GK's Weekly, The Thing, Is Humanism A Religion?

IS HUMANISM A RELIGION? (III)

I HAVE just been reading Mr. Norman Foerster's book on "American Criticism"; and I hope it is no disrespect to the bulk of the book, a series of very thoughtful studies on American thinkers, if I say that the whole point of it is in the last chapter; which propounds a certain problem or challenge to modern thought. It is the problem of whether what he calls Humanism can satisfy humanity. Of his other topics it would be easy to talk for ever. He generally says the right thing; he sometimes says the last word, in that suggestive or provocative style that tempts somebody to say one word more. In my own estimate of his subjects, Whitman would be very much larger and Lowell very much smaller. About Emerson he seems both sensitive and just; and Emerson certainly had distinction; but just that dry sort of distinction to which I should always be afraid of being unfair. A Puritan tried to be a Pagan; and succeeded in being a Pagan who hesitated about whether he ought to go and see a girl dancing. But all these things are stimulating but secondary to the question which I will take the liberty of attacking separately and attempting to answer seriously. I fear that answering it seriously must mean answering it personally. The question really is whether Humanism can perform all the functions of religion; and I cannot but regard it in relation to my own religion. It is only just to say that Humanism is quite different from Humanitarianism. It means, as explained here, something like this. Modern science and organization are in a sense only too natural. They herd us like the beasts along lines of heredity or tribal doom; they attach man to the earth like a plant instead of liberating him, even like a bird, let alone an angel. Indeed, their latest psychology is lower than the level of life. What is subconscious is sub-human and, as it were, subterranean: or something less than earthly. This fight for culture is above all a fight for consciousness: what some would call self-consciousness: but anyhow against mere subconsciousness. We need a rally of the really HUMAN things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers. Nevertheless, my first duty is to answer the question put to me; and I must answer it in the negative.

I do not believe that Humanism can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism. I do not believe it because of a certain truth to me so concrete as to be called a fact. I know it sounds very like something that has often been said in conventional or superficial apologetics. But I do not mean it in that vague sense; so far from inheriting it as a convention, I have rather recently collided with it as a discovery. I have realized it relatively late in life, and realized that it is indeed the whole story and moral of my own lifetime. But even a few years ago, when most of my moral and religious views were pretty finally formed, I should not have seen it quite sharply
and clearly; as I see it now.

The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is NOT really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands. That is, very briefly, the thesis I maintain; and it so happens that the book called AMERICAN CRITICISM might almost have been meant for a text-book to prove my point.

I will begin with a particular example with which the book also deals. My whole youth was filled, as with a sunrise, with the sanguine glow of Walt Whitman. He seemed to me something like a crowd turned to a giant, or like Adam the First Man. It thrilled me to hear of somebody who had heard of somebody, who saw him in the street; it was as if Christ were still alive. I did not care about whether his unmetrical poetry were a wise form or no, any more than whether a true Gospel of Jesus were scrawled on parchment or stone. I never had a hint of the evil some enemies have attributed to him; if it was there, it was not there for me. What I saluted was a new equality, which was not a dull levelling but an enthusiastic lifting; a shouting exultation in the mere fact that men were men. Real men were greater than unreal gods; and each remained as mystic and majestic as a god, while he became as frank and comforting as a comrade. The point can be put most compactly in one of Whitman's own phrases; he says somewhere that old artists painted crowds, in which one head had a nimbus of gold-coloured light; "but I paint hundreds of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light." A glory was to cling about men as men; a mutual worship was to take the form of fellowship; and the least and lowest of men must be included in this fellowship; a hump-backed Negro half-wit, with one eye and homicidal mania, must not be painted without his nimbus of gold-coloured light. This might seem only the final expansion of a movement begun a century before with Rousseau and the Revolutionists; and I was brought up to believe and did believe that the movement was the beginning of bigger and better things. But these were songs before sunrise; and there is no comparison between even sunrise and the sun. Whitman was brotherhood in broad daylight, showing endless varieties of radiant and wonderful creatures, all the more sacred for being solid. Shelley had adored Man, but Whitman adored Men. Every human face, every human feature, was a matter of mystical poetry, such as lit like chance torchlight, hitherto, a face here and there in the crowd. A king was a man treated as all men should be treated. A god was a man worshipped as all men should be worshipped. What could they do against a race of gods and a republic of kings; not verbally but veritably the New World?

Well ... here is what Mr. Foerster says about the present position of the founder of the new world of democracy: "Our present science lends little support to an inherent 'dignity of man' or to his 'perfectibility.' It is wholly possible that the science of the future will lead us away from democracy towards some form of aristocracy. The millennial expectations that Whitman built upon science and democracy, we are now well aware rested upon insecure foundations.... The perfection of nature, the natural goodness of man, 'the great pride of man in himself' offset with an emotional humanitarianism--these are the materials of a structure only slightly coloured with modernity. His politics, his ethics, his religion belong to the past, even that facile 'religiousness' which he hoped would suffuse and complete the work of science and democracy.... In the essentials of his prophecy, Whitman, we must conclude, has been falsified by the event." This is a very moderate and fair statement; it would be easy to find the same thing in a much fiercer statement. Here is a monumental remark by Mr. H.L. Mencken: "They (he means certain liberal or ex-liberal thinkers) have come to realize that the morons whom they sweated to save do not want to be saved, and are not worth saving." That is the New Spirit, if there is any New Spirit. "I will make unconquerable cities, with their arms about each other's necks," cried Walt Whitman, "by the love of comrades, by the lifelong love of comrades." I like to think of the face of Mr. Mencken of Baltimore, if some casual comrade from Pittsburgh tried to make him unconquerable by putting an arm around his neck. But the idea is dead for much less ferocious people than Mr. Mencken. It is dead in a man like Aldous Huxley, who complained recently of the "gratuitous" romancing of the old republican view of human nature. It is dead in the most humane and humorous of our recent critics. It is dead in so many wise and good men to-day, that I cannot help wondering whether, under modern conditions of his favourite "science," it would not be dead in Whitman himself.

It is not dead in me. It remains real for me, not by any merit of mine, but by the fact that this mystical idea, while it has evaporated as a mood, still exists as a creed. I am perfectly prepared to assert, as firmly as I should have asserted in my boyhood, that the hump-backed and half-witted Negro is decorated with a nimbus of gold-coloured light. The truth is that Whitman's wild picture, or what he thought was a wild picture, is in fact a very old and orthodox picture. There are, as a matter of fact, any number of old pictures in which whole crowds are crowned with haloes, to indicate that they have all attained Beatitude. But for Catholics it is a
fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude. It is true that the shafts are feathered with free will, and therefore throw the shadow of all the tragic possibilities of free will; and that the Church (having also been aware for ages of that darker side of truth, which the new sceptics have just discovered) does also draw attention to the darkness of that potential tragedy. But that does not make any difference to the gloriousness of the potential glory. In one aspect it is even a part of it; since the freedom is itself a glory. In that sense they would still wear their haloes even in hell.

But the point is that anyone believing that all these beings were made to be blessed, and multitudes of them probably well on their way to be blessed, really has a sound philosophic reason for regarding them all as radiant and wonderful creatures, or seeing all their heads in haloes. That conviction does make every human face, every human feature, a matter of mystical poetry. But it is not at all like modern poetry. The most modern of modern poetry is not the poetry of reception, but of rejection, or rather, of repulsion. The spirit that inhabits most recent work might be called a fury of fastidiousness. The new man of letters does not get his effect by saying that for him a hump-backed Negro has a halo. He gets his effect by saying that, just as he was about to embrace finally the fairest of women, he was nauseated by a pimple above her eyebrow or a stain of grease on her left thumb. Whitman tried to prove that dirty things were really clean, as when he glorified manure as the matrix of the purity of grass. His followers in free verse try to prove that clean things are really dirty; to suggest something leprous and loathsome about the thick whiteness of milk, or something prickly and plague-stricken about the unaccountable growth of hair. In short, the whole mood has changed, as a matter of poetry. But it has not changed as a matter of theology; and that is the argument for having an unchanging theology. The Catholic theology has nothing to do with democracy, for or against, in the sense of a machinery of voting or a criticism of particular political privileges. It is not committed to support what Whitman said for democracy, or even what Jefferson or Lincoln said for democracy. But it is absolutely committed to contradict what Mr. Mencken says against democracy. There will be Diocletian persecutions, there will be Dominican crusades, there will be rending of all religious peace and compromise, or even the end of civilization and the world, before the Catholic Church will admit that one single moron, or one single man, "is not worth saving."

I have therefore found in my middle age this curious fact about the lesson of my life, and that of all my generation. We all grew up with a common conviction, lit by the flames of the literary genius of Rousseau, of Shelley, of Victor Hugo, finding its final flare up and conflagration in the universalism of Walt Whitman. And we all took it for granted that all our descendants would take it for granted. I said the discovery of brotherhood seemed like the discovery of broad daylight; of something that men could never grow tired of. Yet even in my own short lifetime, men have already grown tired of it. We cannot now appeal to the love of equality as an EMOTION. We cannot now open a new book of poems, and expect it to be about the life-long love of comrades, or "Love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives." We realize that in most men it has died, because it was a mood and not a doctrine. And we begin to wonder too late, in the wise fashion of the aged, how we could ever have expected it to last as a mood, if it was not strong enough to last as a doctrine. And we also begin to realize that all the real strength there was in it, which is the only strength that remains in it, was the original strength of the doctrine. What really happened was this: that the men of the eighteenth century, many of them in a just impatience with corrupt and cynical priests, turned on those priests and said in effect, "Well, I suppose you call yourselves Christians; so you can't actually DENY that men are brothers or that it is our duty to help the poor." The very confidence of their challenge, the very ringing note in the revolutionary voice, came from the fact that the Christian reactionaries were in a false position as Christians. The democratic demand won because it seemed unanswerable. And it seemed unanswerable, not in the least because it is unanswerable, but because even decadent Christians dared not give the answer. Mr. H. L. Mencken will always be happy to oblige with the answer.

Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting. For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it, all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story. Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church's bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the
strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed "Psalms" or "Gospels"; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

Again, the Calvinists took the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God; and treated it as a rocky irreducible truism so solid that anything could be built on it, however crushing or cruel. They were so confident in their logic, and its one first principle of predestination, that they tortured the intellect and imagination with dreadful deductions about God, that seemed to turn Him into a demon. But it never seems to have struck them that somebody might suddenly say that he did not believe in the demon. They were quite surprised when people called "infidels" here and there began to say it. They had assumed the Divine foreknowledge as so fixed, that it must, if necessary, fulfil itself by destroying the Divine mercy. They never thought anybody would deny the knowledge exactly as they denied the mercy. Then came Wesley and the reaction against Calvinism; and Evangelicals seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin. It is a proverb, and almost a joke, that they address a stranger in the street and offer to relax his secret agony of sin. But it seldom seemed to strike them, until much later, that the man in the street might possibly answer that he did not want to be saved from sin, any more than from spotted fever or St. Vitus's Dance; because these things were not in fact causing him any suffering at all. They, in their turn, were quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity; a contentment with the comradeship of their kind; ending with the happy yawp of Whitman that he would not "lie awake and weep for his sins."

Now the plain truth is that Shelley and Whitman and the revolutionary optimists were themselves doing exactly the same thing all over again. They also, though less consciously because of the chaos of their times, had really taken out of the old Catholic tradition one particular transcendental idea; the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men. And they acted in exactly the same extraordinary fashion as their prototypes, the Wesleyans and the Calvinists. They took it for granted that this spiritual idea was absolutely self-evident like the sun and moon; that nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else. They perpetually hammered away at their human divinity and human dignity, and inevitable love for all human beings; as if these things were naked natural facts. And now they are quite surprised when new and restless realists suddenly explode, and begin to say that a pork-butcher with red whiskers and a wart on his nose does not strike them as particularly divine or dignified, that they are not conscious of the smallest sincere impulse to love him, that they could not love him if they tried, or that they do not recognize any particular obligation to try.

It might appear that the process has come to an end, and that there is nothing more for the naked realist to shed. But it is not so; and the process can still go on. There are still traditional charities to which men cling. There are still traditional charities for them to fling away when they find they are only traditional. Everybody must have noticed in the most modern writers the survival of a rather painful sort of pity. They no longer honour all men, like St. Paul and the other mystical democrats. It would hardly be too much to say that they despise all men; often (to do them justice) including themselves. But they do in a manner pity all men, and particularly those that are pitiable; by this time they extend the feeling almost disproportionately to the other animals. This compassion for men is also tainted with its historical connection with Christian charity; and even in the case of animals, with the example of many Christian saints. There is nothing to show that a new revulsion from such sentimental religions will not free men even from the obligation of pitying the pain of the world. Not only Nietzsche, but many Neo-Pagans working on his lines, have suggested such hardness as a higher intellectual purity. And having read many modern poems about the Man of the Future, made of steel and illumined with nothing warmer than green fire, I have no difficulty in imagining a literature that should pride itself on a merciless and metallic detachment. Then, perhaps, it might be faintly conjectured that the last of the Christian virtues had died. But so long as they lived they were Christian.

I do not therefore believe that Humanism and Religion are rivals on equal terms. I believe it is a rivalry between the pools and the fountain; or between the firebrands and the fire. Each of these old intellectuals snatched one firebrand out of the undying fire; but the point is that though he waved the torch very wildly, though he would have used the torch to burn down half the world, the torch went out very soon. The Puritans did not really perpetuate their sublime exultation in helplessness; they only made it unpopular. We did not go on indefinitely looking at the Brooklyn crowds with the eye of Whitman; we have come with singular rapidity to regard them with the eye of Dreiser. In short, I distrust spiritual experiments outside the central spiritual tradition; for the simple reason that I think they do not last, even if they manage to spread. At the most they stand for one generation; at the commonest for one fashion; at the lowest for one clique. I do not think they have the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity. For an antiquated, doddering old democrat like myself may be excused for attaching some slight importance to that last question; that of covering the common life of mankind. How many Humanists are there supposed to be among the inferior crowd of human beings? Are there to be, for instance, no more than there were Greek philosophers in an ordinary rabble of jolly pagan polytheistic Greeks? Are there to be no more than there were men concentrated on the Culture of Matthew Arnold, among the mobs who followed Cardinal Manning or General Booth? I do not in the least intend to sneer at Humanism; I think I understand the intellectual distinction it draws, and I have tried to understand it in a spirit of humility; but I feel a faint interest in how many people out of the battered and bewildered human race are actually expected to understand it. And I ask with a certain personal interest; for there are three hundred million people in the world who accept the mysteries that I accept and live by the faith I hold. I really want to know whether it is anticipated that there will be three hundred million Humanists in Humanity. The sanguine may say that Humanism will be the religion of the next generation, just as Comte said that Humanity would be the God of the next generation; and so in one sense it was. But it is not the God of this generation. And the question is what will be the religion of the next generation after that, or all the other generations (as a certain ancient promise ran) even unto the end of the world.

Humanism, in Mr. Foerster's sense, has one very wise and worthy character. It is really trying to pick up the pieces; that is, to pick up all the pieces. All that was done before was first blind destruction and then random and scrappy selection; as if boys had broken up a stained-glass window and then made a few scraps into coloured spectacles, the rose-coloured spectacles of the republican or the green or yellow spectacles of the pessimist and the decadent. But Humanism as here professed will stoop to gather all it can; for instance, it is great enough to stoop and pick up the jewel of humility. Mr. Foerster does understand, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not understand, the case for humility. Matthew Arnold, who made something of the same stand for what he called Culture in the mid-nineteenth century, attempted something of the same preservation of chastity; which he would call, in a rather irritating manner, "pureness." But before we call either Culture or Humanism a substitute for religion, there is a very plain question that can be asked in the form of a very homely metaphor. Humanism may try to pick up the pieces; but can it stick them together? Where is the cement which made religion corporate and popular, which can prevent it falling to pieces in a debris of individualistic tastes and degrees? What is to prevent one Humanist wanting chastity without humility, and another humility without chastity, and another truth or beauty without either? The problem of an enduring ethic and culture consists in finding an arrangement of the pieces by which they remain related, as do the stones arranged in an arch. And I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.

Fr Z, One Of My Followers Has A Blog & Likes Cooking

I have noticed that Father Z (a follower of this blog, have I mentioned that) has cookery on his blog from time to time. Well I thought, always happy to learn from my followers, maybe that will bring in a few readers, so here we go.

Breakfast (a Catholic word meaning, to break the Eucharistic Fast after Mass, it was the rule until the 1950s to fast from Midnight until after Mass if you were going to Holy Communion) today.

It is important to choose the right drink to go with a meal. Open the fridge door, apple juice unopened, pineapple juice open, right pineapple juice it is then.

Toast one slice if bread, while heating a little oil in a frying pan.Remove the shells from 4 or 5 eggs, I'm just having four today. Add eggs to the pan, add salt & coarse pepper to taste. Butter toast.
Flip over the eggs to cook on both sides as this is the Catholic thing to do, symbolising Scripture & Tradition, not just cooking them on one side in a mean-spirited protestant way.

When slightly over done, flip out onto the slice of buttered toast and eat.


Four eggs on one slice of toast? Quail eggs of course!

God Bless The Legion Of Mary

When in Oxford for the Chesterton Conference last weekend, I went for a stroll along the High Street. There were two muslim information stalls, a protestant one, some music and a Catholic information stall. Yes Catholics standing in the street on a stall! It seemed to be The Legion of Mary, free Rosaries, Miraculous Medals, Alfie Lambe & Edel Quinn Prayer Cards and general Catholic leaflets. God bless them!

Jews, Muslims, Purple/Pink Hair & A Chesterton Conference

Having missed the bus to Oxford, by 30 seconds, I still arrived at 9.59am for the 10am start of The GK Chesterton Society Oxford Conference. Nothing much happened for the next 10-15 minutes as this was a mostly Catholic gathering. Dr Oddie's opening remarks did refer to the Catholic sense of time! He said some interesting things about Jews & GKC, he talked of a Jewish problem in Chesterton's day, which was summed up by Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism thus, "We are aliens here, they do not let us dissolve into the population, and if they let us we would not do it. Let us go forth!"(Appendix A, of The Holiness of GK Chesterton) He felt that people may look back in the future on the worries that some have today about muslim integration and wonder why the fuss, just as many now look back on the Jewish problem. Lynette Burrows then spoke, and I think she was not so confident about muslim integration. But she gave a very interesting talk. (I'm told all the talks will appear on the website soon).

Fr Ian Ker, author of many books including his latest one of 700 pages on GK Chesterton, which Dr Oddie described as being a book that no fan of Chesterton could afford to be without. But at £30 I'm not sure it is one I can afford to be with! Father gave a great talk about GKC, Jesus and all that, it was quite amazing. It was also a very English talk as Father muddled his papers and was very embarrassed. At one bit he talked about GKC making us look at Jesus, we have become distracted since Vatican II with Justice & Peace, Just War, etc. and we think of Jesus as a kindly uncle who does not mind what we do, and forgives us. But Chesterton makes us look the Jesus of the Gospels.

After Mass, Celebrated by Fr Hean the Treasurer, now a Priest of the Ordinariate, and lunch, Dale Ahlquist spoke; "Thank you for showing up for your afternoon nap", with glass of wine in hand, "I will be joining you shortly". He did go on to say much of interest, with over one hundred quotes from GKC! "Have you noticed how, many people in the suburbs have pets but no children. Wherever you have animal worship you have human sacrifice."

All in all a very good day, and what I have said does not do it justice. Do keep an eye on The GK Chesterton Society's website to read the talks in full. And as the quotes above are from memory (and as Conor will tell you, I don't have one) handle with care! Another odd thing that day was as I walked towards the Conference, the people walking in front of me. One of the girls had purple, pink & lighter pink hair, I thought to myself, this generation, this Country, this culture, what hope for GKC? I stopped to buy myself a mocha, to help keep me awake. I sat at the back of the Conference room and the same group of youngsters sat in front of me! (see photos)
For GK Chesterton Prayer cards

4th July; As I Said Last Year!

GK's Weekly, The Thing, Sceptic As A Critic

As you will have seen I was reading The Thing by GK Chesterton. Having read the first hundred pages or so, it dawned on me that some Catholic paper or other really should just reprint the whole thing in parts each week. I then remembered that I'm the only person around here (or anywhere else for that matter) with any sense, and so here it will appear each Saturday (Started 25th June). It will be called GK's Weekly in honour of Chesterton's paper of that name. The posts will all be longer than anything that I would read on a blog, but that's The Thing.

THE SCEPTIC AS A CRITIC (II)

IT takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes. I feel myself to be in some such position in the recent American debate about Mr. Mencken's MERCURY and the Puritans; and I admit it at the beginning with an embarrassment not untinged with terror. I know that the umpire may be torn in pieces. I know that the self-appointed umpire ought to be torn in pieces. I know, above all, that this is especially the case in anything which in any way involves international relations. Perhaps the only sound criticism is self-criticism. Perhaps this is even more true of nations than of men. And I can quite well understand that many Americans would accept suggestions from their fellow countrymen which they would rightly refuse from a foreigner. I can only plead that I have endeavoured to carry out the excellent patriotic principle of "See England First" in the equally patriotic paraphrase of "Criticize England First." I have been engaged upon it long enough to be quite well aware that there are evils present in England that are relatively absent from America; and none more conspicuously absent, as Mr. Belloc [Pictured] has pointed out to the surprise of many, than the real, servile, superstitious, and mystical adoration of Money.

But what makes me so objectionable on the present occasion is that I feel a considerable sympathy with both sides. This offensive attitude I will endeavour to disguise, as far as possible, by tactfully distributed abuse of such things as I really think are abuses, and a gracefully simulated disgust with this or that part of each controversial case. But the plain truth is, that if I were an American, I should very frequently rejoice at the AMERICAN MERCURY's scoring off somebody or something; nor would my modest fireside be entirely without mild rejoicings when the AMERICAN MERCURY was scored off. But I do definitely think that both sides, and perhaps especially the iconoclastic side, need what the whole modern world needs-- a fixed spiritual standard even for their own intellectual purposes. I might express it by saying that I am very fond of revolutionists, but not very fond of nihilists. For nihilists, as their name implies, have nothing to revolt about.


On this side of the matter there is little to be added to the admirably sane, subtle, and penetrating article by Mr. T. S. Eliot;* especially that vital sentence in it in which he tells Professor Irving Babbitt (who admits the need of enthusiasm) that we cannot have an enthusiasm for having an enthusiasm. I think I know, incidentally, what we must have. Professor Babbitt is a very learned man; and I myself have little Latin and less Greek. But I know enough Greek to know the meaning of the second syllable of "enthusiasm," and I know it to be the key to this and every other discussion.

Let me take two examples, touching my points of agreement with the two sides. I heartily admire Mr. Mencken, not only for his vivacity and wit, but for his vehemence and sometimes for his violence. I warmly applaud him for his scorn and detestation of Service; and I think he was stating a historical fact when he said, as quoted in THE FORUM: "When a gang of real estate agents, bond salesmen, and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service, it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be swindled." I do not see why he should not call a spade a spade and a swindler a swindler. I do not blame him for using vulgar words for vulgar things. But I do remark upon two ways in which the fact of his philosophy being negative makes his criticism almost shallow. First of all, it is obvious that such a satire is entirely meaningless unless swindling is a sin. And it is equally obvious that we are instantly swallowed up in the abysses of "moralism" and "religionism," if it is a sin. And the second point, if less obvious, is equally important-- that his healthy instinct against greasy hypocrisy does not really enlighten him about the heart of that hypocrisy.

What is the matter with the cult of Service is that, like so many modern notions, it is an idolatry of the intermediate, to the oblivion of the ultimate. It is like the jargon of the idiots who talk about Efficiency without any criticism of Effect. The sin of Service is the sin of Satan: that of trying to be first where it can only be second. A word like Service has stolen the sacred capital letter from the thing which it was once supposed to serve. There is a sense in serving God, and an even more disputed sense in serving man; but there is no sense in serving Service. To serve God is at least to serve an ideal being. Even if he were an imaginary being, he would still be an ideal being. That ideal has definite and even dogmatic attributes--truth, justice, pity, purity, and the rest. To serve it, however imperfectly, is to serve a particular concept of perfection. But the man who rushes down the street waving his arms and wanting something or somebody to serve, will probably fall into the first bucket-shop or den of thieves and usurers, and be found industriously serving THEM. There arises the horrible idea that industry, reliability, punctuality, and business activity are good things; that mere readiness to serve the powers of this world is a Christian virtue. That is the case against Service, as distinct from the curse against Service, so heartily and inspiringly hurled by Mr. Mencken. But the serious case cannot be stated without once more raising the real question of whether mankind ought to serve anything; and of whether they had not better try to define what they intend to serve. All these silly words like Service and Efficiency and Practicality and the rest fail because they worship the means and not the end. But it all comes back to whether we do propose to worship the end; and preferably the right end.

Two other characteristic passages from Mr. Mencken will serve to show more sharply this curious sense in which he misses his own point. On the one hand, he appears to state most positively the purely personal and subjective nature of criticism; he makes it individual and almost irresponsible. "The critic is first and last simply trying to express himself; he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis attained, which Wagner achieved when he wrote DIE WALKURIE, and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg." That is all consistent enough as far as it goes; but unfortunately Mr. Mencken appears to go on to something quite inconsistent with it. According to the quotation, he afterwards bursts into a song of triumph because there is now in America not only criticism, but controversy. "To-day for the first time in years there is strife in American criticism... ears are bitten off, noses are bloodied. There are wallops both above and below the belt."

Now, there may be something in his case for controversy; but it is quite inconsistent with his case for creative self-expression. If the critic produces the criticism ONLY to please himself; it is entirely irrelevant that it does not please somebody else. The somebody else has a perfect right to say the exact opposite to please himself, and be perfectly satisfied with himself. But they cannot controvert because they cannot compare. They cannot compare because there is no common standard of comparison. Neither I nor anybody else can have a controversy about literature with Mr. Mencken, because there is no way of criticizing the criticism, except by asking whether the critic is satisfied. And there the debate ends, at the beginning: for nobody can doubt that Mr. Mencken is satisfied.

But not to make Mr. Mencken a mere victim of the ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM, I will make the experiment in a viler body and offer myself for dissection. I daresay a great deal of the criticism I write really is moved by a mood of self-expression; and certainly it is true enough that there is a satisfaction in self-expression. I can take something or other about which I have definite feelings--as, for instance, the philosophy of Mr. Dreiser, which has been mentioned more than once in this debate. I can achieve for my own inner ego the grateful feeling of writing as follows:

"He describes a world which appears to be a dull and discolouring illusion of indigestion, not bright enough to be called a nightmare; smelly, but not even stinking with any strength; smelling of the stale gas of ignorant chemical experiments by dirty, secretive schoolboys--the sort of boys who torture cats in corners; spineless and spiritless like a broken-backed worm; loathsomely slow and laborious like an endless slug; despairing, but not with dignity; blaspheming, but not with courage; without wit without will, without laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die, too deaf to leave off talking, too blind to stop, too stupid to start afresh, too dead to be killed, and incapable even of being damned, since in all its weary centuries it has not reached the age of reason."

That is what I feel about it; and it certainly gives me pleasure to relieve my feelings. I have got it off my chest. I have attained a katharsis. I have laid an egg. I have produced a criticism, satisfying all Mr. Mencken's definitions of the critic. I have performed a function. I feel better, thank you.

But what influence my feelings can be expected to have on Mr. Dreiser, or anybody who does not admit my standards of truth and falsehood, I do not quite see. Mr. Dreiser can hardly be expected to say that his chemistry is quackery, as I think it--quackery without the liveliness we might reasonably expect from quacks. He does not think fatalism base and servile, as I do; he does not think free will the highest truth about humanity, as I do. He does not believe that despair is itself a sin, and perhaps the worst of sins, as Catholics do. He does not think blasphemy the smallest and silliest sort of pride, as even pagans do. He naturally does not think his own picture of life a false picture, resembling real life about as much as a wilderness of linoleum would resemble the land of all the living flowers, as I do. But he would not think it falser for being like a wilderness. He would probably admit that it was dreary, but think it correct to be dreary. He would probably own that he was hopeless, but not see any harm in being hopeless. What I advance as accusations, he would very probably accept as compliments.


Under these circumstances, I do not quite see how I, or anyone with my views, could have a CONTROVERSY with Mr. Dreiser. There does not seem to be any way in which I could prove him wrong, because he does not accept my view of what is wrong. There does not seem to be any way in which he could prove himself right, because I do not share his notions of what is right. We might, indeed, meet in the street and fall on each other; and while I believe we are both heavy men, I doubt not that he is the more formidable. The very possibility of our being reduced to this inarticulate explanation may possibly throw some light on Mr. Mencken's remarkable description of the new literary life in America. "Ears are bitten off," he says; and this curious
form of cultural intercourse might really be the only solution, when ears are no longer organs of hearing and there are no organs except organs of self-expression. He that hath ears to hear and will not hear may just as well have them bitten off. Such deafness seems inevitable in the creative critic, who is as indifferent as a hen to all noises except her own cackling over her own egg. Anyhow, hens do not criticize each other's eggs, or even pelt each other with eggs, in the manner of political controversy. We can only say that the novelist in question has undoubtedly laid a magnificently large and solid egg--something in the nature of an ostrich's egg; and after that, there is really nothing to prevent the ostrich from hiding its head in the sand, achieving thereby for its own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed. But we cannot argue with it about whether the egg is a bad egg, or whether parts of it are excellent.

In all these instances, therefore, because of the absence of a standard of ultimate values, the most ordinary functions really cannot be performed. They not only cannot be performed with "a grateful feeling," or a katharsis, but in the long run they cannot be performed at all. We cannot really denounce the Service-mongering bond salesman as a swindler, because we have no certain agreement that it is shameful to be a swindler. A little manipulation of some of Mr. Mencken's own individualistic theories about mentality as superior to moralism might present the swindler as a superman. We cannot really argue for or against the mere ideal of Service, because neither side has really considered what is to be served or how we are to arrive at the right rules for serving it. Consequently, in practice, it may turn out that the State of Service is merely the Servile State. And finally, we cannot really argue about that or anything else, because there are no rules of the game of argument. There is nothing to prove who has scored a point and who has not. There cannot be "strife in American criticism"; the professors cannot be "forced to make some defence." That would require plaintiffs and defendants to appear before some tribunal and give evidence according to some tests of truth. There can be a disturbance, but there can not be a discussion.

In plain words, the normal functions of man--effort, protest, judgment, persuasion, and proof--are found in fact to be hampered and hamstrung by these negations of the sceptic even when the sceptic seems at first to be only denying some distant vision or some miraculous tale. Each function is found in fact to refer to some end, to some test, to some way of distinguishing between use and misuse, which the mere sceptic destroys as completely as he could destroy any myth or superstition. If the function is only performed for the satisfaction of the performer, as in the parable of the critic and the egg, it becomes futile to discuss whether it is an addled egg. It becomes futile to consider whether eggs will produce chickens or provide breakfasts. But even to be certain of our own sanity in applying the tests, we do really have to go back to some aboriginal problem, like that of the old riddle of the priority of egg or chicken; we do really, like the great religions, have to begin AB OVO. If those primordial sanities can be disturbed, the whole of practical life can be disturbed with them. Men can be frozen by fatalism, or crazed by anarchism, or driven to death by pessimism; for men will not go on indefinitely acting on what they feel to be a fable. And it is in this organic and almost muscular sense that religion is really the help of man--in the sense that without it he is ultimately helpless, almost motionless.

Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair Lewis and the other critics in the MERCURY movement are so spirited and sincere, they attack so vigorously so many things that ought to be attacked, they expose so brilliantly many things that really are impostures, that in discussing matters with them a man will have every impulse to put his cards on the table. It would be affectation and almost hypocrisy in me to ignore, in this place, the fact that I do myself believe in a special spiritual solution of this problem, a special spiritual authority above this chaos. Nor, indeed, is the idea altogether absent, as an idea, from many other minds besides my own. The Catholic
philosophy is mentioned in terms of respect, and even a sort of hope, both by Professor Babbitt** and Mr. T. S. Eliot. I do not misunderstand their courtesies, or seek to lure them a step further than they desire to go. But, as a matter of fact, by a series of faultlessly logical steps, Mr. Eliot led Professor Babbitt so near to the very gates of the Catholic Church that in the end I felt quite nervous, so to speak, for fear they should both take another unintentional step and fall into it by accident.

I have a particular reason for mentioning this matter in conclusion-- a reason that is directly related to this curious effect of scepticism in weakening the normal functions of the human being. In one of the most brilliant and amusing of Mr. Sinclair Lewis's recent books there is a passage which I quote from memory, but I think more or less correctly. He said that the Catholic Faith differs from current Puritanism in that it does not ask a man to give up his sense of beauty, or his sense of humour, or his pleasant vices (by which he probably meant smoking and drinking, which are not vices at all), but that it does ask a man to give up his life and soul, his mind, body, reason, and all the rest. I ask the reader to consider, as quietly and impartially as possible, the statement thus made; and put it side by side with all those other facts about the gradual fossilizing of human function by the fundamental doubts of our day.

It would be far truer to say that the Faith gives a man back his body and his soul and his reason and his will and his very life. It would be far truer to say that the man who has received it receives all the old human functions which all the other philosophies are already taking away. It would be nearer to reality to say that he alone will have freedom, that he alone will have will, because he alone will believe in free will; that he alone will have reason, since ultimate doubt denies reason as well as authority; that he alone will truly act, because action is performed to an end. It is at least a less unlikely vision that all this hardening and hopeless despair of the intellect will leave him at last the only walking and talking citizen in a city of paralytics.
------
* "The Humanism of Irving Babbitt," The Forum for July 1928.

** "The Critic and American life," The Forum for February 1928

GK Chesterton Video On YouTube

This very short video of GK Chesterton himself, says so much in just 58 seconds! If I can work it out I will add it to my own YouTube Channel, five films and one Subscriber so far, look out Hollywood and BBC Noise 24!

Archbishop Stack & The Holy Father

Click here to see Archbishop Stack of Cardiff receive the Pallium from Pope Benedict XVI. Now His Grace just needs a Cardiff City FC scarf and a few prayers.

A LITANY ON BEHALF OF BISHOPS
Lord have mercy on us.
Christ have mercy on us.
Lord have mercy on us.
Christ hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.

God, the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.
God, the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God, the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven and earth, pray for us.
St. Joseph, Protector of Holy Mother Church, pray for us.
St Michael, all Archangels, special servants of Bishops, pray for us.
St John the Baptist, Herald of the Lord, pray for us.
St Peter, pray for us.
St Paul, pray for us.
St Andrew, pray for us.
St John, pray for us.
St Thomas, pray for us.
St James, pray for us.
St Philip, pray for us.
St Bartholomew, pray for us.
St Matthew, pray for us.
St James, pray for us.
St Simon, pray for us.
St Thaddeus, pray for us.
St Barnabas, pray for us.
St Matthias, pray for us.
O Holy Apostles, our first Bishops, we beg your intercession on behalf of your successors;

St Thomas Becket, pray for us.
St Blaise, pray for us.
St Boniface, pray for us.
St Cyprian, pray for us.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, pray for us.
St. Irenaeus, pray for us.
St John Fisher, pray for us.
St. Polycarp, pray for us.
All martyred Bishops; pray for us.

St Athanasius, pray for us.
St Alphosus Liguori, pray for us.
St Ambrose, pray for us.
St Anslem, pray for us.
St Augustine, pray for us.
St Basil and Gregory Nazianzen pray for us
St Bonaventure, pray for us.
St Cyril of Alexandria, pray for us.
St Cyril of Jerusalem, pray for us.
St Francis De Sales, pray for us.
St Hilary, pray for us.
St Isadore of Seville, pray for us.
St Peter Chrsologus, pray for us.
St Peter Damian, pray for us.
St Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.
All Bishops-Doctors of the Church, pray for us.

St Albert the Great, pray for us.
St Ansgar, pray for us.
St Charles Borromeo, pray for us.
St Ildephonsus, pray for us.
St Methodius, pray for us.
St Nicolas, pray for us.
St Norbert, pray for us.
St Patrick, pray for us.
St Richard, pray for us.
Sts. Timothy and Titus, pray for us.
St William, pray for us.
St Wulfran, pray for us.
All Bishops who have spread the light of Christ; pray for us.

St Leo the Great, pray for us.
St Pius V, pray for us.
St Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
St Pius X, pray for us.
All Saints who have helped further the Faith through teaching, pray for us.

That all bishops will maintain complete obedience to the Holy Father, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will remain faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will defend the Faith and moral teachings of the Church, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will uphold the true teachings of the Ecumenical Councils, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will allow and defend all duly authorised Rites of the Mass, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will staunchly defend the unborn, the elderly, the sick and all defenceless people, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will provide for true and complete education of the Faith for all souls in their care, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will exercise the powers of their office to defend the faithful against heretics, apostates, and false prophets and teachers, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will use their authority and powers to correct errors and falsehoods, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will stand up for the rights of the Church when infringed upon by the State, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will develop a great devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will be living examples of the virtues, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will look to their saintly predecessors as examples of how they should carry out their vocations, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will encourage true vocations to the priesthood and religious life, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will boldly proclaim the message of Our Lady of Fatima, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will concentrate their energies more on the spiritual than on the material needs of the faithful, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will teach and preach the truth of Humanae Vitae and Familiaris Consortio.

O God, look with favour on Thy servants, Thy bishops, whom Thou hast appointed as teachers and defenders of Thy faithful here on earth. Grant that by word and example they may assist those over whom they have been placed, so that shepherds and flocks may together attain everlasting life, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

Upon Father Finigan's Orders

Upon the orders of Fr Timothy Finigan, I am now reading the Autobiography of GK Chesterton, having finished The Thing. Well 'orders' is just a lie to see if this title will get a few extra readers! But While talking to Father about Chesterton (soon to be made a Saint), he mentioned quoting the start of the Autobiography, on his blog I think. And then he did quote it to us by heart;

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.

It really is very good altogether, and I don't care that the c of E did not like it. They thought that it was too much about Chesterton! Autobiography! But more on this another day.

See you all on Saturday

60 Years A Priest!

God bless you Papa! Nice Vestments too!

Today Is A Holy Day Of Obligation

Today is the Feast Day of Ss Peter & Paul and is still a Holy Day of Obligation in England & Wales. I say this because some such Days have been moved to Sundays, so some people are not sure which are which, and some Parish newsletters have not mentioned it. But in short, Go to Mass!

Sign Petition To Protect Pakistan's Christians

Aid to the Church in Need asks you to add your voice to the British Pakistani Christian Association's call for peace, justice and human rights for all people of Pakistan.

Please show your solidarity with Pakistan's suffering faithful by adding your name to the petition.

I have posted on Pakistan before. Photo is of murdered Catholic Pakistani minister, Shahbaz Bhatti. There is a March on Saturday.

Immaculate Heart of Mary Pro-Life Prayer vigil - London 2nd July

If you are unable to attend the Chesterton Conference in Oxford on the 2nd, the following should be of interest to you;

A Little Miracle?
There was a Marian pro-life prayer vigil on 28th May. It was a powerful and prayerful experience. There was also at least 1 confirmed turnaround. However, it didn't end there. From that day onwards there was a total of 13 turnarounds in two weeks. That hasn't happened before. If you receive emails from Good Counsel or read their blog you'll see what I mean. It was felt that such results were a special blessing from Our Lady. With this in mind, there will be another vigil. There will also be an announcement about some serious news which will require our prayers and pro-life efforts.

What:
Prayers of consecration and reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the unborn, their parents, and the abortion employees. We will of course have trained and experienced counsellors throughout.

When:
Saturday 2nd July 2011 (Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary)

Where:
Bedford Square London WC1B. Same location as last time and 40 Days for Life. Nearest tube stations are Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road. You can take any bus going to Tottenham Court Road or Gower Street.

Time:
8.30am-1pm. You can come for all or part of the vigil.

Contact:
daniel-40days[AT]hotmail.co.uk (the AT should be @ when actually sending an email. This is done to prevent spam.

And you may even make it along to the end of the Pakistan Protest March defending Christians in that country. But if not do sign the Petition.

GK's Weekly, The Thing, Introduction

As you will have seen I am reading The Thing by GK Chesterton. Having read the first hundred pages or so, it dawned on me that some Catholic paper or other really should just reprint the whole thing in parts each week. I then remembered that I'm the only person around here (or anywhere else for that matter) with any sense, and so here it will appear each Saturday. It will be called GK's Weekly in honour of Chesterton's paper of that name. The posts will all be longer than anything that I would read on a blog, but that's The Thing.

INTRODUCTION (I)

IT will be naturally objected to the publication of these papers that they are ephemeral and that they are controversial. In other words, the normal critic will at once dismiss them as too frivolous and dislike them as too serious. The rather one-sided truce of good taste, touching all religious matters, which prevailed until a short time ago, has now given place to a rather one-sided war. But the truce can still be invoked, as such terrorism of taste generally is invoked, against the minority. We all know the dear old Conservative colonel who swears himself red in the face that he is not going to talk politics, but that damning to hell all those bloody blasted Socialists is not politics. We all have a kindly feeling for the dear old lady, living at Bath or Cheltenham, who would not dream of talking uncharitably about anybody, but who does certainly think the Dissenters are too dreadful or that Irish servants are really impossible. It is in the spirit of these two very admirable persons that the controversy is now conducted in the Press on behalf of a Progressive Faith and a Broad and Brotherly Religion. So long as the writer employs vast and universal gestures of fellowship and hospitality to all those who are ready to abandon their religious beliefs, he is allowed to be as rude as he likes to all those who venture to retain them. The Dean of St. Paul's permits himself genially to call the Catholic Church a treacherous and bloody corporation; Mr. H. G. Wells is allowed to compare the Blessed Trinity to an undignified dance; the Bishop of Birmingham to compare the Blessed Sacrament to a barbarous blood-feast. It is felt that phrases like these cannot ruffle that human peace and harmony which all such humanitarians desire; there is nothing in THESE expressions that could possibly interfere with brotherhood and the sympathy that is the bond of society. We may be sure of this, for we have the word of the writers themselves that their whole aim is to generate an atmosphere of liberality and love. If, therefore, any unlucky interruption mars the harmony of the occasion, if it is really impossible for these fraternal festivities to pass off without some silly disturbance, or somebody making a scene, it is obvious that the blame must lie with a few irritable and irritating individuals, who cannot accept these descriptions of the Trinity and the Sacrament and the Church as soothing their feelings or satisfying their ideas.

It is explained very clearly in all such statements that they are accepted by all intelligent people except those who do not accept them. But as I myself, in my political experience, have ventured to doubt the right of the Tory colonel to curse his political opponents and say it is not politics, or of the lady to love everybody and loathe Irishmen, I have the same difficulty in admitting the right of the most liberal and large-minded Christian to see good in all religions and nothing but evil in mine. But I know that to publish replies to this effect, particularly direct replies given in real controversy, will be regarded by many as a provocation and an impertinence.

Well, I must in this matter confess to being so old-fashioned as to feel something like a point of honour. I think I may say that I am normally of the sort to be sociable and get on easily with my fellows; I am not so much disposed to quarrel as to argue; and I value more than I can easily say the generally genial relations I have kept with those who differ from me merely in argument. I am very fond of England even as it is, quite apart from what it was or might be; I have a number of popular tastes, from detective stories to the defence of public-houses; I have been on many occasions on the side of the majority, as for instance in the propaganda of English patriotism during the Great War. I could even find in these sympathies a sufficient material for popular appeals; and, in a more practical sense, I should enjoy nothing more than always writing detective stories, except always reading them. But if in this much too lucky and even
lazy existence I find that my co-religionists are being pelted with insults for saying that their religion is right, it would ill become me not to put myself in the way of being insulted. Many of them have had far too hard a life, and I have had far too easy a life, for me not to count it a privilege to be the object of the same curious controversial methods. If the Dean of St. Paul's
really does believe, as he most undoubtedly does say, that the most devout and devoted rulers of the Catholic Church, when they accepted (realistically and even reluctantly) the fact of a modern miracle, were engaged in a "lucrative imposture," I should very much prefer to believe that he accuses me, along with better men than myself, of becoming an impostor merely for filthy lucre. If the word "Jesuit" is still to be used as synonymous with the word "liar," I should prefer that the same simple translation should apply to the word "Journalist," of which it is much more often true. If the Dean accuses Catholics as Catholics of desiring innocent men to die in prison (as he does), I should much prefer that he should cast me for some part in that terrific and murderous melodrama; it might in any case be material for a detective story. In short, it is precisely because I do sympathise and agree with my Protestant and agnostic fellow countrymen, on about ninety-nine subjects out of a hundred, that I do feel it a point of honour not to avoid their accusations on these points, if they really have such accusations to bring. I am very sorry if this little book of mine seems to be controversial on subjects about which everybody is allowed to be controversial except ourselves. But I am afraid there is no help for it; and if I assure the reader that I have tried to start putting it together in an unimpaired spirit of charity, it is always possible that the charity may be as one-sided as the controversy. Anyhow, it represents my attitude towards this controversy; and it is quite possible that everything is wrong about it, except that it is right.

Mass For Good Counsel At St Patrick's Friday 24th June

For the last six months or so a group of youngsters have been coming to the Good Counsel Mass on the 2nd Friday of each month at Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, at 6.30pm. After Mass they would go out for dinner. They are now starting to have Mass at St Patrick's details below. As well as this the Mass at Corpus Christi will still continue.

Juventutem London have moved to St Patrick's, Soho. This will be our first Mass in the new location. The Mass at 6.30pm will be offered for the Good Counsel Network. (But the collection will be for Juventutem)

Celebrant: Fr Patrick Hayward
Deacon: Fr Seán Finnegan
Subdeacon: Fr Timothy Finigan
Preacher: Fr Aidan Nichols OP (Author of; GK Chesterton, Theologian)

In choir: Fr Ray Blake

Music provided by Schola Abelis, University of Oxford Gregorian Chant society.

After the Mass we shall move to the square for a picnic if conditions are favourable. Otherwise, we shall go to a restaurant as usual.

For more details about the Masses organised by Juventutem London click here. We're especially keen for people to realise that the Mass is not only for people between the ages of 18-35, but that the social afterwards is!

Photo

Saint Etheldreda: Abbess Of Ely On Tv & A Walking Pilgrimage

At 7am on Thursday 23rd June a 60 minute programme about this Saint will be on EWTN (sky 589). Despite her vow of purity and desire to serve the Lord as a nun, St Etheldreda is forced into marriage by her Father. She miraculously escapes and becomes the Abbess of Ely (No, not the place in Cardiff, but a place in Norfolk, no doubt named after that part of Cardiff!)

Not only this, but later this year, 26th-28th August, there will be a walking Pilgrimage from Ely (No, still the one in Norfolk) to Walsingham. There will be lots of fun, singing, praying, nice Old Rite Masses and even some walking, but no running we hope. (Remember the very wise bears in Prince Caspian).

GK Chesterton On Voting For Nick Clegg

When thinking about Terry Pratchett and Chesterton last week, I went to look at Orthodoxy by GKC. It was very nice to find the following message written in 1908 by Chesterton for the students et al who voted for Nick Clegg in the last election;

THE ETHICS OF ELFLAND

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

Croeso I Gymru, Archesgob Stack!

Maybe that should be the other way around. Your Grace, don't worry about learning Welsh, although it would be a good thing. Worry about The Church in Wales, things are not good. There maybe signs of hope, but I don't see them when I'm there!

Sign up to say the Rosary for Archbishop Stack or any other Bishop you want to pray for. Photo here.

Todays Conference Cancelled

I just spoke to a lady at our local Parish, who was on her way to the Pro Ecclesia Et Pontifice Conference in Westminster Central methodist Hall. It has been cancelled I told her, for final details see here.

Large Turn Out For Annual GK Chesterton Pilgrimage

Well I'm quite large! So we loaded up the coach in London and 45 minutes latter we were there, at the Grave of the great man himself. We all said the Prayer for the Beatification of GK Chesterton and then went for lunch. I pushed the crowds away from the grave ("move back you two") first to take a photo of my son.

What Chesterton and his friend Belloc would have thought of lunch is beyond me. 75% of us are Pioneers so we don't drink alcohol and the other 25% of the people on the Pilgrimage had only just turned four, and so were lucky to be in the pub at all! Down with teetotalism up the Pioneers!

We then moved onto St Teresa's Catholic Church, GKC's Parish, only to find the front doors locked, which should have been open and the side door which should have been locked, open! So we pushed a few things that blocked the door out of the way and we were in! Very nice, do see the website for photos and details. We said the prayer again, in front of the Statue of Mary given to the Church by GKC himself. We let Fr Higgins, the PP know about the doors before we left. I sure Chesterton wrote about a Higgins, must look that up sometime.

Next years Pilgrimage will take place on Thursday 14th June, the 76th Anniversary the the death of Gilbert Kieth Chesterton. Anyone interested in walking there from Campden Hill, Kensington, London, should let me know. We will hopefully have Mass (High?).

Marconi scandal, Chesterton & All That

Allegations and rumours centred on insider trading in Marconi's shares and involved a number of government ministers, including Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney General; Herbert Samuel, Postmaster General; and the Treasurer of the Liberal Party, the Master of Elibank, Lord Murray.

The allegations included the fact that Isaacs' brother, Godfrey Isaacs, was managing director of the Marconi company. While some have seen anti-Semitism in the charges, the majority of those accused were not Jewish, and the allegations, whether true or not, were well-founded and serious enough to be brought to public attention. Particularly active was the New Witness, edited by Cecil Chesterton. This was a distributist publication founded in 1911 by Hilaire Belloc as Eye-Witness, with Cecil's brother G. K. Chesterton on the editorial staff.

Cecil Chesterton, expected to be sued by the government ministers under the nation's libel laws, which put the burden of proof on the defendant. Instead, Godfrey Isaacs, Marconi's director, brought a criminal libel action against him. The New Age (June 12, 1913) described the trial this way:

If circumstantial evidence were ever sufficient to justify a charge, we do not doubt that in the case of Mr. Godfrey Isaacs v. Mr. Cecil Chesterton, the latter and not the former would have won. The case of Mr. Chesterton was admittedly based on circumstances and on such reasonable deductions from them as on the face of the facts any average mind would have felt impelled to draw. Unfortunately, however, for him the circumstances themselves proved insusceptible of any further evidence than their own existence.

The court ruled against Cecil Chesterton and fined him a token £100 plus costs, which was paid by his supporters. Some supporters claimed the decision would have gone differently had Cecil's lawyer aggressively gone after the accused ministers who were at the heart of the scandal. In the next issue of the New Witness, Cecil Chesterton repeated his allegations against the ministers, who still did not sue. (I got this from Wikipedia) For more details see the biography of G. K. Chesterton by Maisie Ward.

Marconi has since gone bust! And on 14th June 2011, the 75th Anniversary of the death of GK Chesterton, Marconi House in London caught fire!

GK Chesterton, Terry Pratchett & Suicide

I have been told that Terry is a fan of GKC, nothing wrong with that, we all should be. But it is an amazing coincidence (sorry God, just using this term so as not to offend the fools out there) that today ends the 9 days of the Pro-Life prayers to GKC and today State Sponsored TV (BBC) will show Terry watching someone else kill themselves. Tomorrow is the 75 anniversary of the death of GKC, were he still alive I think he would suggest that Terry needs to read a few more of his books!

Just being totally ridiculous for a minute and putting God out of the argument, let us consider a couple of points. Many people who attempt suicide fail and go on and live happy lives, assisted suicide does not fail. Secondly, you and I do not know what the future holds, we do not even KNOW for sure how we will feel tomorrow. Alison Davis, of No Less Human wanted to die for years, but is now very happy that no one helped her!

Just looked on the internet and found this lot here;

Author Terry Pratchett writes that Chesterton "in small doses taken regularly is good for the soul" [Source- Wisdom and Innocence, p. 90].

Pratchet and co-author Neil Gaiman dedicated their novel Good Omens:
"to the memory of GK Chesterton, a man who knew what was going on".

Also a character in the book (Good Omens) states that Chesterton is:
"the only poet in the twentieth century to even come close to the Truth."
[Source- Wisdom and Innocence, p. 90.]

Terry Pratchett also writes:
"It's worth pointing out that in The Man Who was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill he gave us two of the most emotionally charged plots in the twentieth century..."
[Source- Wisdom and Innocence, p. 90]

As I have a signed copy (that is a funny story, for another post) of Wisdom and Innocence, maybe I should get around to reading it now. You can borrow it when I'm done Terry.

Do also see John Smeaton's blog for how to complain to the BBC and ideas of what to say.

Prayers For SSPX

[Considering the signs], Messa in Latino [joined now by Rorate Caeli and, we hope, by all of you, in your churches, chapels, families, prayer groups] takes the liberty of begging all to join in prayer during the entire Pentecost Octave, invoking Almighty God:

That the Fraternity of Saint Pius X may be granted an official position within the Church.

For this intention, under the advice and with the approval of priests who collaborate with Messa in Latino, from Pentecost Sunday to Trinity Sunday, we ask all to say this prayer:

VENI, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium, et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.

V. Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur;
R. Et renovabis faciem terrae.
Oremus:
DEUS, qui corda fidelium Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti: da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere, et de eius semper consolatione gaudere. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

COME, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy love.

V. Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created
R. And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

Let us pray:
O GOD, Who taught the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant that, by the gift of the same Spirit, we may be always truly wise, and ever rejoice in His consolation. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

And to offer their daily rosary for this intention.

We invite Priests to please add this intention to their personal memento at Holy Mass.

Chesterton Quote Found At Last!

GKC Conference & Pilgrimage and lots of people who can remember things they have read by him, and tell you where they read them! Oh help! While I may be Chesterton's biggest fan, lets go by weight, I've read less than half the books he wrote and remember nothing! I have spent years however telling GKC's story about a gate across a road, but could not remember which book it came from, and sometimes would wonder if it was not Belloc's story instead.

So in absolute fear of meeting anyone who has read a lot of GKC, I turned to my secretary and sent her to London to get me some books! (Sorry in-joke, St Aquinas would get it). So I'm now reading The Thing by GKC, for the first time. Then I find the following at the start of the chapter, The Drift From Domesticity;

IN the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.

The hard thing about quoting Chesterton for me is that I want to quote the whole book! This quote is great, I have used it to defend many many things, be it Altar Rails, Communion on the tongue, Adoration, The Old Rite Mass or the Old Rite Mass!

Chesterton Conference 2nd July 2011

A one day conference to be held on Saturday July 2, 2011, at the Catholic Chaplaincy, St Aldates, Oxford, at 10 a.m.

For directions, see the Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy website

The speakers will be Lynette Burrows, Dale Ahlquist (of EWTN fame), Father Ian Ker and Dr William Oddie.

Chesterton, wrote his brother Cecil, ‘is primarily . . . the preacher of a definite message to his own time. He is using all the power which his literary capacity gives him to lead the age in a certain direction.’

‘The very sound of his name’, the historian Sir Arthur Bryant put it at the time when he died in 1936, ‘is like a trumpet call.… If any literary name of our age becomes a legend, it will be his…. He was the kind of man of whom Bunyan was thinking when he drew the picture of Mr. Greatheart.’

His premature death was seen as the stilling of a prophetic voice at a time when it was desperately needed: Eliot wrote of his sense of loss at Chesterton's ‘disappearance from a world such as that we live in.’

By the end of the last century, his prophetic voice was being rediscovered. Chesterton’s distaste for state socialism, his suspicion of monopoly capitalism, and his support for the independence from imperial domination of small nations like Poland had once more become understood as being at the centre of Catholic thinking, and they were validated by the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc.

His anti-modernism was paralleled by Pope John Paul’s counter-revolution against the theological liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, a liberalism even more powerful (as it had also been during the first decade of the century) within Protestantism; here, too, Chesterton’s transcendentalist arguments against the immanentism of his own day seems almost uncannily prescient.

Chesterton’s ideas on on marriage and the family, on eugenics, above all on the dignity of the human person and the central importance of the defence of free will in a determinist age, all became uncannily relevant to the world of the twenty-first century.

The conference on July 2 will explore this new understanding of Chesterton as a prophet for our own times.

Application Form

Simply print out and post this straightforward form.

This is from the Chesterton Society

Don't forget the Chesterton Pilgrimage 14th June.

Cardinal Burke And All That

So Cardinal Burke is not coming to England (again). Was this the fault of any English Bishop, Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, the Cardinal himself or my four year old son and myself? When I find out, I shall be very cross and make the said culprit come round and explain to my son, why he will not now be meeting the Cardinal!

In the mean while please do start saying the following Litany daily, you can order a printed copy or ten from HLI. And don't forget to sign up to say the Rosary for Cardinal Burke and any other Bishop you like or dislike!

A LITANY ON BEHALF OF BISHOPS
Lord have mercy on us.
Christ have mercy on us.
Lord have mercy on us.
Christ hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.

God, the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.
God, the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God, the Holy Ghost, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, Queen of Heaven and earth, pray for us.
St. Joseph, Protector of Holy Mother Church, pray for us.
St Michael, all Archangels, special servants of Bishops, pray for us.
St John the Baptist, Herald of the Lord, pray for us.
St Peter, pray for us.
St Paul, pray for us.
St Andrew, pray for us.
St John, pray for us.
St Thomas, pray for us.
St James, pray for us.
St Philip, pray for us.
St Bartholomew, pray for us.
St Matthew, pray for us.
St James, pray for us.
St Simon, pray for us.
St Thaddeus, pray for us.
St Barnabas, pray for us.
St Matthias, pray for us.
O Holy Apostles, our first Bishops, we beg your intercession on behalf of your successors;

St Thomas Becket, pray for us.
St Blaise, pray for us.
St Boniface, pray for us.
St Cyprian, pray for us.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, pray for us.
St. Irenaeus, pray for us.
St John Fisher, pray for us.
St. Polycarp, pray for us.
All martyred Bishops; pray for us.

St Athanasius, pray for us.
St Alphosus Liguori, pray for us.
St Ambrose, pray for us.
St Anslem, pray for us.
St Augustine, pray for us.
St Basil and Gregory Nazianzen pray for us
St Bonaventure, pray for us.
St Cyril of Alexandria, pray for us.
St Cyril of Jerusalem, pray for us.
St Francis De Sales, pray for us.
St Hilary, pray for us.
St Isadore of Seville, pray for us.
St Peter Chrsologus, pray for us.
St Peter Damian, pray for us.
St Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.
All Bishops-Doctors of the Church, pray for us.

St Albert the Great, pray for us.
St Ansgar, pray for us.
St Charles Borromeo, pray for us.
St Ildephonsus, pray for us.
St Methodius, pray for us.
St Nicolas, pray for us.
St Norbert, pray for us.
St Patrick, pray for us.
St Richard, pray for us.
Sts. Timothy and Titus, pray for us.
St William, pray for us.
St Wulfran, pray for us.
All Bishops who have spread the light of Christ; pray for us.

St Leo the Great, pray for us.
St Pius V, pray for us.
St Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
St Pius X, pray for us.
All Saints who have helped further the Faith through teaching, pray for us.

That all bishops will maintain complete obedience to the Holy Father, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will remain faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will defend the Faith and moral teachings of the Church, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will uphold the true teachings of the Ecumenical Councils, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will allow and defend all duly authorised Rites of the Mass, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will staunchly defend the unborn, the elderly, the sick and all defenceless people, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will provide for true and complete education of the Faith for all souls in their care, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will exercise the powers of their office to defend the faithful against heretics, apostates, and false prophets and teachers, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will use their authority and powers to correct errors and falsehoods, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will stand up for the rights of the Church when infringed upon by the State, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will develop a great devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will be living examples of the virtues, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will look to their saintly predecessors as examples of how they should carry out their vocations, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will encourage true vocations to the priesthood and religious life, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will boldly proclaim the message of Our Lady of Fatima, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will concentrate their energies more on the spiritual than on the material needs of the faithful, we beseech Thee, hear us.
That all bishops will teach and preach the truth of Humanae Vitae and Familiaris Consortio.

O God, look with favour on Thy servants, Thy bishops, whom Thou hast appointed as teachers and defenders of Thy faithful here on earth. Grant that by word and example they may assist those over whom they have been placed, so that shepherds and flocks may together attain everlasting life, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

First Anniversary Of The Death Of The Pill (tablet)

A year ago today The Pill died as a Catholic magazine when it went public with a pro-abortion edition.

GK Chesterton Novena Starts Sunday 5th June

GK Chesterton died on the 14th June 1936, so please say the following prayer, with an Our Father, Hail Mary and a Glory be, each day, starting on Sunday, leading upto this 75th Anniversary. For printable prayercards.

God Our Father, Thou didst fill the life of Thy servant Gilbert Keith Chesterton with a sense of wonder and joy, and gave him a faith which was the foundation of his ceaseless work, a charity towards all men, particularly his opponents, and a hope which sprang from his lifelong gratitude for the gift of human life. May his innocence and his laughter, his constancy in fighting for the Christian faith in a world losing belief, his lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and his love for all men, especially for the poor, bring cheerfulness to those in despair, conviction and warmth to lukewarm believers and the knowledge of God to those without faith. We beg Thee to grant the favours we ask through his intercession, for end of abortion [and especially for ……] so that his holiness may be recognized by all and the Church may
proclaim him Blessed. We ask this through Christ Our Lord. Amen.
www.Catholicgkchestertonsociety.co.uk

Happy Feast Of The Ascension

The Gospel being read at Mass at Good Counsel today. Father Leworthy FSSP was the Priest, Conor was serving. I took the photo, having finally worked out how to turn the flash off first! For another photo see Maria Stops Abortion.