The Church and the Land: it concerns the young man with great possessions from the Gospels:

“Only once did anyone come to Jesus after speech with Him and go away sad. This was the young man who had great desire to have everlasting life. But he also had ‘great possessions’. He did not know that for him the way to the joy of life was to accept the challenge of Jesus, ‘Go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven. And come follow me.’ He did not realise that his invitation to follow the poor Babe of Bethlehem, the poor man of Galilee, the poor outcast of Golgotha, was a call to enter the narrow path of perfect joy. He could not leave the things which sooner or later would leave him. He clung to his great possessions on earth rather than seek treasure in Heaven, and left the joy of wilful poverty and the following of Jesus for the sadness of wilful wealth and the service of Mammon.”

Father Vincent McNabb: a voice of contradiction (Part II)

So who was Father McNabb?

He was born Joseph McNabb, at Portaferry near Belfast on 8th July 1868. He was thus - I think importantly - senior to both Belloc and Chesterton, by two and six years respectively. His father was a sea captain whom he seldom saw: his mother was just that, a mother, and - in his eyes - all the more blessed for being “just” that (before her marriage, at a very young age, she had occupied an important sales and administration position in a New York department store). Not that she didn’t have other things than bringing up the children and managing the home to occupy herself with: one of Father McNabb’s first memories is of his mother taking him on a sick visit to a lady with a cancerous growth in her chest whom Mrs McNabb would wash and comfort. Mrs McNabb appears always to have played a leading part in parochial charity, and frequently to have commanded her children’s assistance. She was the mother of eleven children in total, Joseph McNabb being the tenth. In his later years he wrote a book, almost an autobiographical study of his early years, called Eleven, thank God! which he dedicated to his mother and which stands as a great apologia pro familia magna. Family always held a central place in Father McNabb’s world, as it indeed holds a central place in Rerum Novarum.

Although born in Ireland, by the age of 14 he had moved with his family to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on account of his father’s work. A move to London had been considered but the capital was thought to be too terrible a place for the bringing-up of children. For a short while Joseph McNabb continued to board for most of the year at St Malachy’s in Belfast until he was 16. However, the influence of his time in Newcastle was important to him, for his family moved into the parish of St Dominic’s which was - unsurprisingly - run by the Dominican Order. He was profoundly impressed by all he saw of Dominican life and spirituality, of their asceticism, their love for Holy Scripture and their profound learning; and so, after leaving St Malachy’s and taking one unsatisfactory year at St Cuthbert’s Grammar School in Newcastle, he decided to become a Dominican. Curiously, what appears to have been the principal human motive behind Father McNabb’s vocation was the same thing that drove Chesterton into the Catholic Church - fear of Hell. As he put it: “I don’t want to go to Hell; I think I’ll go to the Novitiate!” Undoubtedly, while many reasons can be identified for the motivation behind his vocation, the simple fact was that he felt God was calling him to become a friar in order to save his soul.

At the age of 17 - despite his father’s initial anger at his son deciding to pursue a vow of poverty: “I’ll never, no I’ll never consent to a child of mine becoming a voluntary pauper!”: an anger which only abated after a visit from a Dominican from the local Priory to explain the nature of poverty - Joseph McNabb entered the Dominican novitiate at Woodchester. The Dominicans at this time were but a small band: following their establishment at Woodchester in 1854, at the point of their lowest ebb in England, they were by 1885 only just beginning to attract novices and still barely had enough of them to justify a novitiate. Joseph McNabb’s entrance to the Order coincided with the beginnings of a comparative deluge of able and devout novices who entered in his year and the three or four years following, novices who once professed formed the basis of the Order’s rise to prominence during the first half of the twentieth century, principally under the aegis of Father Bede Jarrett.

As we have seen, Father NcNabb was ordained in September 1891, shortly after his 23rd birthday, and in the year of Rerum Novarum. He was the most brilliant scholar of his year in the novitiate, although the following years were to see some greater academic minds entering the Order. One of Father McNabb’s contemporaries wrote that “only Father Humbert Everest - who had left the novitiate for Louvain two years earlier - could have challenged [Father] McNabb’s intellectual supremacy”. Indeed, Father McNabb followed Father Everest to Louvain for further studies. By 1894, three years after his ordination, Father McNabb was sent back to Woodchester with his Doctorate in Sacred Theology.

For the next 26 years, Father McNabb was sent hither and thither as holy Obedience demanded. He taught novices at Woodchester for 3 years upon his return from Louvain and was then sent to Hawkesyard (where the senior novices were now taught) again for 3 years, to teach theology. For the following 6 years, 1900 to 1906, he was returned to Woodchester as Prior (at the tender age of 32): in 1906 he first went to St Dominic’s Priory in north-west London for the first time as parish-priest for two years from whence he was plucked back in 1908 to become Prior of Holy Cross, Leicester, for 6 years until 1914. In 1914 he was elected Prior of Hawkesyard, where he faced his severest personal and spiritual tests (and made some enemies - a point we will have to come to later), a position he served in for 3 years: for a further 3 years he served there as Professor of Dogma before returning to St Dominic’s Priory in London, where he served again as parish-priest until his death on 17th June 1943, some 23 years later.

Father Vincent McNabb: a voice of contradiction (Part I)

I suppose I shall place this here at the beginning. Had I lived more or less at the same time, spanning the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, one person I most would have wanted to meet, canonised Saints aside, is Father Vincent McNabb (admittedly run a close second by Hilaire Belloc). I wrote this almost five years ago. (I am notionally trying to write a full-length biography/study of the man and his thought. It has progressed very little over the last few years - in part, that lack of progess has helped give birth to this blog.)

“Every minister of holy religion must bring to the struggle the full
energy of his ‘mind’ and all his powers of endurance.”

If there is one thing, one single line of text, that could be said to have motivated the tireless apostolic work of Father Vincent McNabb, it is this line from the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII. This great papal “call to arms”, issued by Holy Mother Church just weeks before Father McNabb was ordained as a priest in the Dominican Order at the age of 23, illuminated all of his work and action: after Holy Scripture and the works of St Thomas it held pride of place in his heart. This should perhaps not be so surprising since he was a Dominican working for a large portion of his life in the slums of England, and Rerum Novarum was written - it is said - by Cardinal Zigliara, a noted Dominican scholar, in collaboration with the Pope, and was undoubtedly influenced by the life and work of the great English Cardinal Manning. Yet certainly no priest, no religious in England was as indefatigable as Father McNabb in his desire - in his work - to see the blue-print of Rerum Novarum put into action. Indeed, those Dominican students he taught while at Hawkesyard Priory remembered being instructed to keep a copy of the encyclical beside their beds: and his biographer (-of-sorts), Father Ferdinand Valentine, recalled being told to memorise the paragraph which Father McNabb thought was most central to Pope Leo’s work:

“There is general agreement that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-men’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organisation took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless under different guise, but with the like injustice, still practised by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”

It was to those living in the slums and decaying tenements and to those working in the factories and sweat-shops of London that Father McNabb brought these words of the Vicar of Christ: and as a priest he brought to them Christ’s power to inspire and to heal.

It is evident that Father McNabb is hardly known amongst Catholics today. Even amongst those who concern themselves with Tradition many may know his name but little more. Some may be aware that he is associated with that set of ideas known as Distributism (for which he was the principal inspiration); some that he was a well-known Dominican friar who frequently spoke at Parliament Hill and at Speaker’s Corner to the motley London throng; some that he was at one time a friend of Eric Gill and was connected with his community at Ditchling; perhaps most of those who have heard of him stumbled across his name while reading about Hilaire Belloc or G K Chesterton. All these mental associations are indeed aspects of the man, of the priest; yet he would, I think, like best to have been known for championing Rerum Novarum.

Father McNabb was - with some notable exceptions, principally within his own Order - held in high esteem by his contemporaries, even by those such as George Bernard Shaw or the Webbs, founders of the socialist Fabian Society, who could have most been expected to dislike him. During Father McNabb’s life, G K Chesterton wrote of him, in the introduction to his, Father McNabb’s, book, Francis Thompson And Other Essays:

“Now I am nervous about writing here what I really think about Father Vincent McNabb for fear that he should somehow get hold of the proofs and cut it out. But I will say briefly and firmly that he is one of the few great men I have met in my life; that he is great in many ways, mentally and morally and mystically and practically... nobody who ever met or saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him.”

Hilaire Belloc, who was in many ways temperamentally similar to Father McNabb, wrote this about him after his death in the Dominican journal Blackfriars in 1943:

“The greatness of his [Father McNabb’s] character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgement, was altogether separate from the world about him... the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness... I can write here from intimate personal experience [here, Belloc refers to Father McNabb visiting Belloc - at the latter’s request - immediately after the premature death of Elodie Belloc, his wife, in 1914] ... I have known, seen and felt holiness in person... I have seen holiness at its full in the very domestic paths of my life, and the memory of that experience, which is also a vision, fills me now as I write - so fills me that there is nothing now to say.”

Perhaps appropriately, that memorial, that obituary, was the last thing that Belloc penned (or dictated) for publication before his death some ten years later.

Monsignor Ronald Knox, who was, in many ways, Father McNabb’s temperamental opposite, wrote, when asked for his opinion on the move - in the 1950s - to start a process for Father McNabb’s beatification:

"Father Vincent is the only person I have ever known about whom I have felt, and said more than once, ‘He gives you some idea of what a saint must be like.’ There was a kind of light about his presence which didn’t seem to be quite of this world.”

But perhaps my favourite tribute to him from his famous contemporaries - in one way at least - comes from the pen of Maurice Baring and through the eyes and ears and reflections of an unbeliever. To give some background: Cecil Chesterton, G K Chesterton’s brother, died in 1918 from trench fever caught while serving at the Front: he had converted to Catholicism in 1913. Before joining up, he had been a pugnacious journalist who had fought against financial and political corruption in Parliament, had been successfully but wrongfully sued by the Isaac brothers for revealing their part in the Marconi Scandal, and was in Belloc’s view the more able of the Chesterton brothers (a view that, I have to add, no-one else seems to have held, the humble G K Chesterton aside). Father McNabb preached at Cecil Chesterton’s funeral: sadly, no copy of the sermon survived (Belloc referred to it as the greatest piece of sacred oratory he had ever heard) but Maurice Baring published a poem in the 1943 August issue of Blackfriars inspired by the comments of an unbeliever friend and poet who had accompanied Baring to the funeral:

“A poet heard you preach and told me this:
While listening to your argument unwind
He seemed to leave the heavy world behind;
And liberated in a bright abyss
All burdens and all load and weight to shed;
Uplifted like a leaf before the wind,
Untrammelled in a region unconfined,
He moved as lightly as the happy dead.
And as you read the message of Our Lord
You stumbled over the familiar word,
As if the news now sudden to you came;
As if you stood upon the holy ground
Within the house filled with mighty sound
And lit with Pentecostal tongues of flame.”