Hilaire Belloc: Defender of the Faith

by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

Had we had ten Hilaire Bellocs in the English-speaking Catholic world in the past fifty years, we might have converted the whole kit-and-caboodle and avoided the mess we find ourselves in today. Hilaire Belloc, coupled in memory always with his great friend G. K. Chesterton, made the defence of the Faith the main business of his life. He wielded a mighty sword.

With that impossible declaration behind me, I might better begin with a story told about him — he was a man who collected myths about his person, and I cannot verify the truth of this. Upon being honored with a papal decoration well into his old age, Belloc refused to put out the money needed to buy the medal and grumbled: “What would they say if I changed my mind?”

Hilaire Belloc was not built to fit any cloth fashioned by mortal man. Although he often groused about his own age (I do not mean his chronological age — he always complained about that! — but his moment in time), Belloc would have been impossible in any other age. Growing up as he did, in the twilight of the reign of Queen Victoria, blinking brilliantly in nonsense verse and radical politics in the time of King Edward VII, a child prodigy called by his aunt “Old Thunder”, Hilaire Belloc reposed upon a broad upper-middle-class English society that read him, first adored him, then good-naturedly put up with him, and finally isolated him. “I was once welcome in that house”, he commented wistfully when the automobile in which he was driving passed the home of an exceedingly rich man. His intransigent defense of all things Catholic first amused a literate and basically skeptical gentry looking for novelty; then offended; finally, it was considered intolerable.

A. N. Wilson in his biography of Belloc wrote: “If I created a character in a novel as Hilaire Belloc, people would not believe it.” Belloc was a paradox: a lyrical poet who never read any contemporary poetry; a rhymester whose high finks still charm children; an artilleryman on bivouac at Toul who smelled the Revolution as “France went by”; an aging monarchist who savored the last charge of Charles I at Naseby; the most versatile and certainly the finest English prose stylist in this and possibly any century, who grumbled from the liberty of his battered old boat, the Nona, “dear reader, read less and sail more” even as he lusted for bigger and better-paying audiences; the perpetual wanderer tramping Europe, burning for adventures even as he sang the praises of a rooted peasantry and a hearth steeped in seasonable traditions that “halted the cruelty of time”; the enemy of the rich and of capitalist greed, who once asked for a bucket of money as a birthday gift; the passionate advocate of Truth, who once groused, however, “that the truth always limps”; the drummer boy of an English-speaking Catholicism he helped make proud of itself.

At my last count, Hilaire Belloc wrote 153 books. The business has to do with vigor, an enormous lust for life, and a willingness to make mistakes. Belloc did not give a damn for what anybody thought of him. He wrote his life of King James II in a hotel on the edge of the Sahara in ten days: “It is full of howlers and is the fruit of liberty.” He walked to Rome as a young man, coming in upon the Appian Way on a mule drawn cart — but with his feet dragging on the road so his vow would not be broken.

His vigor was legendary, and I have mentioned as well his lust for life. Belloc — and this is a key to understanding his role as a Catholic apologist — was a man totally at home in this world, but one who knew it was an illusion to be so at home. There was not a trace of Manicheanism in him, and he called puritanism, in his biography of Louis XIV, an “evil out of the pit”, meaning the pit of hell. A mountain climber, he was even more a sailor. His Hills and the Sea and The Cruise of the Nona are classics. If The Path to Rome is the work of a young genius, rollicking and rolling his way over mountain and valley toward the Eternal City, The Four Men, on the contrary, called by its author “A Farrago”, was penned in solitude mixed with melancholy. Grizzlebeard, the Poet, and the Sailor are all extensions of Myself, and Myself is Belloc. Only when life is lived close to the senses, when the intelligence is engaged immediately on what is yielded to man through the body, is the paradox of sadness in created beauty brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after page of Belloc’s writing is troubled by a deep and troubled gravity, heightened by his profound communion with the things of his world: English inns; old oak‑burnished and sturdy; rich Burgundy and other wines” that port of theirs” at the “George” drunk by the fire with which he began this book; the sea and ships that sail — but, please, “no abomination of an engine”; the smell of the tides. These loves run through Belloc’s essays, recurring themes testifying to a vision movingly poetic in its classic simplicity. His eyes are fixed on the primal things that always nourished the human spirit, on the things at hand. He wrote:

Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have no part, I know nothing.

It was this very man, rooted in this world and not in the next, who was to become the first defender of the Catholic Church in England during his lifetime. A key to his understanding of things spiritual was his vivid awareness that all things good pass, that life is filled with what Allan Tate called “rumors of mortality”. In an essay named “Harbour in the North”, Belloc brings his little cutter under a long seawall, and there meets another small vessel. The pilot declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a harbor of whose fame he has heard. “In that place I shall discover again such full moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without failing.” The stranger, of course, is Belloc’s Sailor; and Myself, Belloc himself, answers from his own boat — the Ship of Mortality — “You cannot make the harbour . . . . It is not of this world.”

An almost savage realism mixed with Belloc’s sensibility, and his meditations on death are the most moving in all English letters. Read of the execution of Danton, written in the fires of early youth; of the murder of King Charles I; of the deathbed conversion of King Charles II; and, finally, in his Elizabethan Commentary, one of his last books, Belloc reveals himself: “She felt that she was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will feel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of Azrael.” Belloc’s emotional skepticism is at its purest in an essay called “Cornetto of the Tarquins” in his Towns of Destiny. Speaking of those tombs which are of the origins of us all, he tells us of “the subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed on Rome and from which we all inherit — then as I thought to myself, as I looked westward from the wall, how man might say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not whence it came, nor whither it goes”. Confessing himself to be of a skeptical mind, in a famous letter to Chesterton on the occasion of Chesterton’s conversion, Belloc’s skepticism was conquered by his faith, but the temptation to despair remained with him all his life. To me, this has always seemed strange because Heideggerian angst and dread before the specter of the Nothing seem the peculiar and often awful temptations of those with a metaphysical bent of mind — and Belloc had none at all. In The Cruise of the Nona, he wrote “of the metaphysic . . . who can see it and who can bite into it? It is of no use whatsoever.” Altogether without philosophical preoccupations, he was nonetheless haunted by the temptation that at bottom there is no answer to the riddle of human existence. His conquest of that aberration made his faith something hard, crystal clear, without compromise. Of religions other than the Catholic he had an Olympian contempt and an impatience only barely disguised and then imperfectly. He would not have fared well in these days of ecumenical tea parties, and the so‑called New Church would have bewildered him. Belloc frequently took pains to point out that tolerance is always of a lesser evil that cannot be vanquished at the moment, but vanquished it ought to be.

From whence, then, came his lyrical Catholicism, for which he was to sacrifice fame, all possibility of wealth — Belloc died a poor man — and every avenue — there were many of them — for a public career in politics? Born and baptized in the Church, a Catholic from childhood, his love and appreciation of the Faith came to him when young, but it came somewhat slowly. Of his inner life he tells us very little. French on his father’s side, Belloc — it must be remembered — did his military service in the French artillery, thus delaying his entrance into Oxford when he finally made up his mind to remain an Englishman. His spoken French remained that of a rough cannoneer. Latin European culture was the air he breathed in his youth and to which he returned whenever he could, even sailing across the channel to replenish his reserves of wine.

Were I to seek one scriptural passage which sums up Belloc’s vision of the Faith, it would be: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Mt 6:30). Aided here by a powerful visual imagination which was brought to bear in his many military histories, Belloc could see the Church at work down the ages — and he adored what he saw. The Church made Europe and in so doing quickened the old Roman Order, in disrepair but by no means destroyed by the Germanic tribes from the north. All our typical Western institutions were either created by Catholic men from out of nothing or were inherited from our pagan forefathers and then quickened from within by the yeast of Christianity. Although the terms incarnational and eschatological were not current in Belloc’s lifetime, he is a prime instance of a man with an incarnational understanding of religious truth. Belloc looked for blessings everywhere, and the whole of Christendom was for him an immense network of actual graces.

Making his own the Thomistic insistence that grace perfects nature, the inheritance of classical antiquity, he maintained, was preserved and transfigured in the fires of Faith. In our world — at least as Belloc knew it in what might have been its twilight: the subject is foreign to my paper today — men achieved a free peasantry that marked the whole of Europe for centuries. In that ordo orbis, justice flourished and free men discovering thus their liberty exercised it through two millennia in the creation of a culture that Belloc once called “the standing grace of this world”. There we all experienced not only a free citizenry but the sacredness of marriage, the dignity of men, chivalry, the steady rejection of Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the sacramental universe. These are to be found in Catholic Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and are to be found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this earth.

Belloc understood a rooted life, close to nature, as being humanly superior to the massification produced by modern civilization. Give a man a farm, a small business, an artisan’s anvil, a boat to sail, wine to drink — suffuse all this with the love of Christ; center man’s life around liturgical rhythms; and that man — at least Man writ in the large and taken by the handful — is happier than his industrial counterpart. A Catholic culture tends — and tends is the operative word — toward this kind of life. Tempering greed and avarice, man is then more than himself. As A. N. Wilson notes, in his introduction to a new edition of The Four Men, Belloc knew that his ideal was doomed, and his only consolation was an unholy glee in letting everybody else know that the world was going to hell: “I told you so.”

Hilaire Belloc, spreading his many talents and his incredible energy through the essay, a respectable body of very good verse, military history, nonsense novels, biography and books of travel, studies on the road, political polemics, economic theory, concentrated it all into a center, into a synthesized focus: the apostolate of history. Credo in unam, sanctam, apostolicam eccelesiam, we all recite — but Belloc took the note of apostolicity seriously. I do not mean this in the sense that Belloc showed a lively interest in controversy concerning the apostolic succession. He took that as a settled issue: Roma locuta est, causa finita. I mean it rather in the sense that he understood himself to be a man called to be an apostle. Ronald Knox, in his panegyric at Belloc’s grave site, called him more a prophet than an apostle. Possibly both Knox and I are right because Hilaire Belloc was a missionary in Protestant England, and his principal weapon was history. I doubt that this was a conscious decision, a free act exercised at one crucial moment in his life. By temperament and talent, Belloc was an historian. He soon concluded, shortly after his disillusion with parliamentary politics (he served two terms, one as a Liberal and one as an Independent), that the English‑speaking world had been lied to about its past and about its present, that this lie was bound up with the Protestant establishment, which officially dates from 1689 but which in fact reached far deeper into the English past.

Agreeing with Cobbett (whom, however, he rarely cited and who apparently had little direct influence on him: the two men converged in their historical judgment) that the Protestant Reformation “was the rising of the rich against the poor”, Belloc unpacked layer after layer of “official history” and turned over its foundation, a Great Lie. The religious zealotry of a handful of heretics was used by the mercantile and landed classes of England, aided by the lust of Henry VIII, to abolish the old Catholic Order. If Belloc had any real enemy, it was the Whigs. Of the Earl of Shaftsbury, he wrote: “He is probably in hell.” William of Orange he called that “little pervert”and, of course, the man was just that! Although Belloc never quoted Samuel Johnson’s famous “The Devil was the first Whig”, the whole weight of Belloc’s historical writing yields the same conclusion. But although Belloc loathed the Whigs, he had little in common with the Tories. A populist Catholic radical, a burned‑out republican by middle age, a man chastened into royalism, he would have been out with Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ‘45.

Time prohibits my detailing Belloc’s revolution in English historical writing. Suffice it to say — and this is said formally and altogether without rhetorical emphasis — that one man, Hilaire Belloc, turned the whole writing of British history around. Since Belloc, nobody can get away with understanding the Reformation as the work of high‑minded souls bent on liberty and democracy, noble souls who brought England out of the darkness of Catholic superstition and medieval obscurantism. Others footnoted Belloc and traded on his vision. They did well in doing so, but the vision was his — as was the persecution of silence that followed on his work.

If by their fruits ye shall know them, then the fruits of the Revolt against Rome have been sufficiently documented; more important, they have so pained the bones of all of us that to know them well is to revolt against the Revolt. Men were cheapened in their dignity. They cringed Calvinistically under a cruel and implacable God who damned most of them from all eternity to hell, and who filled the barns of the saved. The beauty and grandeur, even languor, of an old order of things gave way to a severity and grimness of style and manner that choked off man’s natural response to the beauty of the world God had created. Belloc would have none of it, and he exposed the fraud. Behind the psalm‑singing fanatics, there reposes the weight of what he called The Money Power, the new Capitalism and Banking System, that enslaved Europe to its greed. Belloc detailed it all in lavish description in book after book — toward the end, he was repeating himself. If his prose never bored, his arguments often did. The modern world, built on money and heresy, has had and has as its enemy the Catholic Church and the Order she has created. Quite clearly, Mr. Belloc, as he was called in his old age, did not like the modern world — gray, anonymous, bereft of beauty, craftmanship ignorant of nobility, shorn of dignity. Yet, as already noted, the England of his own time was probably the only place he could have flourished as he did. Winston Churchill offered him a high honor, in the name of the king, in the twilight of Belloc’s life, when the bombs were bursting over Britain. Belloc turned him down courteously.

Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, in a piece about liturgy a short time ago, that the only apologetic the Church has for her truth are her saints and her art. Neither are to be found anywhere else within the broad sweep of man’s adventure through time as they are in the Church. Belloc, I think, would have agreed in part with the cardinal. How often did our author pause before tower and church, the easy grace of French and English villages unspoiled by industrialism, as they broke upon vision at dawn and then heightened and blessed the woods and hills surrounding them? How often did he not speak of the Cathedral of Seville as the first marvel of Western art — and this from a man French and not Spanish in temperament? And did he not write the finest panegyric to Saint Joan of Arc — none is better — and do it in an English that matched the French of her own time? No: if the Faith be not the answer to the human heart, then there is none. But Belloc would probably have added to Ratzinger’s saints and art the entire social order brought into being by men who sensed, often obscurely, that if Christ’ were not in the marketplace, he was nowhere. And this, I hasten to add, from a man who held that the center of existence was the tabernacle of the altar. Those close to him have witnessed to his deepening devotion to the Eucharist as the years bent him down. Indeed, Belloc insisted, it was the hatred for and attack on transubstantiation that formed the center of the bitterness moving the English reformers in the sixteenth century. Read Belloc on Cranmer. They turned all the altars around and made of them tables and thus first obscured and finally denied what it is that gave life to Catholic churches and left all others temples reminiscent of tombs.

Faith is to be fought for and, once won — if won only precariously — cherished and watered, but not watered down. So too with the civilization crafted into being for us by the Faith: it must be loved and defended. We might all read Belloc’s meditation “Wall of the City”: within, the busy commerce of decent men who go about the pots and pans of life and who worship God as he is carried through the streets in the monstrance — and without, the enemy! Belloc articulated that enemy for his own time. The enemy is the barbarian, but he always used the word analogically; and the older barbarian before the walls comes off better than his modern counterpart for Belloc. “The Barbarian” within is the man who laughs at the fixed convictions of our inheritance. He is the man with a perpetual sneer on his lips. He is above it all: he judges the poor believer in the street or in the church, some old woman huddled before a shrine of the Virgin mumbling her beads, and he judges her harshly. It is hard enough to come by belief and to live in it, but to throw it away for a cheap joke is despicable. Such are the Barbarians.

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers .... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

Belloc is describing just about everyone you met at your last cocktail party or faculty meeting. Barbarians are everywhere.

Listen to Belloc again in words written from the solitude of the Sahara as he pondered the ruins of Timgad:

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

Of these men he added — and this too from the desert — “Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.” When our Lord vanishes from the household shrines of the West, the drums are muted and men worship abstractions — as they do today — new idols. But behind them there is an awful power, and it is not of this world.

Possessed of a highly poetic and prophetic mind, Belloc possessed as well a sharply honed intelligence. His The Servile State is a prolonged syllogism with not a metaphor in the whole book. His general thesis, argued in 1909, that the West was moving toward neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism is today a commonplace. It happened. We can either mourn or delight in our consumerist society. I get the impression that Belloc did a little of both. Be that as it may, his “distributist society” lies outside the scope of this paper. His Survivals and New Arrivals is closer to my subject. Islam, he predicted, will return because Islam is a permanent menace to the Faith. Islam has returned. Bible Christianity or Bibliolatry could return but probably will not: Belloc was wrong. Fundamentalism is with us everywhere today in the United States: vulgar, as Belloc said it always was, primitive in thought, as Belloc pointed out; sophisticated in its use of an electronic technology which he could not have predicted. Arianism, the modern name of which is modernism, has come back with a vengeance in the Church. Belloc sketched that possibility as well. All of his predictions in this interesting book were closely reasoned, but such argumentation, he admitted it, is often mocked by the mystery of the future. His reasoning prowess truly came into its own in several controversies: one with Coupon on medieval Catholicism, where Coupon got the facts right but turned the picture upside down; one with H. G. Wells on the origin of man, where Belloc complained privately that the Church hampered him because it has swallowed “all that Hebrew folklore”; and, finally, one with Dean Inge, where Belloc nails his enemy to the wall.

After answering point by point Dean Inge’s objections to Catholicism — some of them were infantile: no man can be an Englishman and a Catholic; others were vicious: the Church is “ a bloody and treacherous association” and an “imposter” — Belloc concluded his open letter with the following peroration. I beg your leave to read it as he wrote it:

There wholly escapes you the character of the Catholic Church .... You are like one examining the windows of Chartres from within by candle‑light but we have the sun shining through . . . . For what is the Catholic Church? It is that which replies, co‑ordinates, establishes. It is that within which is right order; outside the puerilities and the despairs. It is the possession of perspective in the survey of the world .... Here alone is promise, and here alone is foundation. Those of us who boast so stable an endowment make no claim thereby to personal peace; we are not saved thereby alone .... But we are of so glorious a company that we receive support, and have communion. The Mother of God is also our own. Our dead are with us. Even in these our earthly miseries we always hear the distant something of an eternal music, and smell a native air. There is a standard set for us whereto our whole selves respond, which is that of an inherited and endless life, quite full, in our own country. You may say, “all that is rhetoric.” You would be wrong, for it is rather vision, recognition, and testimony. But take it for rhetoric. Have you any such? Be it but rhetoric, whence does that stream flow? Or what reserve is that which can fill even such a man as myself with fire? Can your opinion (or doubt or gymnastics) do the same? I think not! One thing in this world is different from all others. It has a personality and a force. It is recognized and (when recognized) most violently hated or loved. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth.

Outside it is the night.
In haec urbe lux
sollennis,
Ver aeternum, pax
perennis
Et aeterna gaudia.

He once wrote that the French are blessed by the capacity to criticize themselves and to surmount their own criticism. Be that as it may, Hilaire Belloc rarely criticized the Church. He loved her altogether too much. He never answered personal attacks by fellow Catholics. It would have been, he said, a sin against his own body. Times change, and today a Catholic writer can make a good living attacking his own Mother. But Hilaire Belloc, coupled in memory always with his great friend G. K. Chesterton, made the defence of the Faith the main business of his life. He wielded a mighty sword. “Gigantes autem erant in terram in diebus illis.” “There were giants upon the earth in those days” (Gen 6:4). But the sword of Hilaire Belloc was buried with him. I gravely doubt whether we shall see his like again.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. “Hilaire Belloc: Defender of the Faith.” In The Catholic Writer: The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute 2 (1989): 83-95.

Reprinted by permission of The Wethersfield Institute.

THE AUTHOR

The late Dr. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen was professor of philosophy and politics at the University of Dallas, Irving, Texas. He wrote over 250 articles and fourteen books, among them Christianity and Political Philosophy, Citizen of Rome, and Being and Knowing. Just before his death in early 1996, he was at work on a collection of adventures and reflections of life and sailing the high seas entitled, Under Full Sail: Reflections and Tales.

Copyright © 1989 Ignatius Press

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The Good of Distributism: A Reply to Critics

by Thomas Storck

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to the replies to my article, "What is Distributism?" which appeared in the January issue of the Concourse. I will reply to Mr. Harold first. I welcome his comments on the evils of consumerism and the dangers inherent in the notion that property rights are absolute. He very rightly notes that it is necessary that individual and social attitudes toward these must change. "Structures are a function of attitudes, and it is capitalist attitudes which must be changed before capitalist structures can change." However, he and I differ, apparently, when it comes to the question of whether the state can have any positive role in bringing about such changes. Mr. Harold writes, "This is all very different, however, from any type of government coercion or political action to change structures, which is the approach of Marxism, and which seems to me the prime danger of distributism as explicated by Mr. Storck. It is one approach to try to conform our own attitudes and actions to the truth, and another to imagine that this strenuous task can be bypassed by blunt political action."

I have never advocated that state action should attempt to bypass conversion of heart, but I do not think there is any necessary opposition between these two modes of acting either. Just as the state can have a tremendous influence on opinion via bad laws--Roe v. Wade is a prime example--so by promoting good laws the state can influence opinion to the better. The 1931 encyclical of Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, in which the Pontiff called for a thorough renewal of society upon the basis of Christian morality, advocated both conversion of heart and legal action on behalf of social justice. Such sentiments have been echoed by numerous popes, as in these words of Pius XII:

And, while the State in the nineteenth century, through excessive exaltation of liberty, considered as its exclusive scope the safe-guarding of liberty by the law, Leo XIII admonished it that it had also the duty to interest itself in social welfare, taking care of the entire people and of all its members, especially the weak and the dispossessed, through a generous social programme and the creation of a labor code. (Address to Italian workers on the Feast of Pentecost, June 1, 1941)

Since, as St. Thomas taught, man is by nature a social and political being, we cannot ignore the role of the state in promoting a just society. It is true, as Mr. Harold states, that governmental action will accomplish little in the absense of a true conversion of hearts, but the point is that both are needed. One of Satan's biggest successes in the modern world has been to divide Catholics, and indeed many others, into two groups: those who look to the state for obtaining everything, and those who look only to individual or private activity or charity. But in fact neither of these two groups is correct.

Moreover, distributism, unlike socialism, does not look to the state to accomplish everything, but primarily works for the establishment of groups--modern "guilds"--which are not organs of the state and which are to play the most important role in ensuring that property serves its true end, namely, the promotion of human welfare.

Mr. Zoric and Mr. Welker, however, unlike Mr. Harold, do not seem to understand that the mere celebration of material riches hardly comports well with the gospel message. Yes, capitalism is certainly responsible for the creation of mounds of material goods. Mr. Zoric and Mr. Welker celebrate the ubiquity of telephones and electricity, cars, VCRs, microwaves, air conditioning, cable TV, washers and dryers. While I would not dispute that many of the inventions of the industrial revolution have done good, one wonders, however, if the indiscriminate production of all the above products really has brought men closer to our Lord, has helped to create a Christian society, has increased charity and justice in our hearts. Perhaps a few quotes would put the matter into perspective.

If abundance of riches were the ultimate end [of life], an economist would be ruler of the people...The purpose [finis] of the people having come together however seems to be to live according to virtue. For to this men come together, that they may live well together, which each one living by himself is not able to obtain; the good life however is according to virtue; the virtuous life therefore is the end [finis] of human society.(St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, I, 14)

John Paul II, speaking of the attempt by non-communist nations to rival communism in the years after World War II, wrote,

Another kind of response, practical in nature, is represented by the affluent society or the consumer society. It seeks to defeat Marxism on the level of pure materialism by showing how a free-market society can achieve a greater satisfaction of material human needs than Communism, while equally excluding spiritual values. In reality, while on the one hand it is true that this social model shows the failure of Marxism to contribute to a humane and better society, on the other hand, insofar as it denies an autonomous existence and value to morality, law, culture and religion, it agrees with Marxism, in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs.(Encyclical Centesimus Annus, no. 19)

And from the same encyclical,

It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards "having" rather than "being," and which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself.(Encyclical Centesimus Annus, no. 36)

And lastly, from one of our separated brethren, John Wesley: "I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion.... But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches." (Quoted by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.)

After their praise of the material products of capitalism, Mr. Zoric and Mr. Welker deal with some of the specifics of my article. They argue, for example, that my account of the stock market is incorrect. But the notion of a real connection between the investor/owner and the company is largely a capitalist fairy tale. If, as they argue, most investors hold stocks on a long-term basis, why do thousands of shares change hands every day, and why is the minute by minute rise and fall in stocks so eagerly watched by both traders and investors? In fact, there is little similarity between private property as the popes have championed it and private property as it exists via shares of stock.

I also stated the following: "If my business supports myself and my family, then what right do I have to expand that business so as to deprive others of the means of supporting themselves and their families?" Mr. Zoric and Mr. Welker argue that "business expansion does not deprive others of the means of supporting themselves; rather, it offers additional opportunities for those seeking such means." But do Mr. Zoric and Mr. Welker really believe that Wal-marts have never put any small shops out of business? That chain stores have never caused mom and pop stores to close? Economists must look at the real facts of the economy, not simply at deductions from their econometric model of what is supposed to happen.

Moreover, distributism is not the enemy of technological development as Mr. Zoric and Mr. Welker seem to think it is, though perhaps it would slow such development down a bit and give us a means of looking more closely at alleged improvements. After all, does mankind really need a new release of Windows every year--often with very little improvement over the old system, but with lots of money for Bill Gates? Does all the money spent on continual computer "upgrades" really represent a wise use of the resources God has given us?

As I indicated above, although Catholicism has always condemned the classical liberal notion that the state and state action are to be reduced to the smallest role possible, nevertheless distributism is not a statist system. It is not a form of socialism nor does it owe anything at all to the Marxist tradition. Rather, this social philosophy would seek to restore to individuals the actual possibility of owning productive property, so that the system of private ownership would work for the common good. Then we would see that it is not for the mere piling up of consumer goods that the economy exists, but for supplying our necessary material needs so that we can turn our minds to things much more important. For after all, "a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). n

Mr. Storck lives in Greenbelt, Maryland

© The University Concourse
Volume V, Issue 7
March 27, 2002

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Fr. Vincent McNabb: A Voice of Contradiction

by Michael Hennessy

"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" illuminated all of his work and action: after Holy Scripture and the works of St Thomas it held pride of place in his heart. Indeed, 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 and the Church's social teaching put into action.

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. 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 very 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:

"... 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 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."

Monsignor Ronald Knox, who was, in many ways, Father McNabb's temperamental opposite, wrote:

"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."

So who was Father McNabb? He was born Joseph McNabb, at Portaferry near Belfast on 8th July 1868. 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. 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. 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. 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 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 Joseph McNabb entered the Dominican novitiate at Woodchester. The Dominicans at this time were but a small band: but 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.

Father NcNabb was ordained in September 1891, the year of Rerum Novarum, shortly after his 23rd birthday. 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. Interestingly, when he took his Ad Gradus examination in Rome prior to his Mastership, Père Garrigou-Lagrange was one of his examiners. 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, was then sent to Hawkesyard to teach theology: in 1906 he 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 in 1920 he returned 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.

So let us now look in more detail at the work and thought of Father McNabb. He took some time to find his own apostolic feet but 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. When he finally settled down at St Dominic's Priory in London at the age of 52 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.

Some idea of the style and content of Father McNabb's teaching, preaching and writings can be gleaned 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."

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).

The state in which so many of his contemporaries lived and worked filled him with such grief and anguish because it was largely amongst these people that he worked, and to these people that 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 itself was in the face of war to encourage a return to the land, so as to increase agricultural produce from its degraded and untended fields.

While objective material poverty may not now — save in exceptional cases — be so great as it was then, before the Second World War, who 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 for us as much a daily call to arms as they are for 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. 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. He was certainly not referring to indigence: but, 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. He wanted us to attempt to be self-sufficient, restrict our desires, limit our needs, control our consumption 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, in particular 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.

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. He taught only what the Church taught: in particular 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 and being the 'celebrity friar' who appeared at public meetings and spoke at Speakers' Corner and at Parliament Hill, 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, such as Stars of Comfort and In Our Valley. 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. He was also an admittedly casual biographer: he wrote a slim work on St John Fisher and another on St Elizabeth of Portugal. He also wrote a number of small books on aspects of Holy Scripture and a Life of Our Lord, which 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 about 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. These conferences 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, 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 G.K.'s Weekly 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.

But of course Father McNabb's life as a friar was also of great note. 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. Everything he wrote was hand-written: he abominated most machinery and had a particular vehemence for type-writers!

This reflected Father McNabb's perennial concern with the primary things. He saw any work or activity that moved even one stage away from the primary thing as less worthy and possibly less virtuous. It was on account of this fundamental view that he developed his famous loathing for 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."

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 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.

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. But 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 mental 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.

If it is true that it is possible to tell much 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!... I have been told that I have a malignant incurable growth in the throat. I can, at most, have weeks to live." It was to be approximately nine weeks before Father McNabb finally died. 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 know 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 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. 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. He received the Last Rites after a collapse and slowly deteriorated until the morning of Thursday 17th June when he summoned Father Prior to his cell (under obedience he had allowed his fellow friars to move him from the floor to 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, especially the old and the 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. 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."

I will conclude this piece with some more of Father McNabb's words:

"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."

***
This is an edited version of a talk given to the UK League of the Kingship of Christ by Michael Hennessy, at St George's House, Wimbledon, on Saturday 15th June 2002.

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