This is a transcript of Mike Hennessy's speech on Vincent McNabb. Which was presented on the 12th of November in London. Once again, I would like to thank him for his commitment to all things Bellocian.
Good evening! And thank you for coming this evening.
Tonight I am going to try and
make real to you all the person of the Dominican, Father
Vincent McNabb. I stress the word
person, for I come not so much to speak about his writings (although I will),
nor about the theories with which his name is so often associated – the dreaded
“D” word! – (although I will), but about how he lived and what his life
represented.
We are long removed from the
years that formed him. By Queens
Victoria’s death Fr McNabb was already in his mid-30s; he died in 1943, seventy
years ago, following the Blitz which caused him so much sorrow and so much
suffering in those parts of London he loved, and before the tide began to turn
in the Second War.
Given this elapse of time, I make
no apology for beginning this exposition by invoking the memory of Fr McNabb's
presence through the medium of that great writer and great friend of his – the
Master, Hilaire Belloc. Under the
influence of the Master’s mighty prose – almost the last thing he wrote before
the twilight years that claimed him until his death in 1953 – we may begin to
catch sight of our quarry, the Apostle of First Principles.
This memorial text was published
in a special issue of Blackfriars, shortly after Fr NcNabb's death:
“It was long a
commonplace that the world knew nothing of its greatest men. Now that saying was already current a life
time ago. It is emphatically true today,
and its value and meaning affects us at the present moment more than ever they
did in the past, for this is a moment when men are only publicly known by their
names, and when the real personality for which the name stands is hidden under
a mass of popular print.
Father Vincent
McNabb, the Dominican, who has just passed to his reward, intensely illustrates
this. The greatness of his character, of his learning, his experience, and,
above all, his judgement, was altogether separate from the world about
him. Those who knew him marvelled
increasingly at every aspect of that personality. But the most remarkable aspect of all was the
character of holiness. Everyone who met
him, even superficially, discovered this.
Those of us who had the honour and rare advantage of knowing him
intimately and well over many years find, upon looking back upon that vast
experience, something unique, over and above the learning, over and above the
application of that learning to Thomism, which is surely the heart of the
Dominican affair. To that testimony,
which so many have the honour and privilege to present, I can add less than
nothing. We know holiness just as we
know courage or the unimportant particular of physical beauty and
proportion. When we come across that
quality of holiness permeating and proceeding from the whole Dominican world,
we can only be silent as before some very rare and majestic presentation,
wholly foreign to our common experience.
It was not the learning, though it had been accumulated over so many
years, nor the particular familiarity with the master text of St Thomas, it was
the fullness of being which, as we remember what we have lost, is on a scale
that appals and dwarfs all general appreciation. It would have been astonishing in any man to
have discovered so profound a simplicity united to so huge a spiritual
experience. Finding it in this one man,
experiencing it as we did, there seems little more to be said unless for the
purpose of reiteration.
I can write here from intimate
personal experience. Vincent McNabb was
with me walking in our garden here in Sussex (which he knew so well!) on the
chief occasion of my life, a moment like all such moments when the soul
was in the presence of death and therefore of eternity.
I do not see how this testimony
can be amplified. I have known, seen and
felt holiness in person. In that
presence all other qualities sink away into nothingness. I have seen holiness at its full in the very
domestic paths of my life, and the memory of that experience, which is also a
vision, fills me now as I write – so fills me that there is nothing more to
say. Men of this calibre are better
known in their absence than in their presence.
With that absence the rest of my life will, I think, be filled. There are many indeed who can add to this
testimony, but I can only add to it by an astonished silence, contemplating
holiness in person and all that was meant thereby. Of this he now has complete visions while we
who write of him grope and are in darkness.
Under the protection of that soul and its intelligence and virtue
combined, I must fall back upon silence.
Never have I see or known anything on such a scale.”
The “chief occasion of my life”
of which Belloc speaks, was – as some here will know – the death of his wife,
Elodie, just before midnight on the Feast of the Purification, 1914, something
from which Belloc's Faith barely recovered at the time, and which marked him
until his death. We will have cause
later to return to the friendship between Fr McNabb and Belloc which so
sustained the latter – and inspired the former – over the rest of their lives.
Now, I have entitled my talk
tonight “Father McNabb: the Apostle of First Principles”, perhaps a` rather
dry, yet I hope not too intimidating, title.
I will explain why I have called it this a little later, as I fear it
may need some explanation – or “unpacking”.
I will also unpack some of his books from my venerable ‘McNabb-sack’ to
read from – no man should travel without books!
Anyway, why am I
here to speak to you about Fr McNabb? Fr
McNabb entered my life in my late twenties, although, as a disciple of G K
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc from my late teens, his name and some glow of his
reputation had already reached me. I
moved to London from the glorious North in 1992, that year entered the service
of the House of Commons – where I still remain as a parliamentary official
(non-party, non-Government – fear not!) – and married in 1993. Our first child arrived in 1995, and another
seven followed: during the course of this delightful family growth, we moved
from London to Reading in order to find a place we could afford where there was
light, refreshment and relative peace.
All this is relevant! My work in Parliament, and my life as a
husband and a father, are the two principal contexts in which my admiration for
Fr McNabb grew. With every Session of
Parliament, with each chilling anti-family Bill receiving Royal Assent from the
Mother of Parliaments (would a mother kill her children?), with each cheap and
stupid insult aimed at my wife (only in my absence) from complete strangers
about the growing size of our family – oddly, usually at bus-stops – I realised
with increasing passion the relevance and power of his mission, his reaching
out, to people over seventy years ago now, about his fears for society and
family.
But I come here not to canonise
Fr McNabb – but to make him and how he lived and preached better known. I have lived within the penumbra of his
thoughts and his prayers and his hopes – and fears – for some fifteen
years. My admiration for him is undimmed
by time. He died 70 years ago – but in
terms of the direct relevance of much of what he had to say, it could have been
yesterday.
He was of a different sort to
these two friends, Belloc and Chesterton – two men who revered him. Chesterton I see very much as a fisherman,
although he spent a good deal of his life drawing people towards a Truth he had
not yet formally accepted. Belloc is
more of a shepherd, albeit often a lonely one, especially after the death of
his dear wife, Elodie – alone in the hills at evening. His writings pulse with the conviction of a
man deeply, almost desperately, attached to the Truth that is the Faith, and
which those who listened or read his sonorous and indefatigable words would
also feel – and be comforted, consoled and strengthened.
Yes, Fr McNabb was of a different
kind. I will return to this later, after I have set out my stall – or, rather,
his stall – or, indeed, the stall of the Church, for he was always at pains to
say that he only spoke as the Church spoke – but to me his life was dedicated
not so much to drawing people into the Church, to the Radiant Hearth from the
Disorder and Darkness without (which of course he did), nor to strengthening
the spirit of those who already lived by that Hearth to defend it from its vile
and stupid enemies (which of course he did); but to drive all of us, both
within and without, back to first principles, to understand not just from
custom or habit or from obedience or from fashion or fear of offence or human
respect what is the Truth – and, from an understanding of that Truth, for us to
draw closer to Christ, to Almighty God and thus to Blessedness.
His was not an easy task – it was
ascetic, hard, driven, liable to create as many enemies as friends, to drive
some to mock him, to hate him. But
this is perhaps the role of the alter
Christus throughout the ages.
So who was Father McNabb?
He was born Joseph McNabb, at
Portaferry near Belfast on 8th July 1868.
His father was a sea captain whom he seldom saw: his mother was just
that, a mother, and – in his eyes – all the more blessed for being “just” that
(before her marriage, at a very young age, she had occupied an important sales
and administration position in a New York department store). Not that she didn’t have other things than
bringing up the children and managing the home to occupy herself with: one of
Father McNabb’s first memories is of his mother taking him on a sick visit to a
lady with a cancerous growth in her chest whom Mrs McNabb would wash and
comfort. Mrs McNabb appears always to
have played a leading part in parochial charity, and frequently to have
commanded her children’s assistance with her charitable work. She was the mother of eleven children in
total, Joseph McNabb being the tenth. In his later years he wrote a book,
called Eleven, Thank God! which he dedicated to his mother and which
stands as a great apologia pro familia magna. Family always held a central place in Father
McNabb’s world, as it indeed holds a central place in Rerum Novarum, a
Papal text he revered.
Although born in Ireland, by the
age of 14 he had moved with his family to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on account of
his father’s work. A move to London had
been considered but the capital was thought to be too terrible a place for the
bringing-up of children. Until he was
16, Joseph McNabb continued to board for most of the year at St Malachy’s in
Belfast. However, the influence of the
time he spent in Newcastle was important to him, for his family moved into the
parish of St Dominic’s which was – unsurprisingly – run by the Dominican
Order. He was profoundly impressed by
all he saw of Dominican life and spirituality, of its asceticism, its love for
Holy Scripture and its profound learning; and so, after leaving St Malachy’s
and taking one unsatisfactory year at St Cuthbert’s Grammar School in
Newcastle, he decided to become a Dominican.
Curiously, what appears to have been a very significant motive behind
Father McNabb’s vocation was the same thing that drove Chesterton into the
Catholic Church – fear of Hell. As he
put it: “I don’t want to go to Hell; I think I’ll go to the Novitiate!” Undoubtedly, while many reasons can be
identified for the motivation behind his vocation, the simple fact was that he
felt God was calling him to become a friar in order to save his soul.
At the age of 17 – despite his
father’s initial anger at his son deciding to pursue a vow of poverty: “I’ll
never, no I’ll never consent to a child of mine becoming a voluntary pauper!”:
an anger which only abated after a visit from a Dominican from the local Priory
to explain the nature of poverty – Joseph McNabb entered the Dominican
novitiate at Woodchester. Joseph
McNabb’s entrance to the Order coincided with the beginnings of a comparative
deluge of able and devout novices who entered in his year and the three or four
years following, novices who – once professed – formed the basis of the Order’s
rise to prominence during the first half of the twentieth century, principally
under the aegis of Father Bede Jarrett.
Father McNabb was ordained in
September 1891, shortly after his 23rd birthday, and in the year of Rerum
Novarum. For Fr McNabb, Rerum Novarum, the Papal Encyclical “On
the Condition of the Working Classes”, was a foundational text. It set out a clear path through the
controversies of drear socialism and grasping capitalism. Key excerpts from it he was to get his
novices to memorise and it stood as founding text for the Distributist movement
in later years. He was the most
brilliant scholar of his year in the novitiate, although the following years
were to see some greater academic minds entering the Order. One of Father McNabb’s contemporaries wrote
that “only Father Humbert Everest – who had left the novitiate for Louvain two
years earlier – could have challenged [Father] McNabb’s intellectual
supremacy”. Indeed, Father McNabb
followed Father Everest to Louvain for further studies.
As an aside, while at Louvain, Fr
McNabb developed a strong love for the people of Catholic Belgium. When the Great War broke out he wrote and
spoke with great energy to raise funds and assist the refugees fleeing before
the German onslaught. He wrote a little
known book – a collection of essays – Europe’s
Ewe Lamb, dedicated to the plight of that country: for his work he received
a medal from the King of Belgium which he handed over to his Prior just moments
before his death.
By 1894, three years after his
ordination, Father McNabb was sent back to Woodchester with his Lectorate in
Sacred Theology. (He took his Ad
Gradus examinations in Rome which led to his Mastership in 1910, when he
also had an audience with Pope St Pius X).
For 26 years, from 1894 to 1920,
Father McNabb was sent hither and thither as holy Obedience demanded. He taught
novices at Woodchester for 3 years upon his return from Louvain and was then
sent to Hawkesyard (where the senior novices were now taught) again for 3
years, to teach theology. For the
following 6 years, 1900 to 1906, he was returned to Woodchester as Prior (at
the tender age of 32): in 1906 he went to St Dominic’s Priory in north-west
London for the first time, to serve as its parish-priest for two
years. From there he was plucked back in
1908 to become Prior of Holy Cross, Leicester, for 6 years until 1914. In 1914 he was elected Prior of Hawkesyard,
where he faced his severest personal and spiritual tests, a position he served
in for 3 years: for a further 3 years he served there as Professor of Dogma
before returning to St Dominic’s Priory in London in 1920, where he served
again as parish-priest until his death on 17th June 1943, some 23 years later. During
these busy years he worked as
assistant to Fr Shapcote on his translation of the St Thomas’s Summa into
English, and he was a regular at the Catholic Evidence Guild platforms at
Speaker’s Corner and Parliament Hill: Frank Sheed said that if the Guild were
to have patron saint, it should be Fr McNabb.
He also lectured weekly for over twenty years in the University of
London Extension Scheme on St Thomas his writings.
After that rather breathless
chronology, I will pause to offer you one of my favourite tributes to Father
McNabb – a poem from the pen of Maurice Baring, written through the eyes and
ears and reflections of an unbeliever, a friend, who wrote to him thus:
“I have twice heard
Fr Vincent preach. It was each time the
most exquisite, intimate, unique experience.
When he began in his halting and wandering way I was disappointed; but in
five minutes I had learned to attune my ear, and my attention was closely
held. I was entranced and hardly felt
human when I came away – I felt so light – that is memorable; the lightness –
the taking flight that had happened – something divine.... I noticed that he
often did not remember the exact words of his text, or of many parts of the
Bible – when he wanted to repeat them – but must find and read them anew. He was so filled with remembering that the
actual words meant nothing to him – but their meaning only. Now at last I have heard what I always longed
to hear – a man inspired.”
At least one of the occasions on
which this unbeliever heard Fr McNabb preach was at Cecil Chesterton’s funeral:
sadly, no copy of the sermon survives, but Belloc referred to it as the
greatest piece of sacred oratory he had ever heard.
These comments Baring rendered
thus:
“A poet heard you preach and told me this:
While listening to your
argument unwind
He seemed to leave the
heavy world behind;
And liberated in a
bright abyss
All burdens and all load
and weight to shed;
Uplifted like a leaf
before the wind,
Untrammelled in a region
unconfined,
He moved as lightly as
the happy dead.
And as you read the
message of Our Lord
You stumbled over the
familiar word,
As if the news now
sudden to you came;
As if you stood upon the
holy ground
Within the house filled
with mighty sound
And lit with Pentecostal
tongues of flame.”
This poem and this testimony
remind me to mention what I consider to be amongst the most powerful of Fr
McNabb's writings today – his often small books of scriptural meditations and
his retreat sermons. I must mention
these here lest I forget later: there is something in the simplicity of
approach taken in his writing of them, in his preaching of the sermons, that
touches me. It is I suppose that
intimacy to which the friend of Baring referred. They are full of compassion, consolation and
hope – yet founded upon the necessary acknowledgement of our sinfulness, our
wretchedness before Almighty God. Fr
McNabb was also an enemy of timidity in prayer, about which in one these small
volumes he has this to say:
“Prayer, like generalship, must
sometimes be daring. To ask a king for a
trifle is to insult him. The thief
daringly asked Jesus to give him the Kingdom of Heaven – to give it in a moment
– and to give it after a life of sin.
And it was given him, even as he prayed.”
But Holy Scripture for him also
touched upon society and the State and upon the common good, not just upon
individual souls. An example of how
reflection upon a short passage of Scripture influenced his teaching about
society and economics can be found in his book, Nazareth or Social Chaos. As with many of his essays, Father McNabb’s
mind was set a-whirring by a text – in this case a line from St John’s account
of the Feeding of the Five Thousand. St
John records how those who were hungry took “as much as they would”. Father
McNabb comments:
“If the Eternal Wisdom, instead
of miraculously providing bread and fishes, had provided money, St John would
have been unable to say that as much as each one wanted Jesus gave.”
As ever there is much to unpack
from this text and from Father McNabb’s comment. Together they reflect upon the
nature of charity, upon the practice of economy; they touch upon social
welfare, and they of course give some insight into how Christ allowed His Will
to be conditioned, as it were, by the will of Man. Father McNabb goes on:
“In a system mainly of things,
the average person may be trusted to limit his wants by his needs. But in a system mainly of tokens, the average
person cannot be trusted to limit his wants by his needs… no man desires an
infinite meal… no man desires an infinite house… no man desires an infinite
field to till… but the undue desire of these tokens tends to a certain infinity,..
for tokens...excite an unsatisfied indefinite desire.”
Thus, desire for money is
infinite. Thus also desire for other
tokens, other shadows of real things, is likewise infinite. This desire is made even stronger by the
realisation that money has no value but only represents price and prices shift
even while value is constant. But there
are other tokens than money. The world
of fashion is full of shadows and tokens – fashion in clothes, fashion in
music, art: the fickle World creates an endless flow of ever-changing and never
necessary things which stand for wealth, or standing, or for ‘good taste’, or
for position in society, or for ‘up-to-dateness’. The ephemera of modernity stoke the infinite
desire for those things which are neither necessary nor truly real.
“Everywhere there will be the
very definite desire to have more and more token-wealth. The very uncertainty
of the future value of this token will heighten and foster the desire.”
Even setting aside monetary
value, i.e. price, the “fashion value” of all these shadow-things changes
almost by the hour. Those things of
fashion that are bought today are tomorrow worthless as things of fashion. It considers poverty to be the absence of
these tokens and shadows. In its confusion, part deliberate and part the result
of ignorance – it has made the word ‘poverty’ stand for a vice rather than for
a virtue.
“Bethlehem and Nazareth poverty
is not a defect to be remedied, but a fundamental condition of all ultimate
remedy and redemption.”
Indeed, Father McNabb was always
concerned with the primary, with real,
things and saw any work or activity that moved even one stage away from the
primary thing as less worthy and possibly less virtuous. As a result he loathed international finance
which was as far removed from reality and the primary things as it was possible
to go. As he put it, cuttingly:
“Some men wrest a living from
nature. This is called work. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest
a living from nature. This is called
trade. Some men wrest a living from
those who wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called finance.”
One can almost hear his lip curling in contempt,
except that such contempt for others he forbade himself. Somewhat sorrowfully I wonder where he would
have placed my own toil as a parliamentary official.
I will now say a little more
about Father McNabb’s life as a friar in order to put more flesh upon him – so
that I may make more progress in my attempt to 'conjure him up' (if that phrase
is not considered blasphemous with such a subject) amongst us all here tonight.
When a move to beatify Fr McNabb
was being mooted in the 1950s, Father Ronald Knox was asked for his opinion of
the Dominican. He wrote:
“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.”
Even amongst his fellow
Dominicans, Father McNabb was considered to be an ascetic. As Prior of Woodchester, Hawkesyard and Holy
Cross he had developed a reputation for being hard on others, but certainly no
harder than he was on himself: and he could always lend someone a sympathetic
ear, something he never seems to have had for himself! He ate sparingly – he blamed his “Protestant
stomach” (blamed on his baptism on 12th July!) – and his face and
body demonstrated the hard self-denial of his religious life. He slept on the floor of his cell – which
floor he scrubbed daily – and his bed lay unused even through illness and his
final death-pangs. He had no chair in
his room until the last days of his life when – still refusing to lie on his
bed – he finally consented to be seated in a chair. When writing, he knelt at a table surmounted
by a crucifix and small statue of the Blessed Virgin: on the table lay his only
books, a copy of the Vulgate, his Breviary, and the Summa Theologica.
He kept a compendious box of
notes, all written on scraps of paper – the backs of cards, used envelopes and
the like – on a huge variety of subjects some penned in English, some in Latin,
some in Greek and some even in Hebrew.
Everything he wrote was hand-written: he abominated most
machinery and had a particular vehemence for type-writers! Hilaire Belloc, who shared many views with
Father McNabb, always had a fascination for machinery and considered the
type-writer – and the telephone (something else Father McNabb loathed) – as a
great boon. It would no doubt have been
both interesting and amusing to have been a fly-on-the-wall as they discussed
the desirability of the ‘automated writing machine’!
Of course, as a religious,
indeed, as a Catholic, prayer was central to his life. His profound attachment to Holy Mass and the Office
aside, Father McNabb devoted much of his energy to praying, and to encouraging
others to pray, the Holy Rosary. As a
man of formidable intellect and deep learning he had nothing but impatience for
those who claimed that the Rosary was a prayer, a devotion, for simple
beginners, for the unlettered, for those who have not yet ascended to the
sublime heights of spirituality. People
who said such things rendered Father McNabb almost speechless with indignation. “The Rosary”, he would say, “is the
safest and surest way to union with God through mental prayer”. What impressed him the most about the Holy
Rosary was the prayerfulness of many of the faithful who had been taught or had
grown up to pray to God through Our Blessed Lady. Again and again he would say: “Most of the
contemplatives I have met are in the world, and these have found union with God
through the Rosary.” Devotion to the
Rosary, he insisted, should be fundamental to a Catholic’s prayer life. As he
said during a sermon on Rosary Sunday on 1936:
“The Incarnation is the centre of
all our spiritual life.. One of the
means by which it is made so is the Holy Rosary. There is hardly any way of arriving at some
realisation of this great mystery equal to that of saying the Rosary. Nothing will impress it so much on your mind
as going apart to dwell in thought, a little space each day, in Bethlehem, on
Golgotha, on the Mount of the Ascension.”
Father McNabb wore a homespun
habit – he only had the one at any one time – and marched around London in the
same heavy hob-nailed boots from year to year.
Over his shoulders as he trudged about the streets he had slung his
“McNabb-sack”, a capacious if battered means of carriage for his Vulgate,
Breviary, and whatever other books he needed.
Although he was not averse to rail travel, or public transport in
general, he usually refused to travel by car or by cab: the long distances he
had to cover in London from St Dominic’s Priory to the various convents to
which he was chaplain, to Speakers’ Corner and to Parliament Hill, he managed
on foot and at a startling pace.
There is a moving account of an
occasion when Father McNabb actually accepted a cab-ride back to his Priory.
For months he had made sick calls to a young girl – an only child – who was
dying. The mother – who had asked him to
come – was a Catholic; the largely absent father was not, and moreover was one
of his chief hecklers at Parliament Hill.
They were a poor family, lodged with another family in a single, small
room in a crumbling tenement block near St. Pancras Station. Sadly, the daughter died: McNabb said the
Requiem Mass. Just a few weeks later the
mother died – she had been ill throughout her daughter’s illness but had said
nothing about it to anyone. McNabb again
said the Requiem Mass. As he left the
graveyard the husband approached him, gave him a flower from a funeral bouquet
that Father McNabb had arranged from a pious benefactor, and asked him how he
was planning to return to his Priory.
The sky was thunderous and rain was beginning to fall. Father McNabb replied that he planned to
return as he had come – on foot. The husband – trebly poor now – pulled from
his pocket enough money to pay for a cab: at first Father McNabb demurred and
then he realised that this was the widower’s mite. With tears in his eyes he accepted the
money. He never forgot this instance of
simple charity. As he wrote:
“Blessed are the poor! Few things have ever touched me more than
that. Out of his poverty he offered me
my fare. Imagine that coming from one
who has not the faith. What am I to do
when I see him next? To kiss his feet
would be unworthy of him. I shall
pray... that God may give him the consolation of the faith.”
The full extent of Father
McNabb’s own charity will of course never be known. What he did privately remained private even
after the public death that we will shortly be considering. One known instance may have to suffice. In another rotting block of flats close to
Camden Lock lived an old bed-ridden woman.
For months, possibly for years, someone came regularly to talk to her,
to tidy the room and to scrub the floor.
A few weeks after Father McNabb had died, a group of people living in
rooms near to the woman’s were discussing who would do the job as the old lady
who had come to do the work before had evidently stopped coming. Only the bed-ridden lady’s best friend knew
that this ‘lady’ had in fact been Father McNabb, on his way to Parliament Hill
in his long habit, dropping in for a half an hour or so to see the old lady.
Charity also burned strong in him
in his friendship with Hilaire Belloc.
Fr McNabb first met Hilaire
Belloc following the publication of Belloc's CTS pamphlet on socialism in 1911. Belloc had heard a sermon preached by Father
McNabb earlier that year and he been very impressed by what he had heard. This was a period of febrile political
activity in England – and abroad – and Belloc had for many years been
developing, largely under continental influence, his political and economic
views. These had been expounded to a
largely deaf audience during his 5 years as an MP. After that he worked with
Cecil Chesterton to write that still controversial critique of the then current
parliamentary system, The Party System, and then his pungent analysis of
the social and economic woes of the day, The Servile State.
Fr McNabb first visited
Kingsland, Belloc's Sussex home, in 1913.
At this point, Fr McNabb was still in clerical black and had not yet
adopted as his customary attire the Dominican habit (we must remember that
religious were advised against wearing their habits in public and needed
permission from their superior to do so at this time). The next time Fr McNabb visited was on the
evening of 3 February 1914, the day after Elodie Belloc's death in February
1914 – on this occasion, Belloc's daughter Eleanor recalled, Fr McNabb was
dressed in his Dominican habit. He
stayed with the family until after Elodie's funeral and said Holy Mass next to
her coffin in the large hall at Kingsland every morning.
Thereafter, Fr McNabb was a
frequent visitor, and until 1919 he would stay most Holy Weeks to celebrate the
Triduum and the Easter Mass in Belloc's chapel.
In later years, once had had moved back to St Dominic's Priory in London
and his duties increased he would instead arrive in Easter Week for a few days
and began to visit at Christmas, arriving on Christmas Eve to celebrate the
three Masses of Christmas. When one
reads Belloc's beautiful essay, A Remaining Christmas, we must imagine
the ascetic Dominican in cheerful stillness at the periphery of the narrative.
Their friendship was very strong
and, as many other friends noted, after the death of Cecil Chesterton (in 1918,
just weeks after the Armistice: he died from trench fever), no-one had any
appreciable influence over Hilaire Belloc except Fr McNabb, who held the
Dominican in great “awe and reverence”.
Belloc’s behaviour was different in the presence of Fr McNabb, his
daughter, Eleanor, noted – restrained and careful in conversation at table.
In 1919, Fr McNabb wrote to
Belloc:
“I often ask God to
further you in your great battles for the poor and for their Master.”
They shared a deep love for 'the
poor of Jesus Christ' (I am reminded of Belloc's glorious poem, written
probably when he was in his early twenties, called The Poor of London
where he uses that very phrase) and a great love for the Truth, married with
the desire to lighten others' darkness and bring the consolation and wisdom of
that Truth to those who most needed it.
Towards the end of the 1920s (after the great battles with H G Wells but
before the tussles with G C Coulton), Belloc felt the fight beginning to weary
him almost to the point of collapse. He
wrote to Fr McNabb asking for his permission to give up controversy as it was
damaging his Faith, but Fr Vincent told him he must continue under the strain
and burden of that controversy. As Fr
McNabb wrote in 1936 to his good friend:
“You have been a
light-house for almost more than the run of a life-time. It has brought you a certain loneliness amongst
the sea and winds.
But your moments of
conscious loneliness can hardly be more than moments when you know – as we must
make you know – how many your light has guided and how many your heroism of
accepted loneliness has heartened.
What I personally
owe to the light-house that you are, I can only dimly discern and can never
repay.”
When Belloc suffered a stroke in
1942, Fr McNabb – just one year away from his own death – rushed to Kingsland
fearing his good friend might die and wanting to be at his side. Belloc's daughter, Eleanor, remembers McNabb
at Belloc's bed-side, speaking to him in a whisper as he slept and muttering “sancte
Belloc” under his breath.
When Belloc's neighbour, the
(very) lapsed Catholic poet and Arabist, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, was nearing
death, it was Fr McNabb whom Belloc asked to visit. Blunt was reconciled to the Church by Fr
McNabb before his death. Of such was the
practical nature of their friendship.
G K Chesterton, a good friend of
Fr McNabb's, wrote this of Fr McNabb, a
man he said was “walking on a crystal floor over his head”, in an introduction
to a collection of essays some nine years before he died:
“...I am nervous about writing...
what I think about Fr Vincent McNabb; for fear he should somehow get hold of
the proofs and cut it out. But I will
sat briefly and firmly that he is one of the few great men I have met in all my
life; that he is great in many ways, mentally and morally and mystically and
practically; and that next to nobody nowadays has ever heard of him... [but] nobody who ever met or
saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him.”
Fr McNabb of course sang the Salve Regina at
Chesterton's bedside as he died.
I would like now to cite some quotations from Fr
McNabb’s own works to throw light on what he was saying to his
contemporaries.
This first piece is from the introduction to the
book, Old Principles and the New Order, published in 1942, which was a
collection of his essays printed in Catholic journals over the previous twenty
years. As such, it serves as a useful
introduction to his thought over those years of his public apostolate:
“This book rests upon certain dogmatic and moral
principles, certain undeniable facts, and it makes certain practical proposals.
The first principle is that there is a God, our
Creator, Whom we must love and serve; and Whom we cannot love and serve without
loving and serving our fellow creatures.
The second principle is that the Family is the unit
of all social life; and that therefore the value of all social proposals must be
tested by their effect on the Family.
The third (psychological) principle is that from
the average man we cannot expect more than average virtue. A set of circumstances demanding from the
average man more than average (i.e. heroic) virtue is called an Occasion of
Sin.
The fourth (moral) principle is that occasions of
sin should be changed, if they can possibly be changed, i.e. they must be
overcome by flight not fight.
The great observed fact, of world-wide incidence,
is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas)
normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from
the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue...
...From this observed fact that the industrialized
town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be
fled,... Flight from the Land must be now be countered by Flight to
the Land.”
The occasion of sin which Father McNabb was
particularly – but not exclusively – referring to was the temptation placed
before poor families living in poor conditions to resort to methods of birth
control (“no birth and no control” as G K Chesterton so famously put it – “race
suicide” as McNabb put it rather more grimly).
As Father McNabb wrote in 1925:
“Full family life must be
the acid test of any system calling itself civilisation. But under our present
system the possibility of full family life is practically and explicitly
dead. As wages and rents now are, there
is no possibility for the average working man to have the average family. In order to avoid this average family only
two courses are now open to him. He may
exercise birth-control by abstinence, which is sinless, or by neo-Malthusian
methods of mortal sin. His choice is
therefore between mortal sin and what is for the average individual heroic
virtue. In other words, the town
civilisation of today is for the vast majority of the married classes a
proximate occasion of sin. But it is
teaching of the Church that we must fly the proximate occasions of sin. To remain in unnecessary occasions of sin is
to be guilty of the sin we should fly.”
Yes, the industrialised town, the City, what it so
easily provides and sustains – and denies – is an occasion of sin. Father McNabb in thus describing the City had
in mind principally its temptation to race-suicide, to contraceptive greed, to
sloth and selfishness. But he was also
thinking of its preoccupation with token and unreal wealth, with the sham of
fashion, with luxury and excess, with its focus on things that are to do
primarily with enjoyment rather than with charity – giving to self
rather than giving of self.
“A State organized for leisure is a State organized for
pleasure. And a State organized for
pleasure is a State organized for – Hell!”
The City will tend always to decadence: the moderns revel in their
decadence, too dulled or stupid to realize that decadence is decay and decay
precedes collapse.
Yet who, upon reading this description of
city-living as an occasion of sin, does not recall that passage from Cardinal
John Henry Newman’s novel, Callista, describing the farm-worker,
Agellius, entering the city of Carthage for the first time?
“The sights now shock and now allure: fearful
sights – not here and there but on the stateliest structures and on the meanest
hovels, in public offices and private houses, in central spots and at the
corners of the streets, in bazaars and shops and house doors, in the rudest
workmanship and in the highest art, in letters or in emblems or in paintings –
the insignia and pomp of Satan and of Belial, of a reign of corruption and a
revel of idolatry which you can neither endure nor escape. Wherever you go it is all the same – you are
accosted, affronted, publicly, shamelessly, now as if a precept of religion,
now as if a homage to nature, by all which, as a Christian, you shrink from and
abjure.”
While the state of involuntary poverty and
destitution in which so many of his contemporaries lived and worked filled him
with grief and anguish – he regularly records in his books the latest
statistics concerning the numbers of families living in one room (or even
sharing one room) in the filthy and crumbling tenement blocks of London and
elsewhere – it was largely amongst these people that he worked, and to these
people he ministered and preached. He was consistent in urging his
congregation, his audience, to leave him and to leave London. He encouraged all those who could to desert
the Babylon of London – “Babylon-on-Thames” or “Babylondon”, as he often
referred to it – and he vowed to remain behind to serve those who could not, or
would not, leave: at least until the way had been prepared by those who had
gone before them into the countryside.
And it must be remembered that this Flight to the Land was no foolish
idea: towards the end of Father McNabb’s life the Government was itself was in
the face of war to encourage a return to the land, so as to increase
agricultural production from degraded and untended fields and meadows.
Of course, the primary reason for Father McNabb’s
detestation of squalid and degrading urban conditions was the effect they had
upon family life. The family is the
prime unit of Christian society – indeed of any society – and precedes the
State in every respect. Parents' rights
need to be defended in order to preserve the family.
“The Rights of the Parent
are Natural Rights…. When therefore a
child is born its parents find themselves possessed of certain rights which,
though occasioned by their own acts of marriage and procreation, are not determined
by their own will, nor by the will of the State, nor by the will of man, but by
the Will of God. The Rights of the
Parent are prior to the Rights of the State.
This is clearly seen by those who recognise the Catholic doctrine that
the family as a family is prior to the State.
Not only in idea but in facts, families must have preceded States…. It is truer to say that the State has duties
towards the family than that families have duties towards the State. A nation’s chief duty towards this living and
essential thing is to safeguard it… Thus
the home, with its dowry of natural rights, is an older institution than any
law or Parliament of men.”
Father McNabb knew that all economic, social, and
political acts had some effect upon the family: it was by their effect
upon the family that he would measure their worth or morality. The family was what he called “the Nazareth
measure”. As he wrote in his book, The
Church and the Land, in an essay that was an open letter addressed to the
Prime Minister of the day:
“...the NAZARETH MEASURE of length and weight and
worth is the Family – that terrestrial “Holy and Undivided Three”. Let no guile of social usefulness betray you
into hurting the authority of the Father, the chastity of the Mother, the
rights and therefore the property of the Child. Social and economic laws are
more subtle but not less infallible than physical laws. No programme of good intentions will undo the
mischief caused by an interference with family life... All our personal and
social building, to be lasting, must be trued by the measures of that little
school of seers whose names are the very music of life – Jesus, Mary, Joseph!”
The family helped to underpin the
preservation of the natural moral order, at least in part, before the Incarnation,
and, since Christ's Birth, Life, Passion, Death and Resurrection, has acted to
preserve true civilisation and the Faith through the decadence of a
disintegrating Roman Empire and the turbulence that followed its dismemberment. Monasteries are rightly credited with the
salvation of true culture and society – but without Catholic families the
monasteries would not just have been empty – they would not have existed at
all.
As he saw it, only the family, and particularly the
Catholic family, can provide the necessary foundation for a re-birth of natural
moral law and for the re-baptism of a society fit to have Christ as its
King. The Nazareth Measure is
vital to help build a country of saints, of holy fathers and holy mothers and
children who wish to grow up to serve God in Truth and in Charity. When it is lost to sight or to understanding,
the family will fail and true society and culture will fall. When it is kept at the forefront of mind and
action it will restore the family to its primacy of honour in the servant
State.
Father McNabb knew the importance of the strength
that he had derived from his natural family, and the strength that he daily
drew from his new spiritual family, his Dominican community. He always stressed that what changed when he
“moved” from his natural family to his supernatural family were not the virtues
he pursued but the vows he had taken. He
was keenly aware of the need for lay people to be inspired amidst the many
snares of the modern world to pursue heroic virtue, to imitate the evangelical
counsels so far as their duties of state permitted. In his book, Old Principles and the New
Order, he writes about charity, poverty, and obedience:
“[E]ven Catholics have sometimes come to think
that the three virtues behind these religious vows were only for religious,
whereas the three virtues are binding upon all individuals, and in some
measure, upon that grouping of individuals... which we moderns...confusedly
call the State’.”
On one level what Father McNabb says here is a
truism – we must all strive to be chaste, poor in spirit, let us say, and
obedient: but upon closer examination Father McNabb is pointing out that these
three virtues should be as much a daily call to arms as they are to the
religious who have professed vows in them.
For after all, as Father McNabb said:
“...the religious men or women who have publicly
promised God to keep poverty, chastity, obedience are not thereby bound to more
poverty, more chastity, more obedience than if they had remained as lay-folk in
the world.”
Moreover, Father McNabb added:
“[I]t need hardly be pointed out that the poverty
of work and thrift, the self-control of virginal and conjugal chastity, the
obedience to rulers and to law, are of the greatest social value and need.”
In many articles Father McNabb traced the decadent
and withering effect of the State upon society to its neglect of poverty –
through reckless expenditure, financial mismanagement, usurious practices – to
its neglect of obedience – by going against the natural moral law and the laws
of revealed religion – and to its neglect of chastity – by permitting, even
encouraging, activities that undermined sexual or conjugal morality. Just as every individual should strive to be
poor, chaste, and obedient, so too the State should aim to adhere to these
three cardinal virtues.
One of Father McNabb’s hardest lessons to his own
and to our generation concerns poverty.
To Father McNabb poverty meant having enough for your duties of state
but no more: having no excess, no extravagance, no luxury – always giving, as
Christian charity dictates, to those less fortunate what you yourself or those
for whom you are responsible do not need.
(And, indeed, distributive justice under the natural law also requires
this.) Certainly, what constituted
“enough” in Father McNabb’s eyes would be considered as much too little by most
of our contemporaries and even by most of us.
But he was not recommending that we all become mendicants or fall into a
life of helpless wretchedness and pauperism – only that we attempt to be more
self-sufficient, restrict our desires, control our consumption, limit our
needs, and give from any over-abundance we possess.
Many Catholics throughout the ages have fallen into
complacency on this point by retreating behind the wall of “spiritual poverty”,
by allowing themselves anything and everything on the basis that they are poor
in spirit. Father McNabb of course
realised the importance of spiritual poverty; realised that it was possible for
a poor man to be more avaricious and more greedy than a rich man. But he also realised the dangers of riches,
the difficulty of achieving spiritual poverty when surrounded by excess – and
he also realised that the demands of justice and especially of charity required
people to have less than they would probably like or might otherwise have
had. Furthermore, he saw the embrace of
poverty as a means of defeating the increasing materialism and destitution of
the world about him.
We too easily perhaps these days dismiss calls for
renunciation of material goods when simply trying to live a faithful Catholic
life seems to involve renunciation enough – but turning away from the lures of
the World, the Flesh and the Devil is not the same as turning resolutely
towards God, and committing ourselves without cavil to live for Jesus' sake and
the love of souls.
My final word on this subject – or rather Fr
McNabb's – comes from his book, The Church and the Land: it concerns the
young man with great possessions from the Gospels:
“Only once did anyone come to Jesus after speech
with Him and go away sad. This was the young man who had great desire to have
everlasting life. But he also had ‘great
possessions’. He did not know that for
him the way to the joy of life was to accept the challenge of Jesus, ‘Go, sell
whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
Heaven. And come follow me.’ He did not realise that his invitation to
follow the poor Babe of Bethlehem, the poor man of Galilee, the poor outcast of
Golgotha, was a call to enter the narrow path of perfect joy. He could not leave the things which sooner or
later would leave him. He clung to his
great possessions on earth rather than seek treasure in Heaven, and left the
joy of wilful poverty and the following of Jesus for the sadness of wilful
wealth and the service of Mammon.”
Before
I move on to describe Father McNabb’s death, I feel I must counter-act any
possible impression that Father McNabb must have been a miserable fanatic. He had a well-developed sense of humour – and
of mischief, and was adept as dealing, often lightly but effectively, with
hecklers at Speakers' Corner or on Parliament Hill. He once famously compared hearing nuns’
confessions to being pecked slowly to death by ducks. On a more serious note, he once attended a
public meeting on the subject of the Mental Degeneracy Bill then passing
through the House of Commons (the occasion of his striking up a friendship with
Chesterton who was also opposing the Bill and with whom he often shared a
platform). After listening to various medical experts explaining how they would
certify as mental degenerates, and as a result sterilise, many types with whom
Father McNabb was familiar in his pastoral work, the good friar stood up and,
having been called to speak by the chairman of the meeting, bellowed: “I am a
moral expert and I certify you all as moral degenerates!” He stormed out
of the meeting to rapturous applause and the meeting broke up in disarray.
As Fr
Delaney, who preached at Fr McNabb's funeral, later wrote:
“He
was the happiest, least depressed member of the community, and he was the life
and soul of merriment when the time for recreation came. Renunciation meant for him foregoing lesser
joys for the sake of the supreme real joy.”
Now, if it is true that it is
possible to tell something important about a person from the manner of their
death then it seems only appropriate that we should now turn to the last long
weeks of Father McNabb’s life and to his eventual death.
On 14th April 1943, as he was drawing
to the end of his seventy-fifth year, Father McNabb was told by his doctor that
he had only a short time to live. That
same day he wrote to his niece, Sister Mary Magdalen, a Dominican sister, “Deo
Gratias! God is asking me to take a
journey which everyone must sooner or later take. I have been told that I have a malignant
incurable growth in the throat. I can, at most, have weeks to live.” The following day he preached to the Sisters
of Mercy. It was Thursday in Passion
Week, and, after a few vivid words of reflection concerning the imminence of
the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Father McNabb said:
“And now dear sisters, I have
some very good news for you. This is the
last time I shall be speaking to you together in this chapel. You know in these days everyone is being
called up [this
of course was in the midst of World War II]... I too have been called up!... And for what?
To the King of Kings, and that not for the duration but for Life
Everlasting! The words of the Psalm, ‘Rejoice
at the things that were said to me – with joy I have entered the House of the
Lord’, are filling my heart with joy.”
It was to be approximately nine
weeks before Father McNabb finally died – and these last two months were as
busy a period for him as any that had gone before. He carried on his teaching courses on Aquinas
and the Psalms, even offering to start a course on the Angels for as long as he
lasted: “I do not know what sort of Angels they will put me amongst,
dear children! I am not good enough for
the good Angels.” He warned his
students that at any time he may have to send them a telegram to say that he
was dead.
When the press – Catholic and
secular – found out that such a popular figure was about to die they hounded
the Dominican Community at St Dominic’s Priory. Father McNabb was determined
that his death should be as much a sermon as his life as a Dominican had
been. He knew that the last weeks would
be difficult. He had been told that he
would effectively die slowly of starvation, and would also experience some
severe breathing troubles, as the passage of his throat narrowed and finally
disappeared. While his strength was
still with him he continued to preach and speak across London, marching along
its dreary streets in his habit and hob-nailed boots with his heavy
‘McNabb-sack’ over his shoulders. He
went to all his choir duties until a few days before his death: although he was
able to speak to the end, and his breathing problems were slight, he was not
able to eat for about a week, and could not swallow any liquids for three days,
before he died.
On Monday 14th June,
he collapsed during Prime, on Monday 14th June.
Experiencing a slight recovery, he wrote his last letter, again to his
niece, Sister Mary Magdalen. The next
day he received the Last Rites, following another collapse, and slowly
deteriorated until the morning of Thursday 17th June when he summoned Father
Prior to his cell (under obedience he was seated on a straight-backed chair –
they didn’t dare suggest to him that he should take to his bed!). There, amidst the bare surroundings of a
familiar austerity, Father McNabb sang the Nunc Dimittis for the last
time, confessed his sins to Father Prior, and renewed his vows. He then became unconscious for half-an-hour,
sneezed, and died.
Crowds of people, young and old,
rich and poor, but especially old and poor, came to see him, pray for him, and
touch his habit as he was laid out in the Lady Chapel at the Priory for three
days. The Requiem Mass took place on
Monday 21st June: the Church was packed, principally with Catholic luminaries –
the streets outside were thronged with the poor from the tenements he had so
often visited. As requested, he was
buried in a plain deal box, marked with a simple black cross and with his favourite
ejaculation from Holy Scripture written upon it in Greek: “Lord, Thou knowest
if I love thee.”
The coffin was drawn on an
open-backed wagon (an old beer wagon!) to Kensal Green Cemetery to where amidst
even more crowded scenes Cardinal Manning had been carried almost
half-a-century before. The newspapers
were full of stories and details about his last few days, his death and his
funeral. Truly, his last sermon, his
death, was what reached his greatest audience. As his Prior, Father Bernard
Delaney, said at his funeral:
“All that he [Father McNabb] said,
all that he did, all that he was, were the expression of his burning love for
his Master, Jesus Christ Our Lord. The
cause of God was his consuming passion – the glory, the justice, the truth of God. He was a great Friar Preacher, but he was
something more – he was a living sermon.”
All ages have their vices. In
that sense there has never been a truly Golden Age. But even Fr McNabb would have recoiled –
dumbstruck, I think – at the grotesque vices that are casually paraded across
the capital, for all eyes to see clearly.
Gross immodesty in dress; brazen homosexual behaviour; the manifest and
squalid impurity of advertisements, of cinema, film and literature; the sexual
vulgarity of language (the speech of the working man in particular has never
been free of profanity, but the current sexual licence in speech, even from the
young, would have appalled even the most robust navvy of Fr McNabb’s day); the
extraordinarily immature materialism; the surrender to naked capitalist and
commercial banality, and to the culture not just of death but of emetic greed;
the casual discourtesy at best and more usually bestial rudeness encouraged by
I-pods, mobile phones and the maddening paraphernalia of technological decay;
and the grinning, cadaverous, Godless vapidity of the stuff with which the West
seduces itself, day by day, and minute by minute, and second by second: all of
this would have saddened Fr McNabb to his tearful heart.
We live amongst a declining, decadent,
post Christian people, too deracinated and intoxicated with technological
advancement and complete licence in matters of physical pleasure to even
approach the lowest rungs of pagan dignity.
We are not – in all likelihood – their betters in any natural respect. Only
supernaturally has it been given us by God’s grace to see where we should aim,
and to turn our eyes from the gutter to the stars.
Yet we cannot shun the world, nor
must we see it in every respect as our foe.
As Fr McNabb wrote:
“We mustn't go out into the world
as if the world were our enemy and we have to conquer it. It is like the poor wounded man on the road
to Jericho; it is hungry and we want to give it something to eat; thirsty, and
we want to give it something to drink; homeless and we want to open the door
and give it a lodging, a home, a hearth.”
Fr McNabb had no intentions save
those of his Father in Heaven, but so multifarious and innumerable are the
intentions of Almighty God that each man reflects only a part of them. And those intentions of Almighty God that Fr
McNabb reflected were the intentions for which we too should work and pray –
for the family, for a sane and Catholic society, for greater love for Our Lord
and Our Blessed Lady, for Christian justice for the poor.
Our lives must be like little
flames amidst this hurricane of amoral, immoral, madness. So long as we are connected to God’s grace,
and we do not sever that connection through Mortal Sin or apostasy, the light
that is within us cannot be blown out no matter how wildly the winds rage, no
matter how much light flickers and sometimes fades. And we must share that
light. When the world is fully dark,
even a little light will seem a supernova.
So, why have I called him ‘the
Apostle of First Principles’?
We have all, I imagine, argues,
controverted from time to time with family members, friends, colleagues,
strangers, about matters of Faith. Below
each initial disagreement always lies another – and then another still beneath
that. We chase these errors back to try
and find common ground. A lot of the
time we never make it. The point at
which our thinking has parted from that of our antagonist is often a long way
back in the chain of reasoning. We
cannot expect the person with whom we are arguing to have the ability let alone
the patience or determination to return to the root, to the source. Nor can we always trace our way
back. We have accepted what the Faith is
from those with authority to teach us – and often we have ourselves looked no
further.
We must learn to try and get back
to the root, to the source. “Go to the Book!” Father McNabb used to say –
referring to Holy Scripture, to the works of St Thomas, to the proclamations of
the Councils of the Church – “...don't just read a book about the Book!”
We must build from the bottom up
– return to first principles to make any head-way. Even in the first half of the twentieth
century, Father McNabb saw this. He saw
it particularly in how Church teaching applies to society, to the pragmatisms
of politics and to how economic life could be configured within the natural law
and the teaching of Christ and his Church.
But he applied this too to the rest of his thinking and writing and
preaching and teaching. He knew that
those first principles could only be found in Authority, in natural law and in
sound metaphysics: not in our own assumptions or particular views and opinions,
even when we think them conformable to the Faith.
Father McNabb has much to teach
this age, and not just those who are not of the Household of the Faith. He is a challenge to all our assumptions, to
all our false knowledge, our false understanding. Do any of us really know as much as we
sometimes think we do? Let us return to
the source.
I will conclude my talk this
evening with a few more words of Fr McNabb’s, and with a prayer of his:
“Some people say, ‘I do not like
sermons. I never go to hear a sermon.’
They do not know that these very words are themselves a sermon. They do not realise that every deed done in
the sight or hearing of another is a preached sermon. The best or the worst of all sermons is a
life led. God made every man and woman
an apostle when he made them capable of dwelling with their fellow men and
women. The best argument for the
Catholic Church is not the words spoken from this pulpit but the lives lived in
this Priory and in this parish. We
should measure the words by the life, not the life by the words.”
“Bend my stubborn heart, my
Master, make my lips truthful. May my
prayer be a prayer of truth as well as a prayer of petition. May I desire what I say I desire; and may I
desire as first what Thou hast put first, at the head of all our desires – Thy
Will, Thy Kingdom, and the hallowing of Thy Name.”
Deo gratias! And thank you.
