The League of Bearded Catholics

England's Vanishing Inns

Ovar at the St. Austin Review, Joseph Pearce laments the sad demise of the English Pub, and points to this article in The Economist that goes into greater detail. Read it and sob;

"More than half the villages in Britain now have no pub at all"

This is no mere cultural footnote, either. It's a Big Deal. Slow, unseen tectonic plates of history have been grinding away under our feet and this is a sign, the surface manifestation of a deep fault. As Joseph Pearce quoted Hilaire Belloc;

"When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England."

It reminds me of when I was a teenager in the 1970s, and there was a great deal of attention given to the loss of the "family farm". It happened before  our eyes and we, as a people, apparently didn't feel the family farm was worth saving. Oh, we were a little sad to see it go, perhaps, but these things happen. Time marches on. That's how it struck me. It was far more momentous than we knew. And so with the pubs of England.

Why? I think one could realistically look at a loss of the sense of community, of local patriotism. We simply feel no natural attachment to these things. We are therefore, I think, un-naturally detached.

In the words of John Kassaian,"What a revolting predicament!"

Saint or Ain't?

Patron Saint of Curmudgeons? Oh, I hope so.

The Pachyderminator writes in the combox on this post about the Hilaire Belloc novena;

Sorry to be a curmudgeon, but you can't pray for his soul and pray for his intercession at the same time. He can't receive our prayers if he's in still in purgatory. And if we're not confident that he's in heaven, we shouldn't be holding novenas to him.

First of all, admit it... you really like being a curmudgeon. I know I do, on occasion. I look forward to turning fifty later this year, as it will mark a sort of symbolic beginning to my most curmudgeonly years... though I don't expect to hit my full potential until after seventy (God willing).

Hilaire Belloc certainly made the most of his natural gift for grumpiness, too, which is why - though I'm confident he will enjoy the Beatific Vision - I'm less certain he will be canonized by the Church than I am in the case of, say, Chesterton.

People don't naturally associate gruffness and snark with sainthood, even though we have plenty of examples to demonstrate how they may go together; St. Paul, St, Augustine... there is even a legend of St. Nicholas (our beloved patron!) punching Arius in the nose at the council of Nicea. There are many others.

In the case of praying to Belloc, or praying for him, I don't find the idea generates for me the kind of cognitive dissonance that it seems to for the highly esteemed Pachyderminator, and perhaps others. People began praying to Mother Teresa almost (forgive me, Mother) before her body had cooled, long before there was any official cause. I and many others have found ourselves praying for the soul of a dead relative one minute, and praying for their intercession the next. Perhaps rolling them together so tightly might give one pause, but the fact is, for anyone not canonized by the Church, we can't know for certain which kind of prayer will be more appropriate at any given point in time. If it makes one uncomfortable to the point of distraction, of course, one need not do it, but I don't see any hard and fast reason not to.

(*edit* - I will concede, though, that this is the first I've heard of a novena to anyone who is not a canonized saint)

Whereas I find a saintly glow evident behind practically all of Chesterton's writing - even his polemics - it seems less evident in Belloc's work, though I personally have no doubts as to where he is spending eternity.

Truthfully, I might need to be a tad more careful in separating my personal confidence in Chesterton's saintly status and my hopes that he will be officially canonized. I am pretty ignorant on what it takes to move the process of beatification ahead, and though I see copious evidence of Chesterton's sanctity, I don't know how this stacks up to the official requirements of the Church.

Others, who know much more than I do of the process, do share this confidence, though, and that gives me hope.

God Invented Weekends

I love being a Catholic. The photo above was not set up at all... just a collection of stuff that happened to be there this morning: my favorite pipe, some smoking paraphernalia, prayer book, Rosary and G.K. Chesterton coffee mug. Later tonight, I suppose I should take another photo, only there will likely be a glass of wine instead of the coffee.

There are hedges that need trimming, and half a hundred small chores that cry for attention, but The Boss jovially insisted I take the whole day off and drop by His House later to see him.

Sunday is also a great day to read all the poems Pavel Chichikov has sent through the week. Like a good meal, it takes a little leisure to give them proper attention.

Today (Sunday, July 11) is also day four of the Belloc Novena.

(cross posted at Old World Swine)

Belloc Novena

Today is the second day (blast!) of a novena for Hilaire Belloc. Here is a prayer as proposed by Kevin O'Brien (via Facebook);

I suggest something like this - "Hilaire Belloc, God's gunner, great poet and soldier for the faith, pray for the Church Militant and for the restoration of Christian culture, especially in Europe and the United States, and for this personal intention I entrust to your intercession, namely _______.

And we, likewise, pray that your immortal soul may be brought before the face of God, and that we may all be brought together, body and soul, at the Inn at the End of the World."

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be.

and Sean Dailey adds;

 

Beer is the preferred drink of the Hillaire Belloc novena, but wine is not objectionable either. His feast day is July 16. Deo Gratias.

The Distributist Review

From League stalwart Joe Grabowski via Facebook, I am informed that The Distributist Review is showing off a snazzy re-design of their website. Very inviting it is, too. I hope it serves to draw more people to spend more time digging into this wonderfully helpful magazine (It's been added to our links at right>>>).

Distributism, that economic ideal championed by Chesterton and Belloc, is built on the foundation of the Catholic idea of subsidiarity (say it three times, slowly, and you'll have it)... which is a fancy term for a very simple moral principle... that everything ought to be taken care of at the lowest practical level. This means first the family, then the immediate community (ideally the parish), and on upward. Any system that turns that order on its head amounts to a kind of tyranny, eventually. Economic freedom is real freedom compared to which elections and so forth are just window dressing.

In the economic realm, Capitalism is a narrower reflection of true subsidiarity, and so contains some useful truth, but it is inadequate and those inadequacies have been showing more and more, lately.

One of those philosophical inadequacies is the unconscious confusion of "money" with "property". Money can certainly serve as a handy representative medium, a symbol of property... but it is no substitute for property. In a sane world, a farmer who lost all his money might still have his property, and so would not have lost everything. The way things are, few of us are able to really own much of anything in a full and final sense. So, for instance, when someone asks if you are a "homeowner", what they really want to know is if you are a mortgage holder.

This confusion spreads to the concept of work. Work, for most people is now defined as some-or-other money making activity. The early feminists rightly complained that this was nonsense, that work in the home was at least as valuable as any paycheck-earning gig, but in the end they abandoned this moral high ground in favor of a pale substitute; that is, Equal Pay in the workplace. They should have held out for real respect. As it is, they have helped make the word "homemaker" into a kind of joke. "Little Suzy Homemaker". But it takes work (and more than work, a kind of inspiration) to make a house a home. Presumably, this is what a "homemaker" does... or did. It is a high calling, but if no one is now willing to do this work, it will not get done, and our houses will remain hastily and haphazardly decorated boxes, drearily impersonal.

We are not forced to participate in this system, as such, at least not in any way that we normally associate with the word "force". If we were being forced in that way, we would not stand for it. We would have taken up pitchforks and torches a long time ago. But we are softly coerced. From grade school, we are taught to see the world this way, to entertain only this narrow sphere of possibility, and by the time we are out of our formal schooling we find we are on the hamster wheel and are more or less at a loss as to how to get off the damned thing.

I have worn out the following Chesterton quote, but it sums up the shortcomings of our current money-obsessed Capitalism and the need for a Distributist revolution as well as any you could hope to find;

"Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property." - Commonwealth, 1932

Bacon and Eggs

Myself. "Well, anyhow, it is determined that we make a feast, and I say for my part that there must be in this feast bacon and eggs fried together in one pan, and making a great commonalty in one dish."

The Sailor. "Excellent ; and the drink shall be beer."

The Poet. "Besides this, what we need is two large cottage loaves of new bread, and butter, and some kind of cheese."

Hilaire Belloc - The Four Men

 

Amid a small cyclone of activity, lately, I had the unique pleasure of welcoming my Chestertonian friend and fellow Leaguer, Del, and his son, who were foolish enough to agree to spend the night in our living room as they rested from their summer motorcycle meandering.

We spent most of our time together on our porch, where we smoked pipes, drank beer and grazed on the kind of rich tidbits that go best with that sort of evening. I embroidered our feast here and there with a little fruit to give the whole thing a thin gloss of healthful balance. Was there cheese? Is the Pope Catholic? The infamous Huntsman Cheese, and Cahill's Irish Porter Cheese (it's cheese and beer in one!).

The weather, I have to say, was perfect for porch sitting, and a porch in fine weather is a great place for praying the Rosary, too.

Del sported a kilt, though I was a little disappointed that he did not wear it while riding his motorcycle. That would have made the entire trip more interesting, for him and for a number of his fellow highway travelers. Impractical, I suppose.

Del's son, Buck - who, Del likes to remind everyone, is a trained killer - is the sort of young man that gives one a real sense of hope that our generation (boomers) may not succeed in ruining everything, though we try. One son in the military, and one in the seminary... a remarkable family all around.

We sent them off next morning with a feast out of Hilaire Belloc's The Four Men; bacon and eggs cooked together in the same pan, toast with real butter and coffee (I doubt Americans will ever very much embrace beer for breakfast, but I'm willing to do my bit to get such a custom started).

A gathering that will live in legend, especially as I find more time to embellish it.

What Is Authentic Catholic Culture, Anyhow?

When The League was started a few months ago, I included in the blog masthead the subtitle, "A raucous celebration of authentic Catholic culture".

Now, because your humble blogmaster has been so cruelly hampered by the demands of real life, we have not been so raucous yet as I hope for us to be. But today I'm pondering more exactly what it was I meant by the words "authentic Catholic culture".

I am an adult convert, of very limited learning, and so my progress toward an authentic Catholic culture in my own life has been a kind of lurching forward in fits and starts. I had absolutely no template to follow from friends or family, and living as I do in the Bible Belt, there is little of Catholic cultural influence to be detected. In that sense, I envy both cradle Catholics and those who live in areas of the country where there is a more visible Catholic history.

When I started reading Chesterton, several years ago, I began to get the sense of what a living Catholic culture might look like, or ought to look like. Not that it would be easy to put into a few words.

I mention all this because it might appear to the casual visitor that my idea of Authentic Catholic Culture™ is simply a kind of idealized fantasy of British culture a century ago, with a Christian gloss. That might be somewhat excusable, given that the Four Patrons of The League are all British writers from the last century... but it would be incorrect.

Here are some reasons why the Four Patrons - Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc and Chesterton - are so pivotal, I think;

For one thing, I am an American, and our heritage in the United States is English to a large degree, so it's natural that we would find familiar territory in the writing of the Big Four. English is our native tongue (as much it may pain the English to be reminded of that) and these are some of the most affective and influential Christian writers who ever communicated in the English language. Not that you can't find many better or more important writers in English, or more holy Christians to study. These Christian men were not just at home in the English tongue, but knew how to wring the most out of it in ways that might be opaque to those not born to the language. Many modern readers in English might find Chesterton nearly opaque, anyway, as our culture and his grow further apart.

In addition, because of their relative position in history and their classical learning, the Big Four were in a sort of unique position to witness the great cultural shift that occurred from the Medieval world to the Modern world, and to describe with great clarity how the fruit of modernism - existential despair, hubris, the industrial age - ripened and then began to rot. There was, in England at the end of the nineteenth century, still a great deal of the Old World - of Medieval Christendom - preserved in the culture. This is not true of the United States, which was founded on Enlightenment principles and which breathed the very air of the Reformation and modernism. Quite literally, the New World.

Chesterton, in particular, saw this great upheaval - this slow-motion tidal wave - and perceived its true nature, narrating the changes with astonishing clarity. The New World was not only antagonistic to Christianity, but to the organic paganism that Christianity had largely supplanted and in fact, to anything that had up until that time been conceived of as human. Modernism is simply opposed to humanity by any previously and commonly accepted definition of the word.

Tolkien translated this vision into a monumental work of artistic imagination that brought these truths to an audience that might never otherwise have picked up a book of theology or religion.

The plain-spoken Lewis made the observations and arguments lucid and accessible to a wider scope of modern readers. Chesterton is simply brilliant, and anyone willing to read him enough to grow familiar with his style will be rewarded many times over for their work, but Lewis expounded these truths in everyday language, for which many people are grateful. Not everyone gets Chesterton's poetic sensibility, Belloc's rhetorical fire, or Tolkien's fantastic vision. If not for Lewis, I might never have read Chesterton. He served as a gateway to all the rest (though I had read The Hobbit before I read anything by Lewis. I was familiar with LOTR, but not very aware of its Christian themes). As a knuckle-headed twenty-something, Chesterton would have been pretty deep wading.

By virtue of their place and time - their particular vantage point of culture, language and history - the Four Patrons are able to give modern readers - most especially native English speaking Westerners - a true account of the arc of history, especially as it concerns the root causes of the accelerating decay of Western civilization.

Though an authentic Catholic culture could be found in any sort of society (it favors peasant culture, I think), we in the modern West will naturally be more concerned about what an authentic Western Catholic culture should look like. It's no good me trying to be an authentically African Catholic or Chinese Catholic. Their own ideas of Authentic Catholic Culture will be for them to work out. It would be fascinating to sit down and winnow out the common grains, though.

Finally, Chesterton/Belloc and Lewis/Tolkien are two great examples of the kind of male friendship which encompasses all that is essentially and vitally human, from the ground up, celebrating all the goodness of the Creator and His created world, baptizing every aspect of human endeavour and relationship in the the light of the Incarnation, and resurrecting every nobly exuberant impulse of genuine pagan gratitude.

Between our astringent Puritan religious roots and our bleak, post-modern industrial culture, we could use a bracing blast of baptised, resurrected and purified Pagan joy;

'Tho times be hard and fortunes tough,
The ways be foul and the weather rough;
We are of stout south country stock
Who cannot have strong ale enough

Hilaire Belloc - from Sussex Drinking Song

 

 In fact, though we commonly hear how Catholicism is the true flowering or living fulfillment of the Old Testament Jewish faith, it is just as much the living fulfillment and effluorescence of all that was good and true in every kind of honest and ancient paganism. What's tragically funny is that what is now called the New Paganism turns out to be either the lifeless embalming of, or else a parody of, the more noble Old Paganism. The real vitality of the old Paganism is preserved now only within the Church.

That's confirmed in Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, somewhere, I'm sure of it. I'll look it up.

Overzealous Beardies

The success of Mohammedanism had not been due to its offering something more satisfactory in the way of philosophy and morals, but, as I have said, to the opportunity it afforded of freedom to the slave and debtor, and an extreme simplicity...

Hilaire Belloc - The Great Heresies

Highly esteemed Bearded Catholic John Kassaian sends along a link to this story of Muslim Fundies in Pakistan beating the mess out of some poor barber - who didn't want to do the job, anyway - for the crime of shaving the beard of a young Muslim man.

Pfft!! (throws up hands).

Presposterous and evil on its face, though I was making the argument the other day that the flouting of some cultural norms, which can seem arbitrary and morally neutral, can (in a particular time and place) constitute an attack on the social order, and that laws may properly be enforced to protect these norms.

For instance, a man in New Guinea may walk around wearing nothing but a gourd between him and the wide blue sky, and this would be perfectly normal. You could not do that in, say, downtown Milwaukee, without it being an affront and an attack on social order, and you would rightly be put in jail, which to a man from New Guinea might seem an unbelieveably barbaric overreaction.

I'm not at all defending the violence of this pathetic event, but it may be that in that part of the world, seeing an unshaven man is an offense akin to seeing RuPaul walking around Disney World in full drag makeup and a thong. In other words, it is perceived as an affront to public morals that goes right to the last frayed nerve-end of these servants of Mohammed.

Which is why I have no plans to visit Pakistan, beard or no. Neither do I anticipate a vacation in Riyad. My family will probably go to Branson, where my wife and daughter can wear shorts without being seized upon, buried to their necks and stoned to death. Plus, Silver Dollar City makes this terrific pan-fried potato concoction that is slap-your-Grandma good.

Science!

Is bacon good for you? That depends... what time is it?

In a nation that apparently is producing more scientific research grants than paying jobs, the latest eye-opener is that eating bacon for breakfast might not be the death sentence that we have for so long been led to believe it is. Then again, all this subtly interpreted data could be upended and turned inside out next week, when bacon might again - by the same experts - be declared The Worst Thing Ever.

"Above all, there is the happy and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; bacon did write Shakespeare. - G.K. Chesterton, The Riddle of the Ivy

 (a tip of the slovenly, shapeless hat to Old World Swine reader M.B.)

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In more groundbreaking research, according to NPR, A major report out Wednesday says that many former foster kids have a tough time out on their own.

Who'd have thought?

(Seriously... pray for them, and all wards of the state)

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Now, a labor strike I can really get behind; The AP reports that workers at the Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen have walked off the job "after the Danish brewer tightened laid-back rules on workplace drinking and removed beer coolers from work sites.".

My favorite detail;

Carlsberg's truck drivers joined the strike in sympathy — even though they are exempt from the new rules, Bekke said. The truck drivers are permitted to bring three beers from the canteen because they often don't have time to have lunch there.

A steady intake of beer throughout the work day is not as strange as might be supposed;

Those great men — Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him — drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread.- Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

Mel-Adjusted

 
 

From our "Six Degress of Trepidation" file, Joseph Pearce - writing at the St. Austin Review - tells of Mel Gibson's recent recommendation that politicians "read Hilaire Belloc".

A capital idea, but with a whole laundry list of caveats. For starters, one hopes that Mr. Gibson's endorsement will frighten fewer people away from Belloc than they will attract... but Pearce reckons that some British pols may actually be giving Belloc's ideas an ear, which is a little scary in itself. He uses a term I had (thankfully) not heard before - "neo-Distributism" - to describe some of the results of this new found interest. One can imagine all sorts of ghastly ideas being wrapped in a term like "neo-Distributism", just as the word "conservative" has lately been hammered into the most bizarre and fanciful shapes;

By jove, gentlemen, the economic ideas of this Belloc fellow might be something we can make into the Next Big Thing... provided we can polish him up a bit... bring his concepts up to date and make them, shall we say, friendlier to big business and to more modern and advanced forms of statecraft...

*shudder*

I don't know that I care very much whether or not politicians read Belloc. I'd rather see him being read by more, you know... people. That might make the politicians nervous, which is how I like my politicians. Nervous and maybe even a little jumpy.

Incidentally, I once had the pleasure of spending a few minutes with Mr. Pearce at the 2008 Chesterton Conference. His enthusiasm for, well... everything, is just infectious.