Two Reviews

Nazareth or Social Chaos by Father Vincent McNabb OP

It is startling, given his deserved reputation as a champion of Rerum Novarum, how few books by Father McNabb touch directly and in the plain fullness of their substance upon the Social Teaching of the Church. Certainly his life was one long sermon upon that Teaching, but amongst his books of retreat conferences, scriptural meditation, theology and hagiography, that Teaching is only touched upon occasionally, and then indirectly. Even in his more general books of essays such as Thoughts Twice-Dyed or Wayside, a Priest's Gleanings, references to the great social questions of the day and to the Church’s response are fewer than one might expect.

In truth, the core of Father McNabb’s writings on the Church’s Social Teaching can be found in three books: The Church and the Land (recently reprinted by IHS Press), Nazareth or Social Chaos, and Old Principles and the New Order. The first of these (even before its reprint) is by far the best known of the triumvirate, if only for the opening essay, A Call to Contemplatives, its advocacy of ‘the Nazareth Measure’ – that all legislation and policy be measured by its effect upon the welfare of the Family. Old Principles and the New Order is a more compendious and diverse book, but contains sublime nuggets of McNabbian wisdom and insight.

Nazareth or Social Chaos is perhaps the most overlooked of the three, despite the thundering challenge of its title. It was first published in 1933, soon after The Church and the Land (1927) and, like that preceding volume, stands as a compilation of essays and short pieces penned for a wide array of periodicals and newsletters, from GKs Weekly to The Columban. Like The Church and the Land, in some of its particularity and detail it suffers from the passage of time. But beneath that, in every essay the principles invoked remain timeless, apposite and challenging. Indeed, the topicality of many of the essays, despite their 70 year old particularity and detail, is at times remarkable.

Father McNabb was – in his writings – a man of few words. Very occasionally overcome by righteous indignation or native Ulster sentimentalism, his prose is almost always hard and gem-like. It can seem cold and unyielding, but it has facets aplenty, and often one phrase carries the weight of what would be in another writer’s book a paragraph or even a page’s worth of substance. Much has to be carefully unpacked from a McNabb essay. Sometimes the telescoping of his intellectual process is too great for me: I cannot follow him every step he takes, because I simply cannot keep up with the speed at which he moves from one idea to the next. I can assent to his conclusions without following his train of thought for its entire passage through the essay. Usually, I can follow – and do follow – slowly but steadily, each of his thoughts condensing centuries of volumes of learning, of philosophy, of the glorified Catholic common sense that is Thomism – and condensing too his own profound wisdom, ascetic and pastoral experience and spiritual insight.

One essay in particular stands out: Things and Tokens. In all of McNabb’s work, there is great emphasis laid on the difference between value and price, between primary things and secondary things, between real wealth and token wealth, money. Again his work is dominated by the principle that we can expect from the average person no more than the average goodness, which is why we must all flee occasions of sin, which are occasions when, not to succumb to temptation, an average person needs more than average goodness.

As with many of his essays, Father McNabb’s mind was set a-whirring by a text, in this case a line from Holy Scripture, from St John’s account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. St John records how those who were hungry took “as much as they would”. Father McNabb comments: “If the Eternal Wisdom, instead of miraculously providing bread and fishes, had provided money, St John would have been unable to say that as much as each one wanted Jesus gave.” As ever there is much to unpack from this text and from Father McNabb’s comment. Together they reflect upon the nature of charity, upon the practice of economy; they touch upon social welfare, and they of course give some insight into how Christ allowed His Will to be conditioned, as it were, by the will of Man. Father McNabb goes on:
“In a system mainly of things, the average person may be trusted to limit his wants by his needs. But in a system mainly of tokens, the average person cannot be trusted to limit his wants by his needs… no man desires an infinite meal… no man desires an infinite house… no man desires an infinite field to till… but the undue desire of these tokens tends to a certain infinity,.. for tokens...excite an unsatisfied indefinite desire.”

Thus, desire for money is infinite. Thus also desire for other tokens, other shadows of real things, is likewise infinite. This desire is made even stronger by the realisation that money has no value but only represents price and prices shift even while value is constant. A certain amount of wheat will always be capable of feeding a certain number of people for a certain period of time. Its current money equivalent may in a week’s or month’s time be able to purchase not even half of that amount of wheat. But there are other tokens than money. The world of fashion is full of shadows and tokens – fashion in clothes, fashion in music, art: the fickle World creates an endless flow of ever-changing and never necessary things which stand for wealth, or standing, or for ‘good taste’, or for position in society, or for ‘up-to-dateness’. The ephemera of modernity stoke the infinite desire for those things which are neither necessary nor truly real.

“Everywhere there will be the very definite desire to have more and more token-wealth. The very uncertainty of the future value of this token will heighten and foster the desire.”

Even setting aside monetary value, i.e price, the “fashion value” of all these shadow-things changes almost by the hour. Those things of fashion that are bought today are tomorrow worthless as things of fashion. The modern world equates these shadows and tokens with wealth. It considers poverty to be the absence of these tokens and shadows: it considers poverty to be not having enough, as if one can ever have enough, of these tokens and shadows. It believes poverty – having enough of real wealth – to be the same as destitution – not having enough of real wealth. In its confusion, part deliberate and part the result of ignorance – it has made the word ‘poverty’ stand for a vice rather than for a virtue.

“Bethlehem and Nazareth poverty is not a defect to be remedied, but fundamental condition of all ultimate remedy and redemption.”

We must increasingly strive to separate ourselves from shadows and tokens, however difficult. When we still must use them we must increasingly see them as shadows and not as realities, and we must desire instead the primary things, the real things. The World over which Satan rules is a shadow world: by holding on to the solid things of God we will keep ourselves from falling into the Enemy’s Shadow.




Old Principles and the New Order by Father Vincent McNabb OP


In many respects this book, first printed in 1942, is Father McNabb’s opus magnus on social issues. Like The Church and the Land and Nazareth or Social Chaos it is a compendium of articles, in this instance dating principally from the late 1930s, although one or two were penned after the commencement of the Second World War. It was compiled and prefaced by Maisie Ward. It was almost the last work to come out under Father McNabb’s name, before his death in 1943, and was the product of a man in his seventies but still very active, preaching at Speaker’s Corner and Parliament Hill, at sundry public meetings and Catholic conferences.

This book is probably the most thorough and ordered of his non-theological works. In good part, this is down to Maisie Ward’s organization of its structure: Economics and the Gospel (what Holy Scripture records about morally sound economics); The Land of Shadows (a critique of token and false wealth, of shifting price and the insubstantiality of money); Land and the Legislators (how to return sanity to society by returning families to the land, and how to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of this exodus); Land and the Cultivator (how living on the land benefits families and society, how it is the basis for sanity and charity and wisdom – and the source of real wealth, of a sufficiency of food, clothing and shelter). The book then shifts on to more historical/theological issues – Centralism and the Clergy – before ending with a series of letters, more general essays and aperçus.

But while this arrangement lends the book order, what truly lends it the magnificent focus that gives that order such true weight and impact is the author’s own introduction. I have quoted from this introduction before, but it is more than worth setting down again.

“The Church is not primarily interested in politics or economics, because neither economics nor politics are primary.
Yet the Church is necessarily and greatly interested in politics and economics because both politics and economics are moral.
This book, therefore, has been written by a priest-teacher of the Church, not as a politician nor as an economist seeking the civil well-being of the State. But it has been written by a theologian whose concern must be for those moral principles which are the necessary root of the civil well-being of the State.
The book rests therefore on
1.Certain dogmatic and moral principles;
2.Certain undeniable facts; and it makes
3.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 out fellow-creature.
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 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 [because of the temptation to contracept, amongst other things].
This is, as we shall see, authoritatively asserted by Pope Pius XII when he couples Flight from the Land with the degradation of marriage.
From this observed fact that the industrialized town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be fled, this Flight from the Land must now be countered by Flight to the Land.”

And this fixes the mind in all that is to be read not so much upon the differences between real things and tokens, a prominent theme in Nazareth or Social Chaos, but upon the allied theme of the City and the Land. It re-echoes the call of that great first essay in The Church and the Land, A Call to Contemplatives: a call to leave ‘Babylondon’ for the fields of England; to flee the occasion of sin for the opportunity for virtue. For the Land promotes charity and poverty and self-restraint and is the enemy of luxury and sloth. The Land welcomes the Family: the City is its enemy.

Yes, the City is an occasion of sin (can anyone of us deny this?). Father McNabb in thus describing the City had in mind principally its temptation to race-suicide, to contraceptive greed, sloth and selfishness. But he was also thinking of its preoccupation with token and unreal wealth, with the sham of fashion, with luxury and excess, with its focus on things that are to do primarily with enjoyment rather than with. (How often has the Church told the World that if you seek happiness for itself you will never find it, but if you seek God or the Things of God happiness will be given unto you?) “A State organized for leisure is a State organized for pleasure. And a State organized for pleasure is a State organized for – Hell!” (Can anyone of us deny that society now is consumed by a lust for leisure, and that much of its leisure is also an occasion of sin?) The City will tend always to decadence: the moderns revel in their decadence, too dulled or stupid to realize that decadence is decay and decay precedes collapse.

To escape the City (the World, occupied in force by the Flesh and the Devil) we who live in the City (or at its edge) must turn inwards. This is the very least we can do to survive. Our Children do not (largely) go to the local school; often they are home-schooled. They are seldom allowed out to play in the local parks or on the streets. If there is a television set it is used exclusively for videos, under adult supervision. We try to shun the City. But it is there all around us. The local newsagent is festooned with pornography. The young Mum on the bus is reading a publication which has pictures and stories that even a non-Catholic young male twenty years ago would have shunned. Immodest dress, vulgarity and excess of luxury and token wealth are promenaded as today’s fashion accessories. In the City we must seal our Children hermetically in our Houses or our People Carriers to keep out the toxicity of the World. Is this the best we can do? Is this the life we want to give them, which we ourselves want to lead?

In this book Father McNabb will force us to move towards finding the answer to this question, however awkward it might be. For a workman, is it not preposterous to live in constant fear of disease, of accidental injury, by choosing to live or work where disease is rife or injury likely? Is not City living for Catholics today, particularly Catholic families, likewise preposterous?

Shun the City and embrace the Land. The World will think us mad, but that is no loss as the World’s understanding of sanity is crazed and unhealthy. Shun the World and embrace the worship of God amidst His Creation: not the structures and streets and filth of Man, but the green fields and shady groves of the Lord.

Belloc as Catholic Historian

An article I penned for 'Mater Dei', based upon an introduction I wrote for the recent IHS reprint of Belloc's "Charles I"

If Belloc most wanted to be remembered for his serious verse – although he thought its quality too slight to merit the devoted attention of posterity (a judgement from which I, for one, demur) – he is perhaps best known today as the author of the humorous “Cautionary Verses for Children”, and for his historical works. Although he was a historian by training, having read what even then was dubiously referred to as Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford (in between bouts of orating, throwing port, belittling unbelievers, singing, presiding over the Union and walking here and there at tremendous pace with a bottle of wine in one pocket and chunks of bread and cheese in the other), he often felt more duty than pleasure in writing his numerous histories. Certainly, his very first historical works, on the French revolutionaries Danton and Robespierre, were written with a good degree of enjoyment, but as he went on, often reluctantly, to write more and more histories and biographical studies (mostly of characters from English history during or immediately after the Reformation) he was motivated less by pleasure and more by the desire he felt, the need he realised, to rectify the distortion of official Protestant Whig history in this country and to present to the people at large a history that was real, true (as much as a historian can make it) and proportionate. On occasion, this writing of history became to him a drudgery, a weary trudging over territory already over-familiar to the writer (and perhaps to the reader!): at times, only encouragement from those who knew the importance of Belloc’s task – such as the great Father Vincent McNabb – made him press on with the task. This was especially the case once his enemies, often the enemies of Catholic Truth, decided to attack him and his writings with remarkable vehemence.

Of course, to Belloc, being described as a Catholic historian would have seemed something of a tautology. In an eminently lucid article he wrote in the 1930s (“The Historian”, collected in “One Thing and Another”) he begins a long exposition of the nature of the historian by defining the creature in question as one “who tells a true story in writing”. This is something of a disappointingly basic definition, on one level. But as Belloc explains each of the key terms in this clause it becomes clear that he means something very particular indeed. After setting out that a historian can either write for those who share his world-view or for those who do not, that essential to true history is proportion and factual establishment, he adds: “without a true philosophy – that is a true religion – true history cannot be written”. And this is the nub of it. Belloc would admit that non-Catholics could write good history, but it was either accidentally good, that is good despite their own views, or it was history of a period when the “Catholic dilemma” (to revile it, laud it, or treat it – as Belloc did – as it deserved to be treated in its historical context) did not apply. For Belloc, the end of history was “the establishment of the Truth”. As this Truth was essentially connected to matters of Theology and to the central fact of the Incarnation, history that failed to recognise the presence of Christ in the world (a presence for Belloc particularly visible in His Mystical Body, the Catholic Church) was false history. Better that a man should revile it but recognise it than not see it at all or pretend its non-existence.

Given this signal fact, it is perhaps unsurprising that lazy and sceptical moderns have a very low opinion of Belloc as an historian. However, it is necessary to say that while suspicion of his Catholic sympathies underlies this low opinion, there is more to it than that. There can of course be no doubt that Belloc had the intellectual apparatus to write what even moderns would currently accept as competent and accurate history. A first class Honours degree from Oxford University was not given for oratorical abilities or prose skills alone. And there can be no doubt that Belloc was one of the greatest animators of the historical past in the English language. Belloc knew that in the accurate invocation of the past lay as much Truth as in his analysis (his ability to summon up the past belies to some extent the sceptic in him, in the same way that his frequent tears during the last line of the “O Salutaris Hostia” belie his claim to be incapable of religious feeling). Certainly he was the greatest of the animators of the past to escape the ludicrous Whiggisms that so beset Macaulay’s majestically evocative prose. Macaulay could write beautifully - but Belloc could write just as well, and most historians, even modern ones, would have to concede that Belloc was in general terms more accurate.

The truth is that historians are wary of Belloc. Many easily disparage him; a good number airily admit his talents but would not admit him to the reading list for their students; few will risk praise. Guedella, a near-contemporary historian of good standing even today, sought Belloc’s advice and research skills on occasion: and Norman Stone (Margaret Thatcher’s favourite historian, some have mischievously claimed) said in a comparatively recent newspaper interview that “in the end, I shall go to Trevelyan’s enemies, Hilaire Belloc and Lord Acton, both Catholics, for an understanding of modern England.”. No doubt, on a purely academic level even his greatest advocates would advise some caution (which says something about the dessicated nature of academic history). On a personal note, as I was about to depart for Oxford to read Modern History (sadly not at Balliol - although it was a lesser place in my time) I was warned off Belloc by one tutor, only to find his books on the reading list of another (a rarity!). “Read him first” I was told by this approving don (who yet did not like Chesterton). “He is largely right in his conclusions, somewhat over-selective in his facts: most of what you will read thereafter you will find happily fits into his analysis, which is as it should be, because, as I said, he is indeed largely right.”

The reasons for Belloc’s uncertain reputation are principally three: he (they say) wrote history as propaganda, selective, biassed history that reflected his own desire to exalt Catholicism; he (they say) made many simple and glaring errors in his books and was lackadaisical about correcting them in subsequent editions - a sure sign of someone who was indifferent to truth; he (they say) didn’t reference his sources and therefore a priori has to be treated as untrustworthy and his books ill-researched.

Firstly, it has to be understood that no history can be written, humanly speaking, with absolute objectivity or lack of bias. The golden ideal (as some moderns would have it) of “perfect history” is unattainable by man (and therefore, thank God, by machine). It is impossible for any historian not to be selective in his facts and evidence. All historians (except some of the moderns who think such things beneath them) attempt to reach conclusions, and in so doing can logically be accused of bias and selectivity in that attempt. The amusing charge of propaganda I will come to later.

Secondly, Belloc acknowledged his inability to get every fact right all the time, and remarked frequently upon other historians’ failure ever to get anything fundamentally right. Quite how so many more accurate historians could count every single tree and list them by species and size and never see the wood was something that often caused Belloc great mirth. Belloc was often slapdash (except with regard to his “set-pieces” which I will shortly touch upon), rarely checked his facts once written down, and never checked his publishers’ galley proofs (if he could help it). In writing his study of James II, in north Africa of all places, with the Sahara as the rather discordant backdrop, a task which he accomplished in ten days, he relied upon a small book of notes and his voluminous but not infallible memory. What was remarkable about Belloc was the fact that any errors he committed in no way impaired his ability to discern the Truth or seriously undermined the strength of his conclusions.

Thirdly, Belloc loathed the systematic and frequent use of footnotes. I wish I had the space here to quote from some of Belloc’s humorous rants against the use of footnotes. The prime cause of this loathing was Edward Gibbon who, in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, showed rare mastery of the black art of deceitful foot-noting. Belloc’s loathing was also a reaction against the growing paralysis hindering historical writing with historians often writing only for other historians and consequently keen to devote to each line of their text at least six lines of self-important foot-notes. This habit particularly beset the French “annaliste” school of social historians whose books often resembled nothing more than a compilation of references, end-notes, foot-notes and bibliographies. Belloc often remarked that history had to be readable to be history, which would immediately sweep numerous modern histories into the pulper (“that dense phalanx of modern academic historians whose work is as dry and dissociated, as detailed and formless, as sawdust, and properly speaking is not history at all.”). The perverse inwardness and self-congratulatory attitude of over-referenced works Belloc found positively fetishistic. He believed most foot-notes to be unnecessary: they often referred only to other secondary sources which themselves then did likewise, and one - pursuing the distant hope of a primary source - was often left dismayed. Often, when followed up, the source referred to was found to contradict the text, or to be entirely outwith its relevance (this was a particular fault - trick! - of Gibbon’s). Footnotes were seemingly used as academic semaphore, to demonstrate supposed mastery of a period to other insecure historians, and to signal dominance over the hoi polloi who must bow down before the properly indicated learning of the writer in question.

Belloc understood the importance of the primary sources more than most historians of today. Indeed he was, more than other historians, forced to rely upon the original evidence since so much of the historical commentary that had been written in English was Whiggish, Protestant bunk. Even now, historians - yes, modern ones - are discovering just how much of the detail that he put into some of the more descriptive passages of his histories is borne out - is indeed founded upon - the very close study of previously neglected primary sources.

I will now come on to a fourth point, which I think lies behind much of the above criticism of Belloc’s historical writings, and which is touched upon by the accusation of propaganda. Belloc is a deliberately and strenuously didactic historian. This a great heresy these days, as it was to some degree when he wrote; and is an even greater heresy on account of what Belloc was being didactic about. In our universities, more frequently than not, history is now written as a bare, turgid stream of data capped with a pleading codicil from the author that the facts are so complicated that he can see no pattern but the hope remains that some pattern may be discerned in the future. (Some hope! Students trained by blind teachers will seldom understand what they see, even if they see it.) When opinion surfaces at all, it is tentatively held and robustly restrained from being presented as fact. The only dogmas offered up to the hungry masses are the thin and poisonous gruel of the unsurpassed excellence of liberal, secular, capitalistic democracy (which Belloc saw as the dung it was). Modern historical study so often languishes blankly in agnosticism: Belloc’s history was certain, decisive, trenchant, the very qualities that weak-willed prevaricators loathe in the Faith. How absurd it is that so many present-day academic institutions should be so empty of the desire to teach, or of the knowledge of what should be taught.

Belloc would also have laughed at those moderns who sneer at historical biography and consider it as a low form of intellectual work, mainly the province of the amateur rather than academic historian. Although this view isn’t as widespread amongst academic historians as it was in my own time at University, it still holds sway in many faculties across the land. Most of Belloc’s histories are in fact biographical studies. As someone who appreciated the full wickedness of materialistic, monist, pseudo-scientific and proto-Marxist histories, he grasped that Man and not some impersonal (often philosophically convenient) force was, under God’s Will and His Providence, the most important force in history. As a believer in Free Will (which determinists notoriously take for granted in their personal lives and only dare reject when they preach their deceit from the pulpit) he knew that human motives were crucial to understand any period of history and used the lives of great men to illumine their age. He would also have reviled the modern trend of psycho-sexual obsessiveness. Written historical biographies – and, even more noticeably, television and radio documentaries - seem unable to free themselves from the Freudian idée fixe that a man can be best measured by the extent of his sexual appetites or by the “complexity” of his perversities.

For Belloc, history for history’s sake (indeed, biography for biography’s sake) was as great and dangerous a lunacy as art for art’s sake. History, as all things, must serve Truth, for all history was the record of conflict of one kind or another, and all conflict was ultimately theological, residing within the frame of the great Truths of the Faith. In short, the fact that Belloc often did write what moderns would not accept as competent or accurate history is something that redounds to the discredit of the moderns, not of Belloc. His sights were set very much higher than the sort of thing churned out by the gallon from educational institutions today.

If Belloc were available on prescription he should without hesitation be recommended to every history faculty in the West (and beyond) as an antidote to wretched agnosticism and relativism, and to the ignorant slavery that still ties most historians to the bare few “facts” of contemporary thought that still prevail – the supremacy of democracy, the progressive effects of capitalism, and the abhorrent nature of the old Catholic order. Belloc taught history as FACT in his books, fact unsullied by the nauseating smugness of the historians of his time (and ours) who worshipped the Money power at the altar of secular, liberal, democracy. He knew that a true understanding of fact required a true understanding of reality, an understanding almost uniquely preserved within the Faith. He considered it easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a man with no understanding of the Faith to write true history. In our age, when reality as understood by the vast majority of our peers seems even further from the teachings of Christ and His Church, who can say that he was wrong?

By the Grave of Fr Vincent

This piece is self-explantory. Some McNabbian devotees visited his grave in the summer of 2006 and I was amongst them.



He lies in a rather bleak spot, interred amongst his brethren, his grave surrounded by those people of London whom he loved so well. The grave is but a small stone’s-throw from a dark and damp wall beyond which rumble trains heading Westwards - out of London - and Eastwards - into the stench. The grave stone and slab are new, replaced when some Dominican brothers were interred at the turn of the century.

A small but ardent band of pilgrims gather on a cloudy November afternoon to pray the Holy Rosary over him and his brothers, not so much for his sake - for we are, I think, all of one mind that he is in a very much better place than we - but for the souls of whichever poor and unprayed-for Catholics lie nearby and for his intentions. Now we know that Fr McNabb had no intentions save those of his Father in Heaven, but so multifarious and innumerable are the intentions of Almighty God that each man reflects only one part of them.

And those intentions of Almighty God that Fr McNabb reflected were the intentions for which we pray - for the family, for a sane and Catholic society, for greater love for Our Lord and Our Blessed Lady, for Christian justice for the poor.

The peace of our prayers is shattered each minute or two by a rattling train - sometimes the shallow Underground rumble, sometimes the high speed InterCity roar. Before us to the south and west line upon line of graves run to the dark wall beyond which lie the small pokey houses that had sometime around the Second World War replaced the scandalous tenement slum-blocks of McNabb’s day. To the south and west, the ground swells up to the horizon in sloping rows of newer gravestones. Save for this small ardent band praying at the foot of Fr Vincent’s grave few people are about this day. The Cemetery of St Mary’s, Kensal Green, is in places shockingly dilapidated and has the air of a forgotten place. Some cemeteries carry with them a well-tended air of peace and order. This cemetery is wilder, more broken, and overgrown with sad neglect. Our Paters and Aves feel choked with weeds despite the glistening new stone over which we pray. The clouds darken and the wind whips our orisons into our faces.

It is hard to imagine that day, 63 years ago now, when the good Father was laid into the cold earth, to join two of his recently deceased brothers. The throng that had followed the cortege from St Dominic‘s Priory - his simple deal coffin, daubed in Greek with “Lord, Thou knowest all things: Thou knowest if I love Thee” , carried upon a simple horse-drawn workman’s cart - that throng had been very great. Many people must have squeezed into the paths around the open grave, some pushed up against the wall beyond which then even as now trains rumbled, their dark smoke coiling lazily in the bright June air. Belloc was there, almost his last public appearance before his secluded twilight years, to see his confessor and friend lowered into the ground. But for Belloc, Father McNabb was more than that. The great Dominican had comforted Belloc in the darkest days of his life, after his wife, Elodie’s, death, when his Faith almost failed him; had encouraged him, almost ordered him, to keep writing to defend the Faith and Reason against the Modern Foe; had been his guide and - as GK Chesterton put it - ‘probably the only man who had any influence’ over Belloc in the later years of his life. As Belloc wrote in his obituary tribute of Father McNabb: “It would have been astonishing in any man to have discovered so profound a simplicity united to so huge a spiritual experience… Never have I seen or known anything on such a scale.”
McNabb was very properly interred in London soil. He would have had it no other way. His body has now at least in great part become one with the earth over which trod those to whom he ministered with such gentle fervour and fierce devotion.

Our Mysteries done, we turn and retrace our steps to the cemetery’s entrance, and return to our homes. This journey is filled with a special poignancy. Yes, today we lack someone of McNabb’s powers and Grace: we need friars - and priests - to preach as passionately as he did, and to match that glorious and holy rhetoric with actions of sublime charity. But the poignancy instead stems from the nature of the London through which we return home.

All ages have their vices. In that sense there has never been a truly Golden Age. But even McNabb would have recoiled - dumbstruck, I think - at the grotesque vices that are casually paraded across the capital, for all eyes to see clearly. Gross immodesty in dress; brazen homosexual behaviour; the manifest and squalid impurity of advertisements, of cinema, film and literature; the sexual vulgarity of language (the speech of the working man in particular has never been free of profanity, but the current sexual licence in speech, even from the young, would have appalled even the most robust navvy of McNabb’s day); the extraordinarily immature materialism; the surrender to naked capitalist and commercial banality, and to the culture not just of death but of emetic greed; the casual discourtesy at best and more usually bestial rudeness encouraged by ipods, mobile phones and the maddening paraphernalia of technological decay; and the grinning, cadaverous, Godless vapidity of the stuff with which the West seduces itself, day by day, and minute by minute, and second by second: - all of this would have rendered McNabb speechless and saddened to his tearful heart that afternoon in London.

We live amongst a declining, decadent, post Christian people, too deracinated and intoxicated with technological advancement and complete licence in matters of physical pleasure to even approach the lowest rungs of pagan dignity. Probably we are not - naturally - their betters in any respect. Only supernaturally has it been given us by God’s grace to see where we should aim, and to turn our eyes from the gutter to the stars.

Our lives must be like little flames amidst this hurricane of amoral, immoral, madness. So long as we are connected to God’s grace, and we do not sever that connection through Mortal Sin or apostasy, the light that is within us cannot be blown out no matter how wildly the winds rage, no matter how much light flickers and sometimes fades. When the world is fully dark, even a little light will seem a supernova.

Fr McNabb, pray for us!

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.