What’s Wrong With The World

We received the prayer cards yesterday.  My husband’s anticipation was apparent, he stood above me while I opened the envelope.  He took his card and immediately went to his room and read it.  How dearly he likes G. K. Chesterton.  I, too, read the prayer, which is so beautiful.  Today, I had a migraine headache, which is related to my neck injury. So, I went to my bedroom with my office and the little prayer card you sent me.  I sat back and looked at the picture on the front of the prayer card.  I looked at him for a long time, examining his expression.  I saw deep, deep compassion in his face, an ‘engaged’ look and I felt warm.  I thought “How beautiful you must be.”  I felt lonely for my homeland.  I have not seen the ocean for more than four years.  So, I looked at the picture of Chesterton, and I whispered….   I don’t test the Saints because Jesus said not to put the Lord our God to the test but, well (I thought of my aching headache)…. show me you are near me and just touch my aching head and make this headache go away.”   I placed the little prayer card on my forehead and closed my eyes.  I must have slipped away for not more than a minute but I felt a kiss touch my forehead and I opened my eyes because I thought my husband was in the room but I was alone.  My headache was gone.  I took the prayer card in my hand and sat up, moved my neck back and forth but there was no sign of a headache.

I felt inundated with warmth and peace.  I had no medication so it was purely grace.

 I wanted to share my first two little prayers with you.  G. K. Chesterton is a ‘powerful’ Saint for our times.  He is ‘powerful’ in our lives.  I speak little of it to my husband because he doesn’t understand the graces moving in his life.  Little Therese of Lisieux  said she will let fall a shower of roses from heaven.  Our Chesterton is going to pass through this world like holy dye changing the colors of history.  You will see.

The texts of the prayer in English, Spanish and Italian are as follows:

Prayer for the intercession of G.K.Chesterton

God our Father,

You filled the life of your servant Gilbert Keith Chesterton with a sense of wonder and joy, and gave him a faith which was the foundation of his ceaseless work, a hope which sprang from his enduring gratitude for the gift of human life, and a charity towards all men, particularly his opponents.

May his innocence and his laughter, his constancy in fighting for the Christian faith in a world losing belief, his lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and his love for all men, especially for the poor, bring cheerfulness to those in despair, conviction and warmth to lukewarm believers and the knowledge of God to those without faith.

We beg you to grant the favours we ask through his intercession, [and especially for ……] so that his holiness may be recognised by all and the Church may proclaim him Blessed.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen. 

Oración por la beatificación de Chesterton

Dios nuestro Padre,

Tú que has colmado la vida de tu siervo Gilbert Keith Chesterton con ese sentido del asombro y el gozo, y le diste esa fe que fue el fundamento de su incesante trabajo, esa esperanza que nacía de su perdurable gratitud por el don de la vida humana, y esa caridad para con todos los hombres, particularmente sus oponentes;

haz que su inocencia y su risa, su constancia en combatir por la fe cristiana en un mundo descreído, su devoción de toda la vida por la Santísima Virgen María y su amor por todos los hombres, especialmente por los pobres, concedan alegría a aquellos que se hallan sin esperanza, convicción y calidez a los creyentes tibios y el conocimiento de Dios a aquellos que no tienen fe.

Te rogamos otorgar los favores que te pedimos por su intercesión, [y especialmente por ……] de manera que su santidad pueda ser reconocida por todos y la Iglesia pueda proclamarlo Beato.

Te lo pedimos por Cristo Nuestro Señor.

Amén.

Una preghiera per l’intercessione di Chesterton.

Dio Nostro Padre,

Tu riempisti la vita del tuo servo Gilbert Keith Chesterton di un senso di meraviglia e gioia,

e desti a lui una fede che fu il fondamento del suo incessante lavoro,

una carità verso tutti gli uomini, in particolare verso i suoi avversari,

e una speranza che scaturiva dalla sua gratitudine di un’intera vita per il dono della vita umana.

Possano la sua innocenza e e le sue risate,

la sua costanza nel combattere per la fede cristiana in un mondo che perde la fede,

la sua devozione di una vita per la Beata Vergine Maria

e il suo amore per tutti gli uomini, specialmente per i poveri,

portare allegria ai disperati,

convinzione e calore ai tiepidi

e la conoscenza di Dio a chi non ha fede.

Ti chiediamo di concedere le grazie cheTi imploriamo

attraverso la sua intercessione (e specialmente per…)

perché la sua santità possa essere riconosciuta da tuttie

 e la Chiesa possa proclamarlo beato.

Te lo chiediamo per Cristo Nostro Signore

Amen.

Father Aidan Nichols’s book G.K.Chesterton, Theologian, has now at last been published by Darton Longman and Todd. Those who heard Fr Aidan at our July conference talking on GKC as a Doctor of the Church will have had a foretaste of what will undoubtedly be an important milestone in the endless struggle to get Chesterton taken seriously as a major figure in the history of Christian thought.

The following is DLT’s  sales pitch.

In the aftermath of what is for English Catholics a joyful and—for many long overdue—milestone,  the Holy See now at last having officially pronounced that John Henry Newman is to be declared Blessed, it is difficult to remember that within living memory it was just as difficult to think of Newman as an exemplar of holiness as it is now for some Catholics to think of Chesterton in this way. As late as the 1950s, many Catholics thought of Newman as a great theologian but not as a holy man. 

The cult of Newman, practically speaking, began in Canada, with the publication, in the form of prayer cards, of a prayer to God the Father asking for graces and even miracles to be performed through Newman’s intercession so that the Church might declare him a Saint. The prayer, which had no official status, emerged in the thirties, a good three decades before the cult of Newman was officially accepted as a reality in England. The cult began with the emergence of a prayer. And so it may be now: our conference on ‘The Holiness of G.K.Chesterton’ has already had international reverberations, as I have noted, with responses coming from France, Poland, the U.S. and Italy.

Now, the one thing needful for a real cult to take on concrete life has emerged: a prayer for Chesterton’s intercession, which I understand began on the model of the Canadian prayer for Newman’s, but which has gone through a considerable process of mutation. Its authors, a layman and a priest who attended the Oxford conference, wish to remain anonymous. It is clearly the result of considerable thought and prayer. So I present it here now: who knows, it may be, perhaps, the beginning of something beautiful  for God. If it is widely prayed, I have no doubt that it will be. It has no official status, of course, so it should only be used in private prayer.

God our Father,

You filled the life of your servant Gilbert Keith Chesterton with a sense of wonder and joy, and gave him a faith which was the foundation of his ceaseless work, a hope which sprang from his enduring gratitude for the gift of human life, and a charity towards all men, particularly his opponents.

May his innocence and his laughter, his constancy in fighting for the Christian faith in a world losing belief, his lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and his love for all men, especially for the poor, bring cheerfulness to those in despair, conviction and warmth to lukewarm believers and the knowledge of God to those without faith.

We beg you to grant the favours we ask through his intercession, [and especially for ……] so that his holiness may be recognized by all and the Church may proclaim him Blessed.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen. 

Your reactions and reflections will be welcomed, either in the form of  comments on this post, or emails sent via ‘contact us’.

–William Oddie

At our recent conference (go to the Conference 2009 page via the website homepage for my opening remarks), I made it clear that it was not intended as the opening shot in a campaign for a cause to be opened towards Chesterton’s beatification: it was simply to ask a question: is there, or should there be, what the Congregation for the Causes of Saints calls ‘a reputation for holiness’ around his writings and his person–the necessary prerequisite for such a cause. This is not a Roman Catholic Society (though many of its members are Catholics) so we can’t as a society ask for a cause to be opened. But many non- Catholics (I used to be one) think that canonization is something the Catholic Church does which they value: one non-Catholic told me that he thought that it was a sign that we take one of our own seriously as a spiritual figure, and if we didn’t take Chesterton seriously, why should he?Chesterton has had a huge influence over non-Catholics like Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis, and we should never forget that Orthodoxy was written when he was an Anglican, and is the result of Anglican theological influences. A famously holy American Anglican priest once replied, when asked why on earth Chesterton had become a Roman Catholic, “Oh, it was necessary for him to become a Catholic: only the Catholic Church can canonize him”.

First, though, there has to be some evidence of a cult in England as there is throughout the world. And in fact there is: it was very evident among those who attended our conference. It is quite wrong to say that it is only in America and Argentina that anyone is interested in  Chesterton in this way. And even if there were only a cult outside England, that would be no bar to opening a cause. I have had contacts in Poland, Spain and France who are mostly puzzled that there is no cause already, as well as in America. But an English Bishop would obviously look for some evidence of a cult here, a difficult matter since the English are reticent about such matters. But such evidence is now emerging, shyly, from the shadows: if you are part of it now is the time to make yourself known.

Meanwhile, go to  http://www.zenit.org/article-26454?l=english for evidence  of Chesterton’s ‘reputation for holiness’ in Italy. 

–William Oddie

The Summer catalogue of St. Philip’s Books, Oxford, has just been published, and it reveals that they have a substantial collection of volumes by Chesterton and Belloc, and other Catholic writers of the period, including Ronald Knox and R.H.Benson. (see www.stphilipsbooks.co.uk). These will be on sale at our conference on July 4, details of which are on our own website. So:  an additional reason for coming.

-William Oddie

Has the present economic crisis brought a moment of opportunity for those who argue that Chesterton’s rejection of both state socialism and monopoly capitalism in favour of a radical decentralisation of wealth—the key argument of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and the basis of ‘distributism’ - is as relevant to the new millennium as it ever was?

Such ideas appear now to be being taken increasingly seriously within the Conservative party, through the influence of the theologian Phillip Blond, who is director of something called ‘the progressive conservatism project’ at the think tank Demos.

Interviewed by The New Statesman, Blond was clear about his intellectual background: “I’m not a socialist and I’m an Anglican. But I have always been interested in Catholic social thought, which always made the argument that capitalism and communism are species of the same thing. Both are forms of disempowerment. But I also think that’s a Tory insight.” And, reports The New Statesman, he reveres many of the figures whom Maurice Cowling, the conservative historian and doyen of a previous generation of “intellectual Tories”, enlisted in the “Christian counter-revolution” against what he termed the “post-Christian consensus”: for example, Thomas Carlyle, G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

In the February issue of Prospect magazine, Blond expounded his ideas at some length. Here, we present a series of extracts from this article.

The current crisis, argues, Blond, ‘represents a disintegration of the idea of the “market state” and makes obsolete the political consensus of the last 30 years. A fresh analysis of the ruling ideological orthodoxy is required.’

So far, he argues, the Tories haven’t fully drawn the lesson of the crisis:

“Tory social thinking has genuinely evolved, but the party’s economic thinking is still poised between repetition and renewal. As late as August 2008 David Cameron said: “I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer,” and that “radical social reform is what this country needs right now.” He is right about society, but against the backdrop of collapsing markets and without a macro-economic alternative, Thatcherite economics has been wrongfooted by events.”

So what the Tories need now is to recover an earlier strand of their own tradition:

“It was Edmund Burke who famously spoke of conservative radicalism being founded on the little platoons of family and civic association. ‘To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind’.”

“Thatcherite neoliberalism was determined to terminate all these state monopolies. Instead, markets would become the vehicle by which efficiency was maximised and prosperity attained. But the free market fundamentalists often did little more than create new monopolies of capital to replace those of the state.”

We are now very close, in Blond’s ideas, to what Chesterton’s analysis of our situation would surely be. The Capitalist free market monopoly economic model whose crisis we are now living through has proved to be no alternative to socialism: as Chesterton puts it in The Outline of Sanity, “Monopoly is neither private nor enterprising. It exists to prevent private enterprise. And that system of trust or monopoly, that complete destruction of property, would still be the present goal of all our progress, if there were not a Bolshevist in the world.” This kind of thinking appears to be behind Blond’s prescription for a new conservatism:

“What must Cameron’s priorities be, and how can he begin to build a new communitarian Tory settlement? He could start with four tasks: relocalising our banking system, developing local capital, helping normal people gain new assets and breaking up big business monopolies.”

Or as Chesterton puts it, “the cure for centralization
is decentralization….when capital has come to be too much in the hand of the few, the right thing is to restore it into the hands of the many.” This key Chestertonian principal is the basis of Blond’s perception of where a post-Thatcherite conservatism should go:

“The next step for conservatism is to reverse the old politics of class, by restoring capital to labour. Cameron should reject the Marxist narrative that paints Tories as wedded to a disenfranchised proletariat. On the contrary: conservatives believe in the extension of wealth and prosperity to all. Yet the great disaster of the last 30 years is the destruction of the capital, assets and savings of the poor: in Britain, the share of wealth (excluding property) enjoyed by the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 12 per cent in 1976 to just 1 per cent in 2003. A radical communitarian civic conservatism must be committed to reversing this trend.”

Blond openly identifies this strand of the Tory tradition with Chesterton’s and Belloc’s distributism:

“Such ideas are not without a past. The idea of a Tory distributist state is not new; indeed the phrase “property owning democracy” was first coined in 1923 by the Conservative MP Noel Skelton. Anthony Eden used it too in his celebrated speech to the 1946 party conference, and the philosophy enthused both Churchill and Thatcher. Recent Tory proposals to exempt the savings of the low paid and pensioners from tax are exactly the path to follow.”

Blond assails the monopoly of the great supermarkets, which has destroyed the small independent trader:

“The Tories must take on the unrecognised private sector monopolies that hide on every British high street. According to figures from IGD research in May 2008, the British grocery market was worth £134.8bn. Of this, the big four supermarkets took £98.6bn, a 73 per cent market share. In the name of competition we have happily handed over our high streets to Tesco, strangling local commerce. The more that price is our only measure of competition, the bigger the economies of scale required to compete, and the higher the barriers to entry for small local competitors. Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out—converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets”.

The Tories, Blond says, should

“….build a new economic and capital base that decentralises power and extends wealth and also makes a final break with the logic of monopoly and debt-financed capitalism. In doing so, Cameron can finally bring together the Tory tradition of Disraeli’s reform of capitalism with his own entirely justified desire to be a “social radical.” It would render the left superfluous and redefine Marx as just another dispossessor of the poor. Moreover it would recover the insights of 19th-century conservatives like Cobbett, Ruskin and Carlyle, ally them with Tawney and the distributism of Chesterton, Belloc and Skelton—all of who knew that, without something to trade, one cannot enter a market. Making markets truly free prevents corporate domination, but also extends ownership, prosperity and innovation across the whole of society. The task of recapitalising the poor is, therefore, the task of making the market work for the many, not the few. David Cameron doesn’t need to do any of this to win the next election. But, to be a great prime minister, he does.”

Where Tawney comes in here is not explained; but Tawney apart, the basis of Blond’s ideas is clear enough. If he really has achieved a serious influence over the thinking of the man who will almost certainly become Prime Minister sometime next year, Chesterton could be on the political agenda in this country as he has never been before.

–William Oddie

Dr William Griffiths writes: ‘Is it feasible to have announcements on the website, of the kind which in former days I would have sent to the Quarterly Editor, such as: Houben’s Bookshop (new and second-hand) of 2 Church Court, Richmond, Surrey (tel. 020-8940 1055) has acquired a large collection of GKC, Belloc (including Chesterbellocs) and general Catholiciana, which is currently being unpacked and priced. The prices seem very reasonable, eg £10 for The Coloured Lands, which I bought to give to a friend. Church Terrace is an alleyway between George Street and Paradise Road. 5 minutes from Richmond Station (train and underground) ; 1 minute from the mediaeval / Georgian Church of St Mary Magdalene’.

We don’t have a suitable page on the website (yet): but as an inexperienced blogger feeling his way, it occurs to me that we can publish anything we like on the blog. So here it is. The blog can be not just a place for solemn reflections on the state of the world, but a general noticeboard for what’s going on, a bit like a parish magazine. So: any contributions are welcome.

–William Oddie

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What is a blog for? I begin this one in the aftermath of a very nasty scandal, in which, it will be remembered, one Damian McBride, a close friend and adviser of the Prime Minister, was revealed to have been plotting with another New Labour luminary to set up a new blog, for the purpose of spreading revolting lies about political rivals and and their families. I don’t want, here or at any time, to adopt a party political stance in this blog: I say nothing about the politics of this scandal . What it vividly demonstrates, though, is the freedom of the blogger to say what he likes, to present as fact any fevered invention of his own, without any need to substantiate it. Print journalists, these days, have a low reputation for accuracy and reliability. All the same, when I was earning my living by journalism in such papers as the Daily Telegraph or the Sunday Times my editors, whenever in an article I presented some new and possibly controversial information not generally known, would always want to know if I could ‘stand up’ my facts. A blogger is under no such restraint, unless it is self-imposed.

So I have given this blog the general title ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ to remind me of the unseen presence of the greatest journalist of his, and probably any, generation and also to pose a general question: ‘what would Chesterton have said about the times we are living in’? He has never seemed more relevant; I hope over the next few months and years that with your help this blog will explore that relevance. Please contribute to the debate by adding your own comments. (If you don’t want them published here, write to contactus@gkchesterton.org.uk).

To start the debate: I am reminded, in the general context of the credit crunch and the behaviour of some of our bankers, of something Chesterton wrote (in the Autobiography) about his father’s generation, which was, he said ‘dangerously deaf and blind upon the… question of economic exploitation; but it was relatively more vigilant and sensitive upon the … question of financial decency. It never occurred to these people that anybody could possibly admire a man for being what we call “daring” in speculation, any more than a woman for being what we call “daring” in dress.’

Does that remind you of any knighted banker you may have heard of?

–William Oddie

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