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."