August, 1958
Last month’s issue will have driven home the fact that The Point does not care for the writings of Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnot Knox. But it might also have raised a question: Whose writings does The Point care for? Who is a Catholic — of our own day, not the Middle Ages — of whom The Point would say, “There is an authentic voice. There is a man with the Faith.”
This summer marks the fifth anniversary of the death of one such man: Monsignor Knox’s compatriot and contemporary, Hilaire Belloc.
From his first entrance into the public arena, Belloc made it clear where his allegiance lay. Standing for election to Parliament in 1906, he opened his campaign by announcing to the mainly-Protestant voters: “Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”
Belloc was elected, and re-elected, in 1910. But when a cabinet crisis necessitated an additional balloting that year, Belloc decided to leave Parliament for more fruitful fields. He had learned some valuable lessons during his four years as a legislator, and left a memorial of his stay in the form of a Sonnet Written in Dejection in the House of Commons. It concludes with the following sestet:
No question, issue, principle, or right;
No wit, no argument, nor no disdain:
No hearty quarrel: morning, noon, and night,
The old, dead, vulgar fossil drags its train;
The while three journalists and twenty Jews
Do with the country anything they choose.
“The fiction that the Catholic Church is a sect,” he wrote, “like any of the various bodies around it in nations of Protestant culture, that She is a sect, like the Mormons, or the Baptists, or the Quakers, is nourished by a score of conventions; by that false phrase ‘the Churches’; by the offensive adjunct, ‘Roman’ — as though the Faith were but one fashion in a hundred Catholicisms, or as if Catholicism were a thing split into numerous factions, of Rome, Canterbury, Boston, and Timbuctoo! Yet the falsehood is so firmly fixed and so long established here that it has recently begun to affect the Catholic body itself. The position is half accepted by them, though in their hearts they know it is a lie. For the line of cleavage does not fall between the various groups, Catholic, Agnostic, Evangelical, or what not, but between the Catholic Church and all else. She is unique, and at issue with the world.”
Yet for all his sense of unity with the Catholic past, Belloc was no remote figure, withdrawn in dreams of lost triumphs. He was in the thick of the present, with interests as large as Christendom itself. The topics dealt with in his more than 150 published books give an idea of his range: history, travel, warfare, poetry, road-building, wine-making, farming, sailing. He knew every peak and plain of Europe almost as well as he knew his beloved southern England. He had journeyed on foot through Spain and France and Italy, across the Pyrenees and the Alps, visiting shrines and battlefields. When he was twenty-one, he had trekked from Philadelphia to San Francisco, making sketches of the American countryside as he went and exchanging these for his meals and nights’ lodging.
In college days, he had been president of the Oxford Union, almost legendary for his brilliance as a speaker; and though Oxford had assailed his Faith, as he mournfully owned, it had not entirely crushed it (once he had infuriated the dons giving an examination by placing prominently on his desk a statue of Our Lady). Later, with the encouragement of Elodie Hogan, the California girl who became his bride, he regained his Catholic loyalties full strength, and never lost them again. He was radically Catholic and incorrigibly human; ardent and enthusiastic; with strong enmities and fierce loves. (After Elodie died in 1914, he wore black for the rest of his life, never let her room be used again, and always traced a Sign of the Cross upon her door when he passed it.)
Belloc had no romantic conception of the task he had set for himself. His “method” was a fighting one, and could lead only to head-long collisions. “We must expose the confusion of thought in the opposing camp,” he wrote, “its ignorance of the world and of the past, its absurd idols. And in doing so we must face, not only ideas — which is easy — but men, the defenders of those ideas — which is difficult ... You will be despised or disapproved if you practice your religion quietly with no effort to oppose its organized enemies, but if you overtly attack these enemies you will get something much worse than disapproval.”
Writing to a priest friend in Ireland, Elodie Belloc put the case even more straight-forwardly: “It is almost impossible for anyone to whom God has not given it to suffer, to know what it is for two militant and convinced Catholics to live in our world in England.”
Nonetheless, the Bellocs’ seventeen years of married life were far from gloomy and resigned ones. Both of them were heartily capable of laughing the whole world off — as Belloc often did in verses like:
Heretics all, whoever you be,Inevitably, Hilaire Belloc’s published pre-occupations with the enemies of the Church led beyond the heretics to the Jews. He summarized: “Wherever the Catholic Church is powerful, and in proportion as it is powerful, the traditional principles of the civilization of which it is the soul and guardian will always be upheld. One of these principles is the sharp distinction between the Jews and ourselves ... The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.”
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.
But Catholic men that live upon wine
Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
Wherever I travel I find it so.
Benedicamus Domino.
And on specific aspects of the Jewish problem, Belloc was equally outspoken: “As for anyone who does not know that the present revolutionary Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppressions of our deplorable Press.”
Belloc’s battling years, roughly the first forty of our century, did not see the full flower of the organized Interfaith conspiracy as we know it now. But his writings anticipated it, and sternly provided against it. On the singularity of the Catholic Church, he says: “Her corporate unity is not one of which others are tolerant, or which is itself tolerant of others. She has no borderland of partial agreement with error, nor is there a flux or common meeting place between Herself and things more or less similar, more or less neighborly. She has frontiers rigidly defined: not only in Her doctrine and its claim to divinity, but in Her very stuff and savor. Within Her walls, all is of one kind; without, all is of another.”
One would hesitate to judge that Belloc’s prolific militancy was entirely wasted on an unmoved, unaroused Catholic body. Belloc’s courage, in example as well as utterance, no doubt begot lesser courage in uncountable places. But the program which he outlined for himself — indeed, for the Church in his time — has, with tragic consequences, gone unrealized. He had defined the program as this: “ ... to arrest, if it still be possible, the decline of civilization, to revive culture, to form of the Catholic body an army of leaders in the preservation and possibly the extension of our old glories, now so grievously imperiled. We are the true heirs and guardians of civilization in the modern race to barbarism, and to reverse the current should be our privilege, as well as our duty.”
He was impatient that the Faith be more talked about — more thrust in people’s faces, if need be. Writing to his close friend, John Phillimore, Belloc complains that “ ... though there is not the least chance yet of England’s conversion — many disasters must come upon her first — still the immediate future is going to be a chaos of opinion, and in that chaos the order, the civility of the Faith will make a deep impression if it is presented, but it has to be presented. The difficulty just now is that English Catholics do not present it at all. They fiddle about with unimportant things of detail or fill the air with their hymns of praise of Protestants for being allowed to live.”
It is in another letter, to this same John Phillimore, that Belloc’s aloneness, and realization of it, is most poignantly brought out. Writing from France shortly after Elodie Belloc’s death, Belloc asks for prayers and Masses, explaining, “I write you this brief line because I know no one else intimately on earth who is fully possessed of the Faith.”
What sustained Belloc? He himself would be the last to make explicit broadcast of it, but we may well conclude that a soldierly love for Our Blessed Lady figured predominantly in all that he tried to do for the Faith. He once wrote of Our Lady to Gilbert Chesterton: “She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand.”
And in one of his poems addressed to Our Lady, he says:
Help of the half-defeated, House of Gold,
Shrine of the Sword, and Tower of Ivory;
Splendor apart, supreme and aureoled,
The Battler’s vision and the world’s reply.
You shall restore me, O my last Ally,
To vengeance and the glories of the bold.
This is the faith that I have held and hold,
And this is that in which I mean to die.
It was on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, five years ago last month, that the Catholic soul of Hilaire Belloc passed to the Particular Judgment. The funeral Mass in the village Church of Our Lady of Consolation was, in detail, that kind of rooted Catholic thing that was Belloc himself. His ordinary, the Bishop of Southwark, was the celebrant. The ancient tones of the Requiem were chanted by monks of a Benedictine Abbey. And seated in the midst of the choir, in the habit of a Benedictine novice, was Hilaire Belloc’s grandson.
The anti-climax came within a month, when an “official” Requiem was sung at Westminster Cathedral, during which a panegyric was dutifully preached. The preacher, selected not because of his known love for Belloc, but for the sake of his own well-known name, was, ironically, Ronald Knox.
Monsignor Knox had, of course, been acquainted with Belloc. They had both been notable Oxford men; they were both prominent English Catholics. They had some interests that were mutual, and some friends. But it would be impossible to imagine two twentieth-century Englishmen more separated in their approach, their witness, and their devotion to the things of the Faith.
If new verses may now be put, with propriety, into Hilaire Belloc’s mouth and manner, there is a species of refreshment for the sympathetic reader in the following rough parody of Belloc’s Lines to a Don — that boisterous piece in which he obliterated an Oxford professor “that dared attack my Chesterton.” These would be, perhaps, Lines to a Monsignor:
And then there’s Knox, R. Arbuthnott,
The drudge, the poky scholar;
The chap you’d like to stick with pins
Until you make him holler.
Knox nauseating, know-it-all,
Knox unenthusiastic;
Knox nosy, nebulous, inane,
Knox nasty and sarcastic.
Knox wily, sneaky, weak and soft,
Knox never on the level.
Knox so unlike those good hard knocks
Saint Michael gives the devil.
Chaotic Knox, Knox noxious, Knox
Unorthodox and saucy.
And toxic Knox, Knox noctis, Knox
Impossible and bossy.
O, blear-eyed Knox, Knox bent of nose,
With hair like uncombed shoddy,
You preached my eulogy, but it
Was over my dead body!