Fr. McNabb Contra Nancy Pelosi

A few weeks back Congresswoman Pelosi made televised remarks that an important part of the "stimulus bill" was the inclusion of monies earmarked for providing more birth control and/or contraceptives in a feigned effort to ease the budgetary deficits facing our Cities and States. But due to the public outcry of many in the laity (and an equally silent response from the USCCB) President Obama nixed this from the stimulus package to avoid a political challenge he didn't want to take on at this point. This doesn't mean that their ideology has changed just the timing of when. It was necessary to placate his rabid pro-death supporters which he did by suggesting that this belonged in a normal budget bill rather than the "supra" budget bill this stimulus package has become.

Now other than simply leaving this at the fact that the Catholic Church does not allow artificial birth control and never has, even pre-Humanae Vitae, it is important to examine Ms. Pelosi's statement further in light of an essay of Fr. McNabb, titled ACTION STATIONS.

He begins with a passage from the Encyclical of Pius XII to the American Hierarchy, "The Holiness of the Family and Social Justice" issued in November , 1939.

"If, instead, the Commandments of God are spurned, not only is it impossible to attain that happiness which has place beyond the brief span of time which is allotted to earthly existence, but the very basis upon which rests true civilization is shaken and naught is to be expected but ruins over which belated tears must be shed. How, in fact, can public weal and the glory of civilised life have any guarantee of stability when right is subverted and virtue despised and derided? Is not God the source and giver of law? Is not He the inspiration and reward of virtue, with none like Him among lawgivers?"

"This, according to the admission of all reasonable men, is everywhere the bitter root of evils: refusal to recognise the Divine Majesty, neglect of moral law whose origin is from Heaven, or that regrettable inconstancy which makes its victims waver between the lawful and forbidden, between justice and inequity."

"Thence arrived the modern and blind egotism and thirst for pleasure, vice, drunkenness, immodest and costly styles of dress, prevalence of crime, even among minors, lust for power, neglect of the poor, base craving for ill-gotten wealth, flight from the land, levity in entering marriage, divorce, the break-up of the family, the cooling of mutual affections between parents and children, birth control, enfeeblement of race, weakening of respect for authority, or the rebellion against or neglect of duty towards one's country and towards mankind"

Fr. McNabb then continues. . .

The simple phrase agrorum desertion (flight from the lands) marks, if it does not make, history. The fundamental evil which it uncovers now finds its place for the first time in a Papal Encyclical.

More historic is the joining together almost in one phrase---the flight from the land, and decay of marriage. As man must eat and therefore work to eat, God made the farm, like the family, a divine institution. Home and homestead being God's foundations for mankind, "flight from the land" into the town and especially the big town, will mean flight from undertaking marriage as God has wished it to be undertaken.

It can never be sufficiently trumpeted to moderns that our modern town, and especially our modern big town, is the proximate occasion of the anti-social sin of race suicide. So many are the overhead charges for rent, rates and taxes that the town cannot pay the majority of its hand-workers and brain-workers an economic wage sufficient to pay an economic rent.

Under these town conditions birth restriction presents itself as an economic necessity. Now birth restriction by marital abstinence is heroic virtue. But as the average person cannot be expected to have more than average self-sacrifice this heroic marital abstinence will tend to give place to birth restriction which is birth frustration.

No wonder that the average town youth of today, faced by circumstances which we elders have left to them, can have no higher idea of marriage than that of a temporary relation between a man and a woman principally for pleasure.

So how do our "Catholic" politicians respond to the moral challenges facing these proximate occasions of sin? By tolerating immoral behavior and compounding it by providing an evil remedy like artificial contraception. The solution is not economic. We cannot simply raise the minimum wage or artificially create jobs because these are ultimately only short term remedies.
Even those from whom we should expect moral guidance are not leading us. Fr., continues. . .

Understand my anguish when I realized that even we priests of the moral code were beginning, as it were, to advocate adjustment to the proximate occasions of sin, as if some expedient would allow the majority of young men and women to live in brothels. I found professional attempts to adjust the moral code to circumstances, to surroundings. If that was an ethical policy, then the great Chosen People did very wrong by coming out of Egypt, for their glorious attempt--which we Christians have not yet imitated--was that they refused to adjust their moral code to their surroundings. They adjusted their surroundings to their moral code.

An Examination of Conscience

The following examination of conscience was found in the "Missal" of Sir Laurence Shipley after his death and reprinted in The Path of Prayer by Fr. Vincent McNabb.

Let me ask my heart how it stands with God!

Is God my God?

Or is He only one amongst many gods, vulgar or sinful, whom I strive to serve?

Is God the Sovereign of my mind?

Is the thought of God my sovereign thought?

Do I believe in God's Word more than any other word--- more than the beloved word of my friend, the imperative word of my country, the persuasive word of Art and Science?

Do I worship God, in body and spirit, at morn and night, by kneeling down to pray?

Do I pray?

Or do I merely say prayers when with but slight effort of mind and will I might pray?

Is it my lips only, or also my heart, that says: Hallowed be Thy Name?

Do I understand this mystic prayer when I say it---or am I glad not to understand?

Do I dwell with ease---or even joy----on the words Thy Will be done?

Do I hurry over these words lest God overhear them and take me at my word?

Do I trust God?

Do I dread lest He hurt me unawares if I give myself wholly to His keeping?

Do I expect and ask Him to do for me what He has already given me power to do for myself?

Do I thus ask God to serve me, if not in my sins, at least in my life?

Do I love God?

Do I love His way with me more than my own way with myself?

Is God at home in my heart?

Am I at home with God---always at home to God?

Does God dwell in my heart as in His own house, which He may enter and quit at will?

Have I cast Him forth from my soul by any wilful sin?

Have I been as much at ease after my sin as before?

Or have I been restless until, my sin confessed and forgiven, I have found rest in God?

Are the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist to me the outpourings of Jesus Christ's most precious Blood, to the cleansing and nourishing of my soul?

Do I often thank God, through Jesus Christ, for these and countless other gifts which have made the Church the King's Wedding Feast to me?

Do I still cling to this earth with its pleasant sights and sounds, or are my eyes straining to catch sight of the City of God?

If at this moment Death should knock at the door of my soul, should I treat its summons as an interruption, or an impertinence, or even a cruelty; or should I welcome it as a glad invitation to God's Wedding Feast?

Tu Solus Deus, Tu Solus Dominus.

False Pacifists

I am posting this essay by Fr. McNabb entitled "On False Pacifism" as a rebuttal to many who claim a moral superiority over others and who with unjust harshness criticize our men and women serving us in the military. H/T to The ChesterBelloc Mandate

On False Pacifism
by Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P.

Two errors, garbed as virtues, are at present threatening the course of European justice. One of these is false pity; the other, false pacifism. Now whereas we wish to speak at length of the latter, a word may dismiss the former.

False pity makes an appeal after this manner: "Be merciful even to your enemy. Overcome him if you will; but be not overcome by what is worst in him. Conquer, but do not copy him. In the hour of victory forget your enemy's frightfulness. Forget even that he is your enemy, and remember only that he is your brother.

"The errors latent in this appeal to the quality of mercy need hardly be dwelt upon, whilst one fatal quality swallows up the rest. The truth is that this gentle-toned pity is almost a superlative pride. It is so supremely self-conscious that in spite of the soil of Germany being still practically inviolate, it calmly foretells victory.

The false pacifism, which we other pacifists nowise confound with true pacifism, makes a brave show on platforms and on paper. It lends itself readily to the more moving kinds of address. It appeals to the noble-hearted. It unnerves heroes. It deceives even the elect. Seldom does it preach its evangel of peace without direct mention of Him around whose cradle angels sang of "Peace on earth to men. "It almost disarms criticism by beseeching Christian men to remember the Rock whence they were hewn and the Captain whose victory on the mount was won: Non occidendo sed moriendo, by dying, not by putting to death.

But the noble blunder into which these pacifists have fallen can be seen only by those who have the power of grasping, as the Scholastics would say, certain simple distinctions. Their first duty is to see the distinction between common virtue and heroic virtue. It was the Greek thinkers and heroes who first detected and proclaimed this simple distinction. Plato and Aristotle, who knew Greeks, divided them into normal Greeks and hero Greeks. The average man, whether Greek or barbarian, can risk his life in order to save his life ; in other words, he can be brave in self-defence. Only a hero will risk his own life to save another's ; that is, only a hero can meet death bravely that others may live.

This distinction between common virtue and heroic virtue passes into the classical Christian distinction between the commandments and the counsels. Until a man under-stands these two, and the difference between them, he has not understood Christianity; and until a man understands Christianity, how can he judge of Europe in this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and fifteen?

This, then, is the distinction between commandments and counsels. A command is something that all must do. A counsel is something that none need do, but some will do. Thus unto everyone it is commanded: "Thou shalt not steal." All are forbidden to take what is not their own ; and are commanded to give back what is not their own if they have taken it. But the Master has given a counsel : " Sell all thou hast." This is more than a command ; not, indeed, more in obligation, but more in hardship and nobility. It suggests that the higher way, the way, not over the earth, but through the air, is to those rare souls who have grasped the principle that "a man's riches consists less in the multitude of his possessions than in the fewness of his wants.

"Thus everyone is under the command : "Thou shalt not kill." By virtue of this a man may not take human life. Yet if another attempts his life he may defend himself by slaying the other. The average man, if attacked by another, could not be bound to forgo all self-defence by force. Yet if a man for some noble motive did allow himself to be slain instead of slaying his foe, he would be giving an example of heroic virtue. But too much stress cannot be laid upon the sound ethical principle that " No one is bound to heroic virtue." The attitude of the Society of Friends towards war is undeniably a noble one ; or it would be noble were it wise. But since it insists that everyone shall exercise the heroic virtue of non-resistance by force it lacks that touch of mercy which would make it kindred to mankind.

A last and most necessary distinction is between "meum" and "tuum" that is, between our power over our own rights and our power over the rights of others. A man may quite lawfully give his purse up to the first stranger who asks it of him. But a postman who would give up a purse he was bound to deliver would be condemned for neglect of duty.

In the same way an individual on the banks of the Meuse might resign his rights against trespass by allowing German troops to pass through his garden. But if that individual is a Belgian soldier, whose duty it is to defend the rights of his fellow-countrymen, then to allow German soldiers to pass through the garden would be a traitorous neglect of duty. Far from being heroic virtue, it would be the cowardice of treachery.

It is not a little strange that the men who so persistently preach heroic virtue in the matter of the commandment : "Thou shalt not kill" do not preach it in the far easier commandment : "Thou shalt not steal."As we know, the commandment : "Thou shalt not kill" is the chief safeguard in a civilization that is dominantly military, whereas the commandment : "Thou shalt not steal" is the chief safeguard in a civilization that is dominantly commercial.

Now, the counsel to defend no rights even the rights of others, or our own transcendent right to live by an appeal to physical force is the absolute or heroic in the commandment against killing. But the absolute or heroic in the commandment against stealing is : "Sell all thou hast and give to the poor."How few there are to urge this absolute amongst the men who look on war as a crime ! Peace has its frightfulness no less than war. Mammon is a more sanguinary god than Mars. When men plead that Mars is red-handed and should not be adored, it may be well to remind them, amidst their financial operations, that their counsels of perfection would be more effective if they themselves followed them in the lesser sphere of self-emptied riches.

Meditations On Care Of The Sick

Fr. Vincent McNabb in his book 'Meditations on St. John' wrote a small chapter titled Care of the Sick. It is based on the Gospel of St. John ch.4, 41-54.

"I should like to turn now to our relationship to sickness. I am not concerned here with how we should behave when we are ill. The sanctification of souls by sickness is a very important function in our life on earth but the sanctification of those who have to do with the sick is also very important in the spiritual life. For God's sake remember that sickness is a great trial. I do not mean for the sick, but for the people who look after them. When we are sick the normal way of looking at things disappears; things which to the healthy seam very little become immensely important to the sick. For instance---the tea is half cold. To a normal person it means very little, but to a sick person it means everything. The bed is not properly made---what does that matter if we sleep as soon as our head touches the pillow; for a sick person it may almost mean a bed-sore in twenty-four hours. Please realise that sickness gives the sufferer an entirely different view and a prolonged illness displaces almost everything.
The sick are the most important people in the household. They are the afflicted of God. And if they are rather impatient, or anything else, it doesn't matter. 'He whom thou lovest is sick.' Always remember when you have to do with sickness that if there is any doubt about the rule of the Church you must always stretch it. How I rub that into young priests. I say: 'My dear Father, the sacraments are for the people, not the people for the sacraments. Please give so-and-so extreme unction---would you mind giving it and having the fight afterwards, not before...' The Church teaches us a lot by its external privileges to the sick. It dispenses everything---all the positive laws of the Church are waived. The sick should be treated as the pearls of the community and if they are rather disgruntled--it does not matter; they must be cared for with great generosity and charity. Some people think that the first thing you must give a sick person is a sermon. Where do people get these ideas? It is bodily care that is the first duty. In a sense the sick can look after their spiritual affairs, but they cannot look after the body. They can look after their souls---and some are troubled about their souls, as if they needed to reminded of their duty to pray to God and so on when perhaps they are miles ahead in the spiritual life. But they cannot look after the body and our primary duty of charity, love of God, is to look after it for them. it was my great privilege to have a brother, now dead, a doctor. He attended my father at his death. I well remember how struck I was with the extreme reverence of his service to my father's body; it had something almost priestly in it and never had I so realised the divinity of service to a human body as when I saw the service of a son to his dying father. There can be something almost like a sacrament in our attention to human bodies, something akin to my priestly attention each morning to the Body of our Lord.
The sick should be spared every avoidable pain; it is not our duty to increase any pain; it is our duty not to increase it and to do everything to alleviate it, to prevent further suffering---everything except the taking away of life. Our duty is to spare that poor body further pain and if inadvertently we give the slightest pain we should beg pardon most humbly. All the humble acts of looking after the body, washing it, feeding it, etc. are holy. No wonder St Joseph is the patron of a happy death. He was very happy in his priest, Jesus, and his nurse, his beloved wife. I like to think of our Lord and our Lady sparing St. Joseph every pain in the attention they gave him.
If we would only ask the sick what we can do for them we would be surprised at the simple things they want. When I have instructed children as to how they might help the sick I have always tried to impress on them that they should find out from the sick person what they would like done. Some lady-bountifuls come and insist on doing what they want---and their place is better than their company. I know of one sufferer who has never been known to complain---I call her the Professional. I never talk piety---she has it all day and wants a change. Instead I usually make her a cup of tea. i have known cases where I have asked 'My child, what can I do for you?' and the answer has been 'Oh Father could you reach me a glass of water'---I have nearly wept."

Excerpts from Nazareth or Social Chaos

One of my favorite authors is Fr. Vincent McNabb O.P. Fr. McNabb was an Irish priest who spent most of his life at the Dominican Priory in N.W. London. Fr. McNabb was regarded as being eccentric and controversial by many, but he lived in that company of saints who followed the Gospel teaching of poverty to the letter and even his detractors could not deny that he lived exactly as he preached. He walked nearly everywhere in his homemade boots and tattered religious habit. In his cell he had a chair and a bed, neither of which he used as he either stood or knelt. He kept a Bible, his breviary, the constitutions of the Dominican Order, and the Summa of St. Thomas. He was the spiritual advisor and friend of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Msgr. Knox wrote of him "Father Vincent is the only person I have ever known about whom I have felt, and said more than once, 'He gives you some idea of what a saint must be like.' There was a kind of light about his presence which didn't seem to be quite of this world." -Most of his writings are out of print but IHS Press is reprinting some of them and worth buying. Here is an excerpt from his book Nazareth or Social Chaos which hopefully will be re-printed in 2008. A recurrent theme throughout his works is the model of the Holy Family and the town of Nazereth where we will find the answer to the modern economic and social evils that afflict us.

Chapter 20. Fifteen Things a Distributist May Do

An Open Letter to
J.—B.—, A Young Gentleman with Desires)
You say you are at sea with a pen; and that anyhow, Fleet Street, not to say Little Essex Street, is in no need of recruits. You feel that Distributist modelling and designing has been well and truly done; but that the modellers and designers will have wasted their brains if some simple folk like you don’t attempt to carry out the designs. You ask dramatically, ‘Don’t tell me what to think for I subscribe to G.K.’s. But tell me what to do.’

I will therefore set down fifteen things, any one of which would be good to do. They shall be fifteen for two reasons. Because if I set down the hundred and one things you might do, it would fill a whole issue and not just one article in G. K.’s. Fifteen gives a choice such as a man has,say, in choosing a cravat, a livelihood, or a wife.

I will not begin at the beginning. I will begin anywhere and go on anyhow. But, indeed, when things have come to such a state of social untidiness as they are at present, a beginning can be made anywhere and anyhow. The one things necessary is to begin.

1. If you have a mantelpiece, remove everything from it except perhaps the clock. If you are fortunate enough to have no mantelpiece, remove from the walls of your home all pictures and such like, except a crucific. This will teach you the Poverty of Thrift. It may be called an empiric approach to Economics.

2. Clean out your own room daily. Clean it if possible on your knees. This will teach you the Poverty of Work. It will also prevent paralysis of the knees. But a paralysis which has reached the knees will soon reach the hands and the brain, if not the tongue.

3. For forty days or more—say, during Lent—do not smoke (and neither grouse about it nor boast about it). This will also improve your eyesight. It will also improve your insight into the tangled economics question: (tobacco) combines and how to smash them.

4. Buy some hand-woven cloth. Wear it. Buy some more. Wear that too. Remember the noble advice on how to eat cucumber, cut it into two parts (equal or unequal). Eat one part. Then eat the other. Your home-spun will instruct you better than the Declaration of Independence will instruct you on the dignity and rights of man.

5. Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot.

6. Find another young Distributist, with our without University education, but with
brains and feet1. Invite him to use his feet by tramping with you across any English county, say, water-logged Staffordshire during the summer holidays. Invite him to use his brains by standing on his feet, but not on his dignity, in market-places, telling the village-folk what is the matter with Staffordshire. This will lead him to tell them what is the matter with himself.

note 1.
Do not believe X.—, who says they are not to be found. The truth is that X.— has
lived so long in stunt circles for the last six months that he has become prematurely infantile.)

If you will keep at it for three weeks or a month, your advice on How to Save England will be more valuable, though, I admit, less valued than that of the entire Board of Directors of the Old Woman of Threadneedle Street.

7. If you fail to find a fellow-tramp, or if you covet the heroism of the dug-outs in a time of peace, spend your summer holiday as a farm-hand. You will not be worth your keep; but it will be worth your while. If Babylondon has not befogged your ‘intellectus agens’—your active intellect, in the noble phrase of scholasticism, you will gradually see the Poverty of Work. This is the other empiric approach to Economics.

8. If through the machinations of Beelzebub or his fellow-devil Mammon, your house is in suburbia, plant your garden not with things lovely to see like roses, or sweet to smell like lavender; but good to eat like potatoes or French beans. At the end of two years you will have done three things: (1) You will have a higher appreciation of yokel-intelligence; (2), you will have a wider knowledge of Natural History (especially of slugs and the like); and (3), You will have a sardonic scorn for the economics of our present Sewage System. In other words you will have had the beginnings of a liberal education.

9. I wil not approach a matter or your reputation. If you take the advice offered, you may be accounted a fanatic. But fanatic or no fanatic, here is the advice. For twelve months, if possible, or at least for twelve days, do not use nything ‘canned’, neither canned meat nor canned music.

This will throw you back on what is called Home Produce. This in its turn will show you the right expression to put into your singing of Rule Britannia.

10. I will now appeal to the artist that is within every one of us. Art, as you know, is the right way of making a good thing. There is no right way of making a bad things. Not only something, but make something—a cup of tea, a boiled egg, a hatpeg (from a fallen branch), a chair!

This heroic attempt to make something will enable your friends to practise their wit by saying you have only made an ass of your yourself. In order to hear this gibe stolidly, read up about ‘the ass’s colt at the crossways.’

11. Talk your young architect friend into spending two weeks of his holiday making an abode (formerly called a house1). He is thinking in terms of Brick-combine bricks, Timber-combine timber, Steel-combine steel, Cement-combine cement, Building materials-combine building materials. Drag him out into England that still grows oak, elm, ash, beech, fir, larch, etc. Give him a wood axe, a hatchet, and adze, and a few tools. Tell him from me that if in two weeks and for less that 100 pounds you and he cannot make an abode more spacious and sanitary than ninety per cent of the dwellings in the Borough of Westminster or St. Pancras, your should be certified. This may be called the Strain Test, enabling you to know whether he has brains enough to be your friend, even if he has brains enough to be an architect.

note 1.
The word house is now becoming obsolete. Collections of flats are not a house.
For the moment the genius of the English language seems unequal to the task of
giving these collections a name.

12. Set down for the information and inspiration of young Distributists one hundred answers to the usually despairing question: ‘How can I get out of London?‘ Begin with the simplest answer: ‘Walk out.’ You may find that some of your most promising Distributists will walk no more with you. Do not be despondent at this; because it may make your own Distributism more sea-worthy.

13. As you are not yet married, and as marriage is the fundamental state of life as well as the unit of the Commonwealth, make up your mind whether your are called to this state. If you make up your mind to marry, do not marry merely a good wife: marry a good mother to your children. A wife that is a good mother to your children ist the Angel of the House; the other sort is the very devil.

14. Before asking her hand and her heart, tell her how to test you. Advise her to ask herself not whether you would make her a good husband, but whether you would make a good father to her and your children. A wife that is not a house-wife, and husband that is not a good house-band are heading for Admiralty Probate and Divorce!

15. If you do not feel called to the state of marriage vows, there is another state of vows—where mysticism and asceticism prove themselves the redemption of
Economics.

But—well—God-speed you, as they say in lands of the old culture.

THE END

There are more excerpts from the book that can be read online.

IHS Press was launched in September of 2001 to bring back into print the classics of last century on the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church.