Francis Chesterton, Gilbert's Wife

Our G.K. Chesterton reading group will discuss the first three chapters of this biography of Frances Chesterton, G.K.'s wife, published by the American Chesterton Society:

The Woman Who Was Chesterton is a love story. But it is also a detective story. And best of all, it is a true story, told here for the the first time. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a romantic, a writer of detective tales, and a teller of the truth. His own story and the stories he told are becoming better and better known. But what has remained unknown is the story of the most important person in his life: his wife Frances Chesterton.

Nancy Carpentier Brown has done incredible detective work to uncover the mystery of Frances, tracking a figure who managed to leave very few traces of herself.

It is quite likely that as more is discovered about Frances, more biographies will be written of her, and they will be even more complete. But they will all come back to this one: The Woman Who Was Chesterton.

The title is, of course, a play on The Man Who Was Thursday, one of Chesterton's novels.

Nancy Carpentier Brown, who had previously edited a selection of Frances Chesterton's poems and plays, How Far Is It to Bethlehem, admits that she has somewhat limited resources for this biography because not many of Frances Chesterton's diaries or journals survived. She does have the letters that Frances and Father John O'Connor, Chesterton's model for Father Brown, exchanged which shed some light into their marital relationship. Brown also makes it clear that she is not writing a biography of G.K. Chesterton; she assumes the reader knows the general outline of his life.

This is not a scholarly biography; Brown is trying to describe the personality of Frances Chesterton and her marriage, partnership, and relationship to Chesterton. They were true partners in Chesterton's career: his writing, publishing, speaking; Frances was also a writer, publishing poetry that was admired and set to music. They were also partners in suffering: although they wanted children, they were infertile (Frances' gynecological history is discreetly described) and decided to help children in their extended families and friends rather than adopt (they had dozens of godchildren too). Both suffered chronic illnesses and often had to nurse one another through health crises, hospitalizations, and therapeutic travel.

Brown offered an excellent summary of this book when she wrote this about How Far Is It to Bethlehem?:

Frances Alice Blogg Chesterton spent most of her life in the shadow of her larger than life husband British author Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Subject to gossip and rumors often started by her sister-in-law, Ada Chesterton, Frances chose to keep quietly in the background, letting her husband and others take center stage. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a woman of talent and extraordinary gifts; it shows she had tremendous humility.

Her story is a love story. The love between Gilbert and Frances was romantic. She was his best fan, his most successful marketer, his biggest cheerleader. She took dictation from him; she tied his shoes. She clung to him when her life seemed out of control. She cherished the love poetry he wrote her, holding the words tenderly in her own heart, never sharing the most intimate of them with anyone. She loved him, and he loved her.

For nearly a century, Frances’ story has been hidden amongst the pages of poetry Gilbert wrote, Christmas cards sent to friends, letters to priests and friends stored in library special collections, biographies written by literary contemporaries, and in scattered periodicals and books. Rarely is it known that Frances had her own writing career. Only recently has anyone been aware that she had four books published during her lifetime.

It’s time to bring Frances out of the shadows and into the light. The story of Frances is intimately woven with the story of Gilbert. They worked as a team; they were lovers and friends, writing coaches and companions. They worked, ate, and slept together for 35 years, dependent on each other physically, emotionally and intellectually. One can hardly understand Gilbert without some understanding of Frances.

Gilbert’s story cannot be written without knowing Frances, but up till now, not enough has been known about Frances. This is the moment when that changes. Frances asked Gilbert to keep her out of his autobiography, but she isn’t here to stop us now. Frances is a woman who will come to be respected ever more, as it is discovered just who she really was, and how much she had to do with who Gilbert was.

Chesterton and Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary, the former Queen of Scotland, was executed on February 8, 1587. Tomorrow night, our Greater Wichita American Chesterton Society local society will meet to discuss two essays by Chesterton from the Ignatius Press edition of Lepanto: one on Cervantes and the other on Mary, Queen of Scots. The second essay is titled "If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary, Queen of Scots".

Chesterton wrote more about Mary of Scotland: in a 1931 book of biographies called Revaluations and in an article in the Illustrated London News about the Casket Letters, those letters that allegedly implicated Mary in the murder of her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. The biographical essay is in the volume In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton, also from Ignatius Press, edited by Joseph Pearce, Aidan Mackay, and Dale Ahlquist.

In the essay we'll discuss tomorrow, Chesterton picks up on the notion that the hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria, wanted to rescue Mary, marry her, and restore her to the throne of Scotland--and of course, reign with her there and in England after Elizabeth I died. Chesterton thinks marriage would have been good for both Mary and John and for Scotland, England, Europe, and the Catholic Church:

For Don John: And to the career of Don John it would have given a climax and a clue of meaning which its merely military successes could not give; and handed his name down in history and (what is much more important) in legend and literature, as a happier Antony married to a nobler Cleopatra. And when he looked into her eyes he would not have seen only bright chaos and the catastrophe of Actium, the ruin of his ships and his hopes of an imperial throne; but rather the flying curve and crescent of the Christian ships, sweeping to the rescue of the Christian captives, and blazed upon their golden sails the sunburst of Lepanto. . . . 

For Mary: If ever there was a woman who was manifestly meant, destined, created, and as it were crying aloud to be carried off by Don John of Austria, or some such person, it was Mary Queen of Scots. If ever there was a woman who went to seed for want of meeting any sort of man who was anything like her equal, it was she. . . . She never met a complete man; and Don John was very complete. . . .

For Europe and Christendom: There was a moment when all Christendom might have clustered together and crystallised anew, under the chemistry of the new culture; and yet have remained a Christendom that was entirely Christian. There was a moment when Humanism had the road straight before it; but, what is even more important, the road also straight behind it. It might have been a real progress, not losing anything of what was good in the past. The significance of two people like Mary Stuart and Don John of Austria is that in them Religion and the Renaissance had not quarrelled; and they kept the faith of their fathers while full of the idea of handing on new conquests and discoveries to their sons. They drew their deep instincts from medieval chivalry without refusing to feed their intellects on the sixteenth-century learning; and there was a moment when this spirit might have pervaded the whole world and the whole Church. There was a moment when religion could have digested Plato as it had once digested Aristotle. For that matter, it might have digested all that is soundest in Rabelais and Montaigne and many others; it might have condemned some things in these thinkers; as it did in Aristotle. Only the shock of the new discoveries could have been absorbed (to a great extent indeed it was absorbed) by the central Christian tradition. What darkened that dawn was the dust and smoke from the struggles of the dogmatising sectaries in Scotland, in Holland, and eventually in England. But for that, on the Continent, the heresy of Jansenism had never so much over-shadowed the splendour of the Counter-Reformation. And England would have gone the way of Shakespeare rather than the way of Milton; which latter degenerated rapidly into the way of Muggleton.

If this sounds interesting, and you are in the Wichita area, we will meet on the second floor of Eighth Day Books at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow (February 9) to discuss. Refreshments will be served.

Belloc on Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots

Hollywood, just like Schiller and Donizetti, could not resist having Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots confront each other, although they never met. Hilaire Belloc, in his Characters of the Reformation, resists that temptation, but may have fallen into other ones. Anna Mitchell and I will start the New Year tomorrow morning with our continuing series of discussing his portraits of Reformation era figures on the Son Rise Morning Show. Listen live here a little after 6:45 a.m. Central/7:45 a.m. Eastern.

Belloc highlights the changes in Elizabeth I's reputation and presents his own view, which is that she was more ruled than ruling:

The truth about Elizabeth is this. She was the puppet or figurehead of the group of new millionaires established upon the loot of religion begun in her father's time. They had at their head the unique genius of William Cecil, who, in spite of dangerous opposition, accomplished what might have seemed the impossible task of digging up the Catholic Faith by the roots from English soil, stamping out the Mass, and shepherding the younger generation of a reluctant people into a new religious mood. 

Throughout her life Elizabeth was thwarted in each political effort she made; she felt the check of her masters and especially Cecil as a horse feels the bridle. She never had her will in matters of State.

Belloc believes that Elizabeth suffered from great physical weakness and that she could not have become pregnant or delivered a child; therefore she remained unmarried.

He offers support for his view that she was unable to exert her political will:

As examples of the way in which she was "run" by those who were her masters, I will take four leading cases out of a very great number which might be quoted: 

1. She had personally given her Royal assurance to the Spanish Minister that the Spanish treasure ships bearing the pay for Alva's soldiers in the Netherlands, the ships which had taken refuge from pirates in English harbours, should be released and the money taken under safeguards to its proper destination. Cecil simply over-ruled her. He ordered the money to be kept and confiscated in spite of her, and his orders, not hers, were obeyed. 

2. Again, she desired to save Norfolk. Three separate times she interfered to prevent the execution. She was over- ruled. That unfortunate cousin of hers was put to death, but his blood is not upon her head; it is upon Cecil's. 

3. She tried to recall Drake just before the open declaration of war with Spain; no one thought of obeying her orders in the matter. 

4. The supreme example is the case of Mary, Queen of Scots. The murder — for it was a murder' — was accomplished against her will. Our official historians have perpetually repeated that her agony at hearing of Mary's death was feigned: that is, false. It was genuine. The signing of the warrant had indeed been wrung out of her, but that did not mean that the warrant would be put into execution. It was put into execution in spite of her, in order that she should be made responsible, willing or unwilling.

I think that Belloc ignores one of the main achievements that Father Marvin O'Connell noted about Elizabeth, and that was that she balanced her budget and did not have to depend upon Parliament for taxes or other stipends--at least, until she thought it was time to enter into war against Philip II in the Spanish Netherlands. Belloc also forgets that Elizabeth did have her way in at least one political sphere: the Church of England. She controlled the doctrine, the worship, and the vestments and order of the Church; she removed bishops at will; Belloc seems to think she harbored sympathy for Catholic doctrine and that's not likely. Furthermore, Elizabeth I did exert her will in the matter of her not marrying or naming a successor: "her masters" and/or Parliament were never able to change her mind on that matter and she had enough power to prevent them from forcing her.

When Belloc discusses Mary, Queen of Scots, he almost proves Elizabeth's point by highlighting how unfortunate Mary's marriages were:

When Mary landed in Scotland the religious revolution which, as we have seen, had made some little progress in England, though not much, which in Germany had swept everything into violent turmoil, and which in France was soon to bring about prolonged civil war, had in Scotland achieved a very great measure of success. Calvinism had become the enthusiastic creed of a minority, burning with zeal and determined to succeed. The majority were not similarly zealous for the defence of the Church, which in Scotland had become thoroughly corrupt; and the great Scottish nobles who had everything in their hands supported the religious revolution because it gave them the power to loot the Church and the monarchy wholesale. 

Into this anarchy Mary was plunged. For seven years her invincible courage still maintained her as Queen; but her temperament ruined what small chances she had of maintaining her position. We must remember in her favour that she was a woman of especial fascination which in a sense she exercises to this day; and that yet it was her misfortune to be married first to a sickly boy even younger than herself who died before she was eighteen and next by her own judgment and error to her cousin Darnley, a debauched and worthless character. She was accused, falsely, of having taken part in the murder of Darnley. The act was really that of the rebel Scotch nobles, but it was widely believed that she was guilty of it and still more widely believed (it is still a problem) that she was at any rate cognizant of what was in the wind. 

It was her temperament again that made her fall a victim to Bothwell, one of her own great nobles in Scotland, a masterly man to whom she succumbed. Though she was the representative of Catholicism she married him with Calvinistic rites, and as he was universally regarded as at least one of the murderers of her first husband the scandal was enormous. She was imprisoned, she escaped, she was defeated; and in 1568, her twenty-sixth year, she escaped, unarmed and without resources, over the border into England — trusting to the promised protection of Elizabeth. From that moment of course she was in Cecil's power.

That's why Chesterton highlights Don John of Austria's plan to marry the Queen of Scotland--with him, Chesterton says, she would at last have had a man more her equal in endurance, culture, spirit, and courage: "If ever there was a woman who was manifestly meant, destined, created, and as it were crying aloud to be carried off by Don John of Austria, or some such person, it was Mary Queen of Scots. If ever there was a woman who went to seed for want of meeting any sort of man who was anything like her equal, it was she."

Of both women, Belloc concludes, the legend has been so powerful that we had not--in his time--gotten to the truth. He feared that Elizabeth I would go from exaltation as the greatest queen ever to being deemed insignificant; he believed that Mary, Queen of Scots' life would always remain a mystery: "The whole story of this unfortunate woman remains and will remain full of unsolved problems. Mary Stuart will always be for some a martyr, for others a criminal, so long as the religious passions which centre round her name survive."

If you watched the 1971 movie I alluded to above, you might remember the theme song for Mary composed by John Barry: elegiac, melancholy, and romantic! Tune in tomorrow for more!

Book Review: Chesterton on "The Victorian Age of Literature"

According to Joseph Pearce in his biography of G.K. Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence, the editors of The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, The Rt. Hon. H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens) Fisher, M.A., F.B.A., Prof. Gilbert Murray, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A. (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford), Prof. Sir J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., and Prof. William T. Brewster, M.A., asked Chesterton to write a survey of the Victorian Age in Literature. His book was published in 1913 as no. 61 in the library; the editors thought it best to warn their readers:

The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.

Chesterton was an author, he was a Victorian (his dates: 1841-1922) , and he had obviously read the Victorians and their works, so I read the book as his authoritative history of Victorian Literature. He approaches the composition of a survey of an age in literature in the only way that Chesterton could: a systematically unsystematical way. He can't do it chronologically any more than he can do it alphabetically, so he traces themes and genres throughout the queen's long reign (her dates: 1837-1901), highlighting along the way a few of his favorites: Cobbett, Dickens, and Shaw. And he does it all in an introduction and four chapters:

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies

Chapter 2. The Great Victorian Novelists

Chapter 3. The Great Victorian Poets

Chapter 4. The Break-up of the Compromise

Bibliographical Note (added by the editors?)

The page numbers below are based on the Dodo Press edition pictured above.

He actually begins his overview before Queen Victoria's reign begins with the French Revolution: "the most important event in English history [that] happened in France". Moreover, he asserts "that the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution." The Romantic poets were the radicals: unlike the first of his favorites, William Cobbett, who really knew how the rural and urban poor suffered and had suggestions for correcting these injustices, there was no revolution. Or as Chesterton states, there was a counter-revolution: "an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that England became finally a land of landlords instead of common land-owners." While that was being implemented, "English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision." . . .  "Ideals exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics." (p. 3)

Thus the Victorian Compromise: implement reform and progress in England without great social unrest. Chesterton identifies Thomas Babington Macaulay as an exponent of this compromise: "its praise of Puritan politics and abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth." (pp. 7-8) 

You'll have to read the book for yourself to appreciate how Chesterton characterizes and criticizes the strengths and weaknesses of the authors he discusses. It is a very quotable book and believe it or not, I have restrained myself in quoting it in this review. As an example, 

"There were two Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh; but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott." (p. 8)

Macaulay could be Homeric, he could praise both the England that defeated the Armada and the Jacobite who died in exile after fighting to restore the Catholic Stuarts:

TO my true king I offered, free from stain,
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him I threw lands, honours, wealth, away,
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood’s prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill’s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting-place I asked, an early grave. . . . (my example, not his)

Chesterton thus praises Macaulay's greatness: "His noble enduring quality in our literature is this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite for great books, great battles, great cities, great men." (pp. 8-9)

He also cites John Stuart Mill and his utilitarian and libertarian philosophy but without much analysis of Mill as a writer.

If Macaulay is an emblem of the Victorian Compromise, with its rationalism and utilitarianism, Newman and the Oxford Movement is an example of one of its enemies: The Oxford Movement "was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault. This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which the spear blade was Newman." (p. 13)

(I've already quoted most of Chesterton's comments about Newman here.)

Then Chesterton goes on to analyze Carlyle, Froude, Ruskin, Kingsley, and Arnold, all with the same balance of praise and blame. He cites them all as "roughly representative of the long series of protests against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man of genius."  (p.25)

And that genius is, of course, Charles Dickens, who Chesterton includes both among "the fighters" in this chapter and the novelists in the next. 

In that chapter Chesterton begins by highlighting the great achievement of female novelists, from Austen to the Brontës , but especially George Eliot. He certainly admires Jane Austen:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

Then he goes on to the men: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, Reade, Kingsley, Bulwer Lytton, Meredith, and Hardy. He concludes chapter 2 with a discussion of children's literature and "literature meant merely for fun": Macdonald, Lear, Carroll, and W.S. Gilbert (and Sullivan?), ending with a joke about the librettist's last name and his own first name: "the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer than the name Gilbert."! (p. 83)

Among the poets in chapter three he reviews Tennyson, and Browning, with this comment on Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

With all his Italian sympathies and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense; for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and intelligently, as one con scious of the case against them both. . . . She is by far the most European of all the English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. (pp. 61-62)

Then he goes on to Swinburne, Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Thompson, and Patmore.

Chesterton summarizes the end of the Victorian Age and the break-up of the Victorian Compromise thus:

There came a time, roughly somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western Europe had for the time exhausted each other—Christianity and the French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria* might very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time. [*Today we could substitute the name "Queen Elizabeth II"!] . . .

Liberalism (in Newman's sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more or less to the heart of the  Utilitarian—and finding that he had none. Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead together, exactly as Macaulay's Lay says, and still stood all who saw them fall almost until the hour at which I write. (pp. 75-76)

In this chapter he examines the Æsthetes and the Decadents: Wilde, Beardsley, and even Maeterlinck(?). He did not include Dowson ("days of wine and roses"; "gone with the wind")! Among novelists, he critiques Henry James, opining that The Turn of the Screw is such a great achievement as a ghost story because the characters in the rest of James's novels are like ghosts! Again, he brings in one of his best literary friends (and designated heretic), G.B. Shaw, and another heretic H.G. Wells for his commendation and criticism.

Then he closes with the Imperialist phase: Stevenson, Henley, and Kipling. His appreciation of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is astute:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one Englishman has seen the joke—I mean  the point. You will find twenty allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will also find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal, neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab of the story is that man can't: because while evil does not care for good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good story-telling. (p. 87)

The main caveat to be made about this book is that you have to know Victorian literature--you have to know it just to know who Chesterton is talking about sometimes for he does not always include first names (unless like Henry James the author has two first names as his name) or the title of the novel or book he is describing. You have to know the novels and the poems and the characters and the plots. I pulled out the second volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature just to double-check some things. 

Sadly, the only author not included in this survey is G.K. himself (which would have been a conflict of interest anyway)--but it's interesting to think about the contributions he made to literature before Queen Victoria died and his attacks on the Victorian compromise on the side of reason and faith, against utilitarianism, industrialism, and jingoism, and how he continued the fight long after the queen died. 

An enjoyable and enlightening read. Notice how the discussion of the English reaction to the French Revolution dovetailed with my recent reading of Robert R. Reilly's book. Notice how Chesterton would have been particularly pleased with the alliteration of my penultimate sentence.

Chesterton to the Neophytes

In the diocese of Wichita, Kansas last night, perhaps 327 adults joined the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil. At least that's how many Candidates (who had already been baptized) and Catechumens or Elect (who have never been baptized) participated in the Rite of Election this year, according to The Catholic Advance, our diocesan newspaper.

The Elect received the Sacraments of Initiation last night: Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion, while the candidates affirmed their belief in all that the Catholic Church teaches and received the Sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Communion. Some may have been baptized Catholics and have received their First Holy Communion in the second grade and then fell away from the practice of the Faith: they were confirmed last night. The Elect of last night are the Neophytes of this Easter Sunday Morning.

I know at least two of those who became Catholics last night and I know that G.K. Chesterton played a great role in one of them deciding to become Catholic.

Chesterton thought often about his "conversion" to Catholicism from the Church of England and he wrote about it often, publishing at least four separate works on why he converted:

The Catholic Church and Conversion
Why I Am A Catholic
"Why I am a Catholic" essay in The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic
In The Well and the Shallows, essays on
MY SIX CONVERSIONS 

I. THE RELIGION OF FOSSILS 

II. WHEN THE WORLD TURNED BACK 

III. THE SURRENDER UPON SEX 

IV. THE PRAYER-BOOK PROBLEM 

V. THE COLLAPSE OF MATERIALISM 

VI. THE CASE OF SPAIN 

VII. THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS

Our G.K. Chesterton group has been reading those various essays which Ignatius Press has collected in one volume--and are just about to finish the last three essays, which will combine with reading chapters from The Woman Who Was Chesterton starting in April. 

Perhaps these two paragraphs from the "Why I Am a Catholic" essay in The Thing summarize Chesterton's reasons for becoming a Catholic. He just kept finding out that the Catholic Church told the truth:

There is barely space here to indicate this one thing out of the thousand things that confirm the same fact and confirm each other. I would undertake to pick up any topic at random, from pork to pyrotechnics, and show that it illustrates the truth of the only true philosophy; so realistic is the remark that all roads lead to Rome. Out of all these I have here only taken one fact; that the thing is pursued age after age by an unreasonable hatred that is perpetually changing its reason. Now of nearly all the dead heresies it may be said that they are not only dead, but damned; that is, they are condemned or would be condemned by common sense, even outside the Church, when once the mood and mania of them is passed. Nobody now wants to revive the Divine Right of Kings which the first Anglicans advanced against the Pope. Nobody now wants to revive the Calvinism which the first Puritans advanced against the King. Nobody now is sorry that the Iconoclasts were prevented from smashing all the statues of Italy. Nobody now is sorry that the Jansenists failed to destroy all the dramas of France. Nobody who knows anything about the Albigensians regrets that they did not convert the world to pessimism and perversion. Nobody who really understands the logic of the Lollards (a much more sympathetic set of people) really wishes that they had succeeded in taking away all political rights and privileges from everybody who was not in a state of grace. "Dominion founded on Grace" was a devout ideal, but considered as a plan for disregarding an Irish policeman controlling the traffic in Piccadilly, until we have discovered whether he has confessed recently to his Irish priest, it is wanting in actuality. In nine cases out of ten the Church simply stood for sanity and social balance against heretics who were sometimes very like lunatics. Yet at each separate moment the pressure of the prevalent error was very strong; the exaggerated error of a whole generation, like the strength of the Manchester School in the 'fifties, or of Fabian Socialism as a fashion in my own youth. A study of the true historical cases commonly shows us the spirit of the age going wrong, and the Catholics at least relatively going right. It is a mind surviving a hundred moods. 

As I say, this is only one aspect; but it was the first that affected me and it leads on to others. When a hammer has hit the right nail on the head a hundred times, there comes a time when we think it was not altogether by accident. But these historical proofs would be nothing without the human and personal proofs, which would need quite a different sort of description. It is enough to say that those who know the Catholic practice find it not only right, but always right when everything else is wrong; making the Confessional the very throne of candour where the world outside talks nonsense about it as a sort of conspiracy; upholding humility when everybody is praising pride; charged with sentimental charity when the world is talking a brutal utilitarianism; charged with dogmatic harshness when the world is loud and loose with vulgar sentimentalism--as it is to-day. At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the centre; he knows.

Welcome home, Neophytes, reverts, and new Catholics! Make yourself at home, all cradle Catholics who renewed our baptismal promises--that perhaps others made for us--last night or will renew them today! 

Happy Easter! Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

The Chestertons and Christmas on the Son Rise Morning Show

Anna Mitchell of Sacred Heart Radio asked me to contribute some Christmas material to the Son Rise Morning Show during my usual Monday morning spot for the next couple of weeks. We talked about Newman and Christmas, but since I'm anticipating the annual Advent/Christmas for our local American Chesterton Society's group, I suggested Chesterton and Christmas. Actually, we'll start with the Chestertons and Christmas, to include G.K.'s wife Frances, who also wrote many Christmas-themed works. So on Monday, December 9, we'll start by discussing how G.K. and Frances celebrated Christmas in their creative works. I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show about 6:50 a.m. Central Time/7:50 a.m. Eastern; listen live here. The segment will be included in an EWTN hour of the program later in the week.

At our annual Chesterton Advent/Christmas party at Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas we read excerpts from G.K. and Frances' poems, stories, plays, and essays. One of our resources is an out of print collection, The Spirit of Christmas. As Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society explains:

Each year for over thirty years, G.K. Chesterton would write at least five or six articles on Christmas, along with one or two poems and some other odd piece, that would be spread among the journals for which he was a regular contributor and Yuletide issues of other journals for which he was not. His biographer Maisie Ward once expressed the desire to collect all of Chesterton’s writings on Christmas into one volume, not only because there was such a wonderful variety of material available, but especially because this was a subject in which Chesterton’s charity seemed to shine most brightly.

It was Marie Smith who finally carried out Maisie’s idea and created a book by Chesterton on Christmas. She would go on to put together five posthumous Chesterton collections, only one fewer than Dorothy Collins. The Spirit of Christmas is probably the most successful and possibly the most satisfying.

This book could easily have been five times larger, but even though it represents only a fraction of Chesterton’s Christmas writings, it is an excellent selection, containing both familiar delights and unusual gems. Presented in mostly chronological order, Marie provides a pleasing layout of poems, essays, stories and even the very rare play, “The Turkey and the Turk.” When the book was published in 1984, most of its material was appearing between the covers of a book for the first time. The other rarity, in addition to the mummer’s play, was the previously uncollected poem Gloria in Profundis – the paradoxical “Glory to God in the Lowest.”

There is a paperback edition available on Amazon.com for $542.00!!

G.K.'s Christmas essays explore how we celebrate Christmas with feasting, caroling, giving gifts, debating about Santa Claus ("The child who doubts about Santa Claus has insomnia. The child who believes has a good night's rest"), etc. He often included Charles Dickens in his Christmas essays--but more about that in the second episode of our miniseries on December 16! His poems, like his wife Frances's, are most often focused on the Baby in the Manger:

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

There is another book we bring to our table at Eighth Day Books: A Chesterton Christmas: Essays, Excerpts, and Eggnog, edited by Brian G. Daigle. He includes a long excerpt from The Everlasting Man from Part II, Chapter One, "The God in the Cave", which someone has to read at least part of:

Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanization of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a newborn child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a newborn child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a newborn child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother, you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows I as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

Our other source is Nancy Charpentier Brown's collection of Frances Chesterton's works, How Far Is It to Bethlehem:

Frances Chesterton, wife of British journalist G.K. Chesterton, was a gentle poet and playwright. Her sweet works long lay in obscurity, except for a few Christmas lyrics, which have never gone out of print. Her plays for children were in demand when she wrote them; there is a demand for them again today. Her poems and plays reveal a woman of deep thought, a spiritual woman, a woman longing for Christ, and especially drawn to Him at the Nativity, when He was a small baby. To read these works is to understand better G.K. Chesterton’s wife and spiritual companion. And so, these works are offered back to a world that has almost forgotten them.

Included in How Far Is It to Bethlehem are six plays for children and adults, an essay, numerous poems, and the collection of Christmas Card poems Frances wrote for the family Christmas Card each year.

Among the Christmas plays Frances wrote is The Christmas Gift, intended for very young children. On Christmas Eve, a family gathers for a meager supper; the father is off at war, and the mother reminds her children:

We won't forget to keep the holy night.
Though all is dark, here is a little light.

Their parish church has been destroyed, but some carolers come to sing around the family's manger:

Welcome, welcome, little Lord,
Out of the cold dark night.
We want to give Thee all we have
Of love and warmth and light.
We have no gold, incense or myrrh
To lay at Thy dear feet,
Only our little lips and hands
That offer service meet.

The simple rhymes, the slightly archaic language ("service meet"), and the surprise at the end create an atmosphere of love and simplicity. There's wonder in how strangers meet on Christmas Eve and share with each other the wonder of that Holy Night.

Frances' other plays and poems contain common themes of dark and light, night and eternity, the Baby in the manger, the gifts of the Magi, Mary and Joseph: all focused on the mystery of the Christ Child, God Made Man, as an infant, so tiny and helpless. Her last Christmas card poem was set to music by Herbert Howells:

Here is the little door, lift up the latch, oh lift! 
We need not wander more but enter with our gift; 
Our gift of finest gold, 
Gold that was never bought nor sold; 
Myrrh to be strewn about his bed; 
Incense in clouds about his head; 
All for the child that stirs not in his sleep, 
But holy slumber holds with ass and sheep. 

Bend low about his bed, for each he has a gift; 
See how his eyes awake, lift up your hand, O lift! 
For gold, he gives a keen-edged sword 
(Defend with it thy little Lord!) 
For incense, smoke of battle red, 
Myrrh for the honoured happy dead; 
Gifts for his children, terrible and sweet, 
Touched by such tiny hands, and Oh such tiny feet.

With Chesterton on the Middle Ages

Preparing for my presentation for the Catholic Culture Conference this weekend at the Spiritual Life Center ("Cobbett and Chesterton on Merry Old England"), I've been reading books and essays by Chesterton. Registration closes today at noon, so you'd better call in now!

Throughout his Short History of England, his study of Chaucer, and many essays in which he mentions the Middle Ages, Chesterton notes that the twentieth century Englishman (or woman) knows nothing about the Middle Ages except what prejudices he or she has received about the darkness and obscurity of that Catholic era. As an example, The American Chesterton Society posts this essay from the Illustrated London News, November 15, 1913, "Getting to Know the Middle Ages":

It is quite natural that the prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: “There was little social or political advance in the Middle Ages” until the Reformation and the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in spinning-jennies and jelly-fish – which is indeed the case. For that is all that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very interesting story.

A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls “little social or political advance.” There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.

Read the rest there.

Also from The American Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist writes about Chesterton on Chaucer:

Chesterton has often been dismissed for blindly idealizing the Middle Ages, but the real problem is quite the opposite. The modern world automatically attacks the Middle Ages as something backwards, dark, and superstitious, the enemy of reason and liberty. Chesterton merely defended the truth that reason and liberty enjoyed a high point in medieval times that the world has not really seen since. He acknowledged that there were still problems in those times, and there are certainly many things that we can rightfully regard as improvements. But history is not a story of progress. Our fortunes move both backward and forward. While technology provides a kind of liberty, it also provides a kind of slavery. While the experts are useful as servants, they are unbearable as masters.

In the Middle Ages the peasant class, according to Chesterton, was still successfully fighting off the rise of the Aristocratic state. He refers to a famous peasant uprising where they “killed the lawyers; a comprehensible and (relatively) even commendable course; though they also showed some disposition to hang anybody who could read or write; which is perhaps carrying the distrust of professionalism too far.”

The most difficult thing for us to understand about that culture is that it was purely Catholic, there were no Reformers or Rebels to contend with. The theology was solid and widespread. The criticisms of the Church came in the form of making fun of stuffy Roman officialism, or, in the case of Geoffrey Chaucer, making fun of friars.

As I recall, though dimmed by years, when I studied The Canterbury Tales in college, it was as if the Reformation had already happened in Chaucer's time: the Church was corrupt; Indulgences were for sale; we were as anti-clerical as Lollards or Voltaire; Martin Luther came far too late to the ball! After this project, I think I need to read Chesterton on Chaucer and then re-read The Canterbury Tales without jaundice. After all, April is not over yet!

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Book Review: Joseph Pearce's Biography of G.K. Chesterton

It seems like I've been reading this book forever! We started reading it in our local Chesterton Society group late in 2019 I think, three chapters at a time, although we sometimes only got through two chapters during our monthly discussions. Then because of COVID, we had to skip several meetings, both in the spring of 2020 and particularly at the end of the year. My late brother and I were both in the hospital in December; then Steven died on the second day of January and we met on the second Friday of that month to pray a Rosary for the repose of his soul, and then it was bitterly cold in February so we cancelled. A smaller group of us finally met in March this year, and a larger group gathered on the Friday in the Octave of Easter this month. 

We determined then we'd all read the last four chapters, hope to get through two of them in May and finish our discussion of this book in June! Next month we'll decide what to read next: we're leaning toward either Chesterton's study of Charles Dickens or his book about Geoffrey Chaucer. I'm in favor of either, but we'll vote so that Eighth Day Books may obtain the book for us and we'll start discussing it in July!

Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton is an excellent biographical study, combining the narrative of Chesterton's life with a comprehensive review of his works, their reception at the time, and their influence on other writers like C.S. Lewis, Christopher Dawson, Dorothy L. Sayers, and many others. Pearce's vivid description of the Chestertons' (Gilbert and Frances) domestic life is well-matched by his recounting of their travels to the Holy Land, the U.S.A., Ireland, etc.

One theme we did comment on several times, because we had previously (in 2016) read Nancy Carpentier Brown's The Woman Who Was Chesterton, was how Pearce's biography was considerably more favorable toward Chesterton's sister-in-law, Ada Chesterton (his brother Cecil's wife/widow) than Brown's view of her in the context of Frances' life. In Pearce's narration, she seemed more sympathetic to Chesterton and his work, while Brown highlights Frances' negative reaction to Ada's biographical work The Chestertons.

There was one error I spotted: one page 381 in the chapter "Rome and Romance" Pearce mentions that the Chestertons were in Rome for the "Beatification of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales"--that's incorrect: 136 Martyrs of England and Wales were beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI. Twenty-nine of those beatified in that group would be canonized among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.

It was difficult for me to read the last pages, describing Chesterton's death and Frances' grief--too close to my own feelings; I had to put the book down for a day before I could finish it.

I think this biography is one of Joseph Pearce's greatest achievements. Highly recommended.

G.K. Chesterton, RIP

So last Friday night, on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, our Greater Wichita Chesterton Society local chapter (including residents of Derby, St. Mark's, Hutchinson and Newton) met in The Ladder to finish our discussion of Joseph Pearce's biography of G.K. Chesterton. As you might expect, the last event in Chesterton's life to be discussed was his death, 85 years ago today (June 14, 1936).

There were two very beautiful anecdotes about Chesterton's decline and death. One was that he had memorized the Sequence for the Feast of Corpus Christi (having published his great work on St. Thomas Aquinas just three years before in 1933). Pearce quoted the last two stanzas of Lauda Sion, with its prayer to see God face-to-face at the Heavenly Banquet:

Bone pastor, panis vere,

Jesu, nostri miserére:

Tu nos pasce, nos tuére:

Tu nos bona fac vidére

In terra vivéntium.

Tu, qui cuncta scis et vales:

Qui nos pascis hic mortáles:

Tuos ibi commensáles,

Cohærédes et sodáles,

Fac sanctórum cívium.

Amen. Alleluia.

He also cited the last words of Verbum supernum prodiens, reflecting on Heaven as being in patria (our true native land!). For a man who loved England so much, this was remarkable statement.

UPDATE: I think that the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated on Thursday, June 11 in 1936. (Easter was on April 12; Pentecost on May 31, and Trinity Sunday on June 7.)

The other anecdote was that Pope Pius XI sent telegrams to Frances Chesterton and Cardinal Hinsley, referring to Chesterton as a "Defender of the Catholic Faith". The telegram was read at a memorial Requiem Mass celebrated at Westminster Cathedral on June 27, 1936. The British press would not publish the pope's telegram because it gave Chesterton the title which, in its view, belonged only to the King of England, Edward VIII. (Edward VIII had not been crowned yet and never would be because he abdicated in December of 1936 because he could not reign "without the help and support of the woman" he loved.)

Since he had not been crowned or anointed, or sworn his coronation oath to defend the faith, the future Duke of Kent was not really the Defender of the Faith at that time at all! 

I wonder what Chesterton would have made of all the ironies of Edward VIII's abdication in his column for G.K.'s Weekly.

Pearce reminded us, of course, that King Henry VIII had received the title "Fidei Defensor" from Pope Leo X "shortly before the King had rebelled against the Church". It was actually in 1521, about six years before Henry started seeking an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. We could date his rebellion against the Catholic Church and Papal authority to 1532, so perhaps not that "shortly before". Pearce also comments that Chesterton had little in common with the king, "except perhaps the size of their girths."! (p. 485)

You may see a digitized image (showing the damage incurred in a fire) of the Papal Bull of Pope Leo X proclaiming Henry VIII the Defender of the Faith at the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog, reminding us why he received that title:

Henry was given the title Defender of the Faith in recognition for his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments). Possibly written in consultation with Thomas More (b. 1478, d. 1535) and Cardinal Wolsey (b. c. 1473, d. 1530), Henry’s principal statesmen at this point in his reign, this theological treatise acted as a response to the pronouncements of the German theologian Martin Luther (b. 1483, d. 1546), whose ideas helped to shape the Protestant Reformation movement during the 16th century. . . .

Henry’s positive relationship with the Papacy did not last. Only a decade after Leo X issued the papal bull, Henry decided to break away from the Church of Rome, following Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annul his marriage to his first wife Catherine of Aragon (b. 1485, d. 1536). He also distanced himself from the Assertio, claiming that he had been manoeuvred into writing it by his bishops. His actions ultimately resulted in his own excommunication by Clement’s successor Paul III (b. 1468, d. 1549) in 1538 and he was stripped of the title Defender of the Faith.

However, towards the end of Henry’s reign, in 1543, the English Parliament passed an act that restored the title for him and his successors. Since then, it has continued to be used as part of the styling of British monarchs (including the reigning Elizabeth II) to indicate their role as Head of the Church of England. It even features on coins of the realm, with the Latin Fidei defensor appearing in its abbreviated form F.D beside the Queen’s portrait.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Defender of the Catholic Faith, Rest in Peace in Our True Native Land!

My 2016 Events and Speaking Calendar

Fortunately for me, I have a secretary, well, desk, because my calendar is filling up this year with events and speaking engagements.

This coming Friday and Saturday: I am attending the 2016 Eighth Day Institute Symposium. As this article in The Wichita Eagle described this year's topic and speakers:

The ecumenical Eighth Day Institute that seeks to renew culture through faith and learning is using the Paris Climate Conference and Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment as a backdrop to its 2016 symposium, “Soil and Sacrament: The World as Gift.”

Mike Aquilina, Hans Boersma, Rod Dreher and Vigen Guorian will be among the speakers at the symposium from Jan. 14 to 16 at St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral.

The symposium will explore the notion of creation as a gift from God and humanity’s role as grateful stewards of the gift.

Guorian, who is an author, gardener and professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, will give two keynotes: one, a view from the garden called “Soil & Sacrament: Earth Meditations,” and the other a view from the classroom: “World as Gift: The Earth Poetry of Wendell Berry.” The event also includes a banquet with reflections by the speakers and live music.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/living/religion/article51315235.html#storylink=cpy

On Thursday, February 4, I am scheduled to present at the Church of the Resurrection for a book reading group. The book they are reading: Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation! I'll follow up with a presentation in April to conclude their series.

On Saturday, February 13, I am scheduled to present at an all-day Chesterton Conference hosted by the Four States G.K. Chesterton Society at the St. Pius X Newman Center, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas. More information to come! (I'll be talking to one of the organizers today.)

The Eighth Day Institute is hosting an important meeting about the situation of Christians in the Middle East and what we can do to help them in February. More info here.

In April, I'll be one of the presenters at the second annual Catholic Culture Conference at the Spiritual Life Center in Wichita, Kansas, which will be headlined by Professor Anthony Esolen, with the topic "Reviving the Catholic Imagination." (My presentation will be on Chesterton, Cobbett, and Merry Old England.)

The Catholic Culture Conference is an opportunity for faithful Christians to come together for formation and fellowship. The program intends to promote Catholic values in personal and family life, as well as in society at large.

The Conference will consist of multiple sessions, each geared towards some particular component of Catholic life in our modern age. A combination of large group lectures and smaller breakout sessions will give each participant the opportunity to learn more about how Catholicism relates to–and is intended to positively change-our culture.

Our Catholic Faith is not just a notional idea. It is a concrete reality with the power to open the hearts and minds of all peoples. It can make the societies in which we live flourish in the way God intended. This Conference will give participants knowledge and inspiration to go about doing just that.

Our Keynote speaker is teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. He is a senior editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, and a regular contributor to Crisis Magazine.

On June 21, I'll be speaking on an English heroine, Margaret More Roper, at the Sisters of Sophia meeting of the Eighth Day Institute. (Ladies only).

Finally--so far--I'll go back to the Spiritual Life Center to present in the Docentium dinner/speech series on Blessed John Henry Newman: Faith, Family and Friends (August).

Every month the Wichita Area Chesterton Society meets on the third Friday at Eighth Day Books to discuss Chesterton's works. Once we finish The Wells and the Shallows, I think we are going to read the biography of Chesterton's wife Frances: The Woman Who was Chesterton by Nancy Carpenter Brown. I also look forward to the monthly meetings of the Sisters of Sophia at the Ladder.

If you want me to speak at an event or meeting, please contact me and we can work something out. Part of our negotiations must include effective promotion of the event, an opportunity (if my talk is related to the English Reformation) to sell and sign copies of my book, and travel expenses if outside Wichita. For Catholic churches in the Wichita diocese, please contact the Speakers Bureau to start the process of scheduling an event.

Thank you very much and Happy New Year!

Book Review: Essays on Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929

This really is a book of its time: the publisher/editor assumed that everyone knew exactly who the authors were and why each one was qualified to write his or her particular essay. It's also a book in which Cardinal Newman is often mentioned in good standing and fond remembrance. 

Published on the 100th anniversary of Catholic Emancipation in England, Catholic Emancipation, 1829 to 1929: Essays by Various Writers with an Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne (Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto, 1929) contains honest and informative analyses of how Catholics in England had succeeded or failed to take advantage of relative religious freedom in England throughout one hundred (100) years.

Contents:

Introduction by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne [the fourth Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935; born in 1861; died in 1935]

I. Joy in Harvest--A Sequel to the Second Spring by Monsignor William Barry, DD (referring to St. John Henry Newman's famous "Second Spring" sermon of 1852)

II. The Catholic Church and the Spiritual Life by The Most Reverend Archbishop [Alban] Goodier, SJ [author of many books including Saints for Sinners] One very lovely line: "When he witnessed, in 1908, the Eucharistic Congress in London, Newman in heaven must indeed have thanked God." p. 43)

III. The Catholic Church and Education by Sir John Gilbert, KBE, KCSG [praises Newman's efforts to educate Catholics; deprecates the unfortunate decision by Henry Cardinal Manning, et al, preventing Catholic men from attending Oxford and Cambridge]

IV. The Catholic Church and Literature by Algernon Cecil [author and barrister; author of Six Oxford Thinkers, including Newman]

V. The Catholic Church and Science by Sir Bertram C.A. Windle, FRS, ScD, PhD [most interesting comment: Thomas Huxley was most influential in convincing Englishmen of the conflict between the Church and science]

VI. The Catholic Church and Music by Ernest Oldmeadow

VII. Catholics in Public Life by Viscount [Edmund Howard] Fitzalan

VIII. Catholic and Philanthropy by The Bishop of Brentwood [Arthur Doubleday]

IX. Religious Orders of Men by Abbot [Basil Christopher] Butler [of Downside Abbey; later Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster; born in 1902; died in 1986; he was a participant in and strong proponent of the Second Vatican Council; one of the youngest contributors to this volume]

X. Religious Communities of Women by Maud Monahan [I could not find any dates for her; she translated spiritual works and wrote about Janet Erskine Stuart, superior general of Society of the Sacred Heart]

XI. The Influence of Catholic Laywomen by Miss Margaret Fletcher [1862-1943; she became a Catholic in 1897 and was the founder of the Catholic Women's League]

XII. Statistical Progress of the Catholic Church by Rev. Herbert Thurston, SJ [author of many entries in the Catholic Encyclopedia; interested in Spiritualism and Madame Blavatsky; friend of  Father George Tyrrell, SJ of the Modernist Movement]

and, saving the best for last:

XIII. The Outlook by G.K. Chesterton [just seven (7) years after becoming a Catholic!!]

Perhaps among the most entertaining of the chapters before Chesterton's Outlook is Oldmeadow's analysis of music in Catholic cathedrals and churches (VI). He deplores the long-lasting legacy of the Embassy chapels, which presented many great professional soloists (especially Italian opera singers), thus discouraging the congregation from singing. Oldmeadow encourages instead the use of plainchant, Gregorian or otherwise, and welcomed Pope St. Pius X's 1903 motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. One of the best passages in his chapter:

Rossini, with his flashy "Stabat Mater", found us an easy prey; and Gounod wound us round his little finger. The show-choirs rose to their showiest; their tenors shook shakes, their leading ladies trilled trills, and a little later on Mendelssohn's "Lauda Sion" was thought to be the most lofty and severe of Church music. Yet there might have been unison singing from every throat and celestial polyphony from a few divinely favored choristers. (p. 135)

Throughout most of the chapters, the constant themes are the patchwork method of repealing penal acts against Catholics, the influx of Irish Immigrants, the influence of French religious and priests (welcomed into England during and after the French Revolution), the growth in schools and colleges, the importance of converts, the development of religious orders (for both men and women), the impact of World War I on how the English viewed Catholics after serving as soldiers, sailors, chaplains, nurses, etc.

One of the most frustrating chapters was on the influence of Catholic laywomen in England between 1829 and 1929. Miss Margaret Fletcher begins with some stirring images as she begins to describe the progress of Catholic laywomen and the "woman's movement":

When in 1829 Emancipation was at last granted, and Catholic women realised that henceforth they would not form part of the quarry of a slackened hunt, they knew themselves to be in many ways scarred and spent by the long chase; and yet at the same time to be gloriously free. They had acquired a spiritual fortitude and had preserved an inner moral liberty which were not characteristics of English women at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (p. 225)

Although she recounts how English Catholic laywomen rejected some aspects of the international woman's movement, I was never sure what influence they really exerted in England. Fletcher intends to sketch the history of their efforts in meetings and publications but uses so much passive voice that I don't know who did what--perhaps she was too reticent to describe her own activity and achievements.

Now to Chesterton's Outlook: he was was the right person to write that chapter: his hopeful innocence and insightful wisdom are evident throughout his contribution:

. . .Whole aspects of Catholic doctrine and tradition, hidden by historical accident and the special quarrels of recent times, will be revealed to the world when it begins to address new questions to the Church. This is a point that has not been sufficiently stressed in the relations between Protestantism and Catholicism. Very often a Protestant was not only a man merely protesting, but a man merely protesting against a particular thing. He sometimes thought that thing was Rome; but it was really only one of the thousand aspects of Rome. When new aspects appear under new searchlights, he will be not so much defeated as simply outside the affair. A Baptist disapproves of baptising babies; a Presbyterian disapproves of bishops; a Prohibitionist disapproves of beer, and so on. But a Presbyterian, as such, has nothing very special to say about the Subconscious Mind. A Baptist as such has nothing special to say to a Behaviorist as such. But a Catholic may have a great deal to say to these people.

For the Catholic commentary on life has gone on so much longer, it has covered so many different social conditions, has dealt so carefully with countless fine shades of metaphysics or casuistry, that it really has a relation to almost any class of speculation that may arise. Thus, in the matter of psychoanalysis and the study of the subconscious, the Church will probably be found sooner or later defending certain essentials about Will and Conscience against a welter of wild impersonality. Catholics remembering Catholicism will have a right and reason to do this. But Calvinists who have half forgotten Calvinism have no particular reason to do it.

There is, for instance, one influence that grows stronger every day, never mentioned in the newspapers, not even intelligible to people in the newspaper frame of mind. It is the return of the Thomist Philosophy; which is the philosophy of common sense, as compared with the paradoxes of Kant and Hegel and the Pragmatists. The Roman religion will be, in the exact sense, the only Rationalistic religion. The other religions will not be Rationalist but Relativist; declaring that the reason is itself relative and unreliable; declaring that Being is only Becoming or that all time is only a time of transition ; saying in mathematics that two and two make five in the fixed stars, saying in metaphysics and in morals that there is a good beyond good and evil. Instead of the materialist who said that the soul did not exist, we shall have the new mystic who says that the body does not exist. Amid all these things the return of the Scholastic will simply be the return of the sane man. (pp. 278-279) 

There goes Chesterton, leading the way into the future, pointing out what the Catholic Church will need to offer the civilization and culture of the next hundred years:

But to say that there is no pain, or no matter, or no evil, or no difference between man and beast, or indeed between anything and anything else — this is a desperate effort to destroy all experience and sense of reality; and men will weary of it more and more, when it has ceased to be the latest fashion ; and will look once more for something that will give form to such a chaos and keep the proportions of the mind of man. Millions of men are already at least wondering whether this solution is not to be found in the Catholic order and philosophy.

Above all, the Church has regained that unique position in the world in a fair field and under the very reverse of favour; having had for a hundred years no more than the common right of speaking and publishing and voting in popular assemblies; and as her Master affirmed his divinity by becoming a man among men, she has become for a season a sect among sects, to emerge at the end as something separate or supreme. (p. 281)

As usual, he's almost too right; it's only too bad that we Catholics haven't held on tightly enough to the Common Sense of St. Thomas Aquinas! 

I'd say his chapter, Oldmeadow's and Goodier's on the spiritual life of English Catholics are the best in this book of insights, gratitude for the progress made, and acknowledgement of difficulties and even failures.