Capitalists McNabbed!

I've just started reading (after taking it from my pile of "waiting to be read books" - there, I won't mention my piles anymore) The Church and the Land by Fr Vincent McNabb.

I wasn't sure what the book was going to be like... I kind of half expected lots of heavy economic or theological diatribes and/or dialogues, heady stuff and disturbing, but like trying to wade through treacle.

Still, I plucked up the courage and opened the book. After all, I knew McNabb had been a key figure in the world of Chesterton and Belloc and had a profound influence on the entire Distribiutist movement of the 20s and 30s (he died in 1943).

Indeed, if you get the book and read the intro's by Dr William Fahey and Hilaire Belloc you'll realise just how important McNabb was (and is!) and furthermore how central to things Belloc believed him to be.

I needn't have worried.

The book is split into essays (rather it is a compilation of essays and articles) and so it is quite easy to pick up and (if so inclined) put down.

At present I am about 10 essays into the book and a few things shine through:

1. McNabb's undoubted intellect. The copious footnotes are perfect because they allow the modern, uneducated sorts (hey - no finger pointing) to understand his many examples and quotes.

2. McNabb's undoubted outrage at Social Injustice. Read his piece "The Voice of the Irish" on social conditions in major Irish and British cities and you will be shocked.

3. McNabb's deep-seated Christian faith. His outrage is for those made in the image of God being treated like cattle, like cogs in a machine to be used, abused and cast aside.

4. McNabb's common sense. He doesn't plead for paradise on earth (like some kind of Masonic/Communist Revolutionary), but merely asks for people to be treated with Charity (in its true sense). In fact he is a true humanitarian whilst not only failing to eschew, but actively attacking all the false values of today's humanitarians. I think it was Fahey who said that McNabb understood the Truth that we are Children of God instead of the Masonic 'Brotherhood of Man' (I never liked their 70s hits anyway). When you read McNabb you understand how Capitalism is intrinsically evil, pushing our folk off the land into single room "apartments" with no running water, never mind a toilet!

Some (notably American Neo-Cons) will queue up to call McNabb a Communist, at once betraying their lack of understanding of Communism, of Christianity, of Distributism and of Capitalism.

Yet ignorance is no defence, especially when defaming and slandering someone (dead or alive) especially when the smallest amount of reading (mayhaps that is beyond their attention span) will dispel any clouds of doubt they may have.

McNabb didn't want families moved from Capitalist slums into Communist grey tower-blocks.

McNabb didn't want the family farm turned into either an agri-business absentee-landlord churning out chemically soaked fodder to give profits to insurance conglomerates or Communist collective "farms" with all produce going to the State.

To make McNabb into a Communist is to go against everything he believed in, just as the Reds might want to turn McNabb into a Capitalist... For when a man attacks Capitalism and Communism, or when a man proposes an alternative which is diametrically opposed to Capitalism and Communism, it is not good enough for proponents of either Materialist creed to point the finger and fabricate twisted strands of "logic" to state that he was in reality one or other of the things he opposed.

In closing, though as I stated I still have a further 130 (or so) pages to go in this absorbing book I would ask anyone fortunate enough to obtain a copy (fingers crossed we can get a few to sell through FC) to read the essay: St Thomas Aquinas on Town Planning.

In this essay McNabb shows himself to be acutely aware of problems before his time, having read the classics and applying their lessons to the modern age.

After advancing arguments for self-sufficiency and that towns-folk would be better suited to being farmers outside the city walls, rather than traders within them, McNabb states that Aristotle, in Politics, asserts that:

"...the fellowship of foreignors greatly corrupts the morals of citizens. The reason is because it must happen that foreignors, having been brought up on other laws and customs, act in ways very different from those of the citizens. Thus their example will draw the citizen to imitate them; and the good estate of the commonwealth will be disturbed."

So far each of McNabb's essays - even the seemingly frivolous such as the one about ladies treating their dogs as babies (and this was 80 years before the current trend for lap-dogs dressed up and molly-coddled by the vacuous, the idle rich or wannabe-"celebrities") - has had the power to make the reader stop and think.

Belloc says that after being in the presence of this devout Dominican and feeling his "holiness" that "all other qualities sink away into nothingness."

Even one of his Hyde Park Corner adversaries (E.A. Siderman) wrote of McNabb:

"...he at once impressed his listeners with his personality, and with his appearance Sunday after Sunday, he became a great favourite."

Certainly, from what I've read so far, McNabb can be counted as one of the great Crusaders for Social Justice for our people.

Would that our age would throw forward such intellects and spokesman. As our people live on dole handouts, or in insecure dead-end McJobs... as more people have their homes repossessed or are forced to pay obscene mortgage payments to the banks (who always announce billions in profits): we need another Vincent McNabb.

As our land is occupied, as the air and soil is polluted, as wage slavery continues and urban "existence" continues, let us hope and pray for more McNabbs to raise the banner of National Freedom, Social Justice, Widespread Property and a Return to the Land.

It's not an easy message. It has none of the glamour of adverts for Coca Cola. It has none of the ease of Yuppies, Dinkies and Yummies driving their 4x4s around Chelsea en route to another dinner party.

But since when has the Truth been pretty, easy or fashionable?

Certainly not in living memory...


Link:
The Vincent McNabb Society

Look out for this poem about McNabb, written after his sermon at the funeral of Cecil Chesterton:

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

P.S. Which other blog would have the social writing of Fr McNabb followed by the politically astute warblings of Stiff Little Fingers? What value for money!