Vincent McNabb

In that small, exclusive circle of truly, inimitably great 20th-century Dominican scholars and preachers, the Irishman Fr. Vincent McNabb is at once the most attractive and perplexing. To Hillaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Maurice Baring, Eric Gill, Msgr. Ronald Knox, and other leaders of the Catholic revival in England in the first half of this century, McNabb was a prophet and a saint.

Belloc's judgment, upon hearing of the death of McNabb in June, 1943, expressed their common opinion: "The greatness of his character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgment, was something altogether separate from the world around him. Those who knew him marveled increasingly at every aspect of that personality. But the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness. . . . Never have I seen or known anything on such a scale."

Yet the view of many of McNabb's brothers in the Dominican order was very much the opposite. To some he was a sham, a hypocrite, an eccentric, a fool, and a bother. The way of life he practiced, which rejected anything made by a machine, they said, was impractical. Even as a writer, McNabb refused to use a typewriter. When someone once tried to persuade him how efficient the typewriter was, he replied with characteristic sharpness: "And the central heating in Hell is very efficient, too."

That is the question the current issue of The Chesterton Review seeks to answer in a special edition devoted entirely to McNabb; it is the largest edition the Review has published in its 22-year history.

Review editor Fr. Ian Boyd, C. S. B., has drawn together the impressions of many of McNabb's great contemporaries from the literary circle of which he was a leading figure -- Chesterton, Belloc, Baring, and Knox, to name only a few--McNabb's fellow Dominicans and contemporary religious, and modern-day scholars to offer a remarkably broad perspective of this towering figure in English Dominican history who still attracts so much interest and affection.

McNabb's importance for us at the end of the 20th century, as Fr. Boyd so ably points out, is that he shows "what it means to live a life of total commitment to God. . . .

"The conflict of opinion which Fr. McNabb provoked, and continues to provoke, goes to the very heart of a serious moral and political issue: How are people of faith, who wish to live a life in conformity with the Gospel, supposed to cope with a world which threatens to undermine their faith and which seems to make it increasingly difficult for them to lead good lives?"

This special edition of The Chesterton Review, however, does even more. It puts before us a Dominican priest, who died in 1943, who embodies or personifies the hopes of Vatican II, as expressed in Gaudium et Spes. McNabb's entire life was a testimony to the primacy of the supernatural. He was an expert on prayer; he was bold in confronting modernity. He may have appeared as an eccentric to many, but he was fearless in preaching before the de-Christianized residents of "Babylondon."

Moreover, he was a priest who was intensely involved in the social issues of his day: the plight of farmers, the homeless or inadequately housed, the unemployed or underemployed. He applied the Gospel standards to contemporary life, and saw, as early as 1910, that modern civilization was leading to what Pope John Paul II now calls the "culture of death."

McNabb's life--the most convincing manner of preaching--is put before the reader of The Chesterton Review, and 50 years after his death, his preaching speaks louder than ever.

McNabb was born near Belfast, Ireland, the 10th of 11 children, on July 8th, 1868, and died June 17th, 1943 at St. Dominic's Parish in London. After studies in Louvain where he earned his degree of lector in Sacred Theology, he was sent to England, in 1894, where he spent the remainder of his life as an apostle to the English.

If he were just an ordinary Dominican, he would have had an ordinary obituary upon his passing away. He was a member of the Dominican order for 58 years and served as a professor of philosophy at Hawkesyard Priory, prior of Holy Cross Priory, priory librarian, a lecturer at London University, as well as serving in various official capacities for the province.

With his hand-loomed habit and his cobbler-made boots, he was a familiar--if not unusual--sight on the streets of London for a half-century. Tens of thousands heard him preach in Hyde Park where he took on all challengers, Protestants, atheists, and freethinkers, before vast crowds every Sunday, or heard him debate such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in the city's theaters and conference halls on the burning social issues of the day.

On one thing his contemporaries agreed: He was a 13th-century monk in 20th-century London, a virtual reincarnation (so to speak) of St. Dominic. He was a scholar in the great Catholic tradition; one who read the Old Testament (and took notes on it) in Hebrew; who read the New Testament (and quoted it) in Greek; and who read St. Thomas (and wrote his reflections on it) in Latin. His reading, as Fr. Bede Bailey, O. P., archivist for the English Dominicans, notes in his Review essay, "was wide, extraordinarily wide," but all for a single purpose: to aid his preaching.

To preach the Word sums up McNabb's entire life: to preach by word and by example. A typical saying of his was: "We preach not only from the pulpit, but we preach as we step up to it and away from it."

"St. Dominic is our tutor," McNabb once wrote. "He enters into the most minute personal relationship with us, to pray, to study, to preach; this is the Dominican life. Dominic was an apostle…who appealed to all classes, to rich and poor, to the cultured, to the unlettered, to university professors, to innkeepers and harvesters; so he [Vincent] must be classless in our vast living society; he must empty his heart of everything that was not God Himself; he must have no bed, no chair, for Dominic had not even a cell."

Throughout his life, McNabb had nothing to call his own, except for his Bible, his breviary, and his copy of St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae. He never slept in a bed, but instead on the wooden floor of his cell, which he scrubbed daily. Nor did he own a chair. His constant studying, reading, writing, and praying were done on his knees. Like Dominic, he walked wherever he went.

McNabb's mission to the English, as Dominican David Albert Jones observes in his essay, was threefold: the first was reunion between Rome and Canterbury; the second was social justice, inspired by St. Thomas and Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, which called upon "every minister of holy religion…to bring to the struggle [for a broad distribution of property] the full energy of his mind and all his powers of endurance"; and the third was to shore up both faith and reason, both under assault by modernists, with doctrinal underpinnings.

The canons of Vatican I, observes Fr. Jones, "set the agenda of McNabb's work as a Catholic thinker," and it is as a Catholic thinker that McNabb can help post-Vatican II Catholics "understand the faith as much as we can, in order that our faith will really be a complement our reason." Or, as he observes later, McNabb's entire life was a testament to the fact that "faith is not an inarticulate feeling."

In the 50-plus years since his death, McNabb's apologetics have increased in value as much as the attacks on the Catholic faith which he foresaw have increased in ferocity. Catholics searching for solid arguments on controverted positions, or confused about what Popes and councils actually teach about social justice, will find in this special edition of The Chesterton Review a rich introduction to McNabb.

Despite all his work and assignments for the order--as retreat-giver, professor, writer, lecturer, librarian, gardener--and his intense involvement in various social causes, McNabb's personal priority was to be of service to the poor. He fulfilled this duty by catechizing poor children and visiting the sick and dying, going so far even as to scrub the floors of incapacitated strangers who had no one to clean for them.

His involvement with Belloc, Chesterton, and the Distributists, who are often dismissed as "back-to-the-land romanticists," must be seen as an extension of his charity to the poor, which had both a material and a spiritual dimension. As Chesterton observed, those with no property have nothing with which to defend their religion, and it was McNabb's business to help those poor in both religion and property to attain both.

McNabb was a key builder and theorist of the Distributist movement, which several contributors to the special McNabb issue demonstrate was more a casuality of World War II than it was to its alleged utopianism.

What McNabb brought to the movement, in addition to "the full energy of his mind and all his powers of endurance," was a Thomistic analysis of modern economic, social, and political structures--which remains valid today. That analysis is, above all, an argument against "economic rationalism" and "social planning" because McNabb saw clearly how the goal of both was the sacrificing of the family upon the altar of so-called Efficiency.

It is the duty of the philosopher, McNabb said once, to defend the common sense and intuition of the common man. McNabb's attempt to so defend common sense is abundantly on display in this special edition of The Chesterton Review, in excerpts of his published books and letters, and in many remembrances of his friends .

Among the many testimonies of Fr. Vincent presented by the Review is the following by Desmond Chute. A generation younger than Belloc, Chute was a man inspired by the Distributists. He lived with Gill at Ditchling, was inspired by McNabb's authentic teaching on. papal social doctrines, and after World War II he decided to study for the priesthood.

Chute wrote: "What struck us first on knowing Fr. Vincent was a singular simplicity unlike any we had ever met with, a profound (for lack of a better word) integrity, which, however, was something more--the complete fusion of all the elements of a highly gifted mind and complex character in an all-pervading sense of the presence of God…

"What we were privileged to see in Fr. Vincent was…a whole-time preacher and teacher. We beheld him among the 'divine philosophers,' that is, the lovers of wisdom, the seekers after Truth. In this search he never flagged; his every waking hour was given to it; and what he found therein he broke as bread to his fellowman.

"So great was his humility and sense of wonder that there was never anything oppressive in argument or pedantic in correction, but rather the sheer joy of shared enlightenment. Justice was always his recurring theme, justice and charity, but justice first. And peace, which he said, rather than joy, was the hallmark of the Christian life. Though his attitude was positive rather than negative, he was nonetheless vigilant in tracking down evil--the 'stench of sin'--nor in scenting out latent wrong at the root of each new ugliness, the incipient fungus of heresy, which he declared would take 500 years to bear its dire consequences.

"One of the first times I heard him converse, there was a passing mention of Mass. Unobtrusively, Fr. Vincent picked up the thread of the discourse, gently emending the phrase to 'Holy Mass,' and adding, 'We can never think enough how holy it is'…He lived, moved, and spoke in an atmosphere of divine awareness so habitual as to be perhaps unconscious…His self effacement was such in quality and degree as to transform his vivid personality into a crystal-clear mirror of divine truth. He might almost be said to have had no professional life or, perhaps with greater truth--no private life: To Fr. Vincent, all life was one thing: the following of one Master, the contemplation for oneself and for others of one Word...

"Every now and then one meets some eminently saintly religious who irresistibly suggests the figure of the founder of the order from whom, and on whom, his own both receives and reflects light. So it was with Fr. Vincent McNabb: To see him in his habit threading his way through dingy streets toward Hyde Park or at Ditchling between the wide Common and the Sussex sky, crossing the meadows and entering cottage and workshop, breviary and New Testament under his arm, in town and country alike scattering seeds of truth and justice, was to understand what was said of St. Dominic: that he spoke only to God or of Him."

For inquiries regarding this special edition of The Chesterton Review on Fr. Vincent McNabb write: The Chesterton Review, St. Thomas More College, 1437 College Dr., Saskatoon, SK, Canada, S7N OW6.

Vincent McNabb, O.P.

"Now I am nervous about writing here what I really think about Father Vincent McNabb; for fear he should somehow get hold of the proofs and cut it out. But I will say briefly and firmly that he is one of the few great men I have met in my life; that he is great in many ways, mentally and morally and mystically and practically... for at least nobody who ever met or saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him."

(Fr Vincent McNabb)...one of the few great men I have met in my life and spiritually the greatest man in England at the present time..."

"Father Vincent McNabb is one of the few great men of our time. He is a great deal too great to be of our time."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Reflections on Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P.

by Hillaire Belloc

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 to-day, and its value and meaning affect 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 all this. The greatness of his character, of his learning his experience, and, above all his judgment, was something altogether separate from the world about him.

Those who knew him marveled 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 honor and the 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 very heart of the Dominican affair.

To that testimony, which so many have the honor 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 appalls 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 caliber 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 seen or known anything on such a scale.

From New Blackfriars

"Is the pain in my own life all waste? Has no strength or even
sweetness sprung out of my past sorrows? And when I look back on
my sins, may I not sing Te Deum laudamus for all the pride they
overthrew, all the humility they fostered, and all the gentleness
and sympathy they begot. God has led me through many ways not of
my own choosing--now high, now low--now in broad daylight, now in
midnight gloom, and now in pelting storm. Yet though I am evil,
He is good; and great, yea, omnipotent in goodness, since He
has drawn good from the heart of evil, and He will build a home
of everlasting life on the ruins of sin."

Lord Jesus, Save Me!

"Lord Jesus, the one whom Thou lovest is sick" (Jn 11:3).
The one whom Thou lovest is strayed.
I have lost Thee.
I cannot find Thee.
Find me.
Seek me.
I cannot find Thee.
I have lost my way.
Thou art the Way.
Find me, or I am utterly lost.
Thou lovest me.
I do not know if I love Thee;
but I know Thou lovest me.
I do not plead my love, but Thine.
I do not plead my strength, but Thine.
I do not plead my deed, but Thine.
The one whom Thou lovest is sick.
I dare not say:
The one who loves Thee is sick.
My sickness is that I do not love Thee.
That is the source of my sickness which is approaching death.
I am sinking.
Raise me.
Come to me upon the waters.
Lord Jesus, "the one whom Thou lovest is sick."

(Vincent McNabb, O.P.)

"You and I are in the Church. Some of us are grateful to God that we were within that Church within almost a few hours of being born. And we have lived long years in that Church and never with a sense of disappointment, save at our own failures. It has been everything to us. It has been Christ to us.

All its great sacraments that we have received have been instituted by Him with such a fitness for us that sometimes we wondered if they had not been made especially for us, and its organization, God's special mercy to us. How we should thank God that He instituted Peter as a Rock on which His Church is built, and the successors of St. Peter to carry on that work of the Church, and for the bishops and clergy. I speak, not as one of them and the most unworthy, but as one who, from childhood, has received those mercies and as one of a family who stood morning by morning at the altar.

I will not say, my dear brethren, that it is a great duty to have continued loyally to the Church; it is a privilege."

I went to see him (Chesterton) as he died. "I asked to be alone with the dying man ," said Father McNabb. There that great frame was in the heat of death, the great mind was getting ready, no doubt, in its own way, for the sight of God. It was Saturday, and I think that perhaps in another thousand years Gilbert Chesterton might be known as one of the sweetest singers to that ever-blessed daughter of Sion, Mary of Nazareth. I knew that the very finest qualities of The Crusaders was one of the endowments of his great heart, and then I remembered the song of the Crusaders, Salve Regina, which we Blackfriars sing every night to the Lady of our love. I said to Gilbert Chesterton: "You shall hear your mother's love song." And I sang to Gilbert Chesterton the Crusader's song: "Hail, Holy Queen!"

Many of Father McNabb's brief notes are particularly memorable. They are an indication of his power to express concisely deep truths in few and simple words. A few selections follow:

I have devoted my life to the preaching of platitudes--it is one of the satisfactions of my life. I like the old things--sun and moon, fresh air, bread and butter, work, friendship, avoiding the occasions of sin. Sometimes the devil would say to me, "Now, Father Vincent, people don't like those sort of things, give them something modern." My Guardian Angel says, "It isn't your duty to be modem. You must give something true."

It is a great delight to me to go out like this in my Dominican habit. I'm a poor specimen, of course, but I am a Black Friar. I should think anyone could see that. A part of London is called after my people. I'm a piece of Old London walking about. I have to confess as it were to being proud. I am not worthy of it, of course, but still I am proud of it even if it is not proud of me.

I often recount the awful agony I went through as a young priest when I heard confessions for some hours during a mission. I think God kept my mind. It wasn't that I felt myself any better than the ones kneeling at my feet, but I realized the terrible sorrows of the world directly caused by the human will. Sorrow after sorrow came pouring into the ear of the young priest sheltered from childhood. I could only say "There must be a hell. The human will is creating all the horrors of the world. There is no way out except through God, nor anyone who could dry such tears but God." We priests are at the world's listening post. We hear of many troubles. People quite rightly bring their troubles to us. We do not wish to share their joys. Sixty-seven years' experience of this poor sinner with endless knowledge of souls has taught me that every life contains some mortification. That is God's pruning of the soul. No self-mortification is to be compared with the mortification God sends.

In the course of my professional life of many years I have come across many groups of well-meaning persons who seem to have great trouble in accepting the rulings of omniscience. I always remember a study circle that met during the 1914-1918 war to discuss the subject of war and peace. Speaker after speaker of both genders and all grades of society stood up and gave good advice to God. I found it very difficult to continue to sit and listen to it. If God had not given me a heart of mirth I could not have stayed. I thought "I can't speak very solemnly about this. I shall introduce a little levity to relieve the anguish of mind." So I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, before I die I would like to found a society quite new but quite necessary--a society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Almighty God." One of the memories of my life is that in less than forty-eight hours I received a very pained message from a dear old gentleman who rebuked me for my levity and I had been nearly dead with their very-near-blasphemy!

One of my chief hecklers in the ghetto had a dear daughter who became a Catholic. She married a man who ran away from her within a year. She looked after her father and her mother-in-law. She died of a broken heart. Her father told me that every year on the anniversary of her death he used to go up to the Sister Superior of the hospital where she died and take some flowers. He said, "I couldn't go this year; I couldn't afford the flowers."

I will tell you in my unworthiness what happened last Thursday (I'm not sure I can tell it!) I was at a street corner talking. He stood there silent, not a word. At nine o'clock I moved away. He said, "Are you going to walk back? You shouldn't, you know. Here's your fare." 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 and I ask you to pray that God my give him the consolation of the Faith.

When you and I look back on life we see little things just redolent of God--certain days, certain places, almost certain objects. God seems to have dealt with us through them. They seem so trivial we could hardly bear to mention them to anyone else. It would seem childish to attach importance to them yet we feel God had spoken to us through them.

I have found as life goes on--I can now count my years by three score--certain ways of joy cease. Eyes are dimmed, your ears, the source of many joys, are less sensitive. There was a time when a primrose on a bank was something almost too lovely for tears. I can well remember almost the exact spot where I saw a first little cluster of primroses in the spring. They were so beautiful; it was an extraordinarily keen joy. I remember, too, being fascinated to see a little brook, the stones lying at the bottom of the crystal water, each little stone with a halo of sparkling light. That sort of joy has almost entirely passed away. The only thing I feel is anguish that it has passed away. To go back now is almost to eat the ashes of sorrow. I can hardly bear to go back to the places of childhood, especially when bereft of those I love.

I went back after fourteen years of religious life to the place by the seaside where I first heard the beat of the waves on the shore. My heart nearly broke. The wild waves were beating as they had always beaten but the companions of childhood were gone, nearly every one of them had died-taken away. Things were as beautiful as ever, as sweet as in childhood--it was like visiting a house of the dead.

The tail-end of our victory can be sung only in Heaven. We cannot sing it on earth. The Church commands religious to sing a Te Deum for a Golden Jubilee but it is a very tremulous Te Deum. It is not to be a cockcrow. No!

At my years there is the great trumpet of death and how to prepare for that is a great concern. Perhaps the best preparation for that uncertain tomorrow is the fulfilling of the duties of the certain today. Great trumpets are sounding telling us to prepare with a preparation of love that will make death merely the change from one mode of loving God to another.

From the Obituary of Father Vincent McNabb in The London Tablet (June 26. 1943)

"...His death was in keeping with his astonishing life. Warned of it for some months beforehand, he used even that as a sustained sermon to attract people not to himself, but to the God Whom he loved and for Whom he lived. Up to the very end, with the help of another friar, he said all his Office and prayers of obligation, and he seemed to be entwined in his big fifteen-decade rosary. At the very end he sang the Nunc Dimittis in his loud, clear voice, gave instructions about his coffin, and requested that the words of St. Peter, "Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee," be inscribed in Greek upon it; made his Confession, renewed his vows, then declared himself ready for death, saying, "I have no fears, thank God." And so he died, his mental vigor and prodigious strength of will holding out to the very last.

A pulpit in St. Dominic's Church, London, from which Fr Vincent McNabb preached

The following Maurice Baring poem was first published in the August, 1943 issue of The Blackfriars's Review. Maurice Baring (1874-1945), an important member of the Chesterbelloc group, was a friend of Father McNabb. As this poem indicates, Baring was greatly impressed by Father McNabb's preaching; and, in particular, by the sermon that he preached at the funeral of Cecil Chesterton. No copy of that sermon survives. Baring's poem reads:

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 the mighty sound
And lit with Pentecostal tongues of flame.

Few priests have made a greater or more lasting impact on this country as a whole during the present century than Fr Vincent McNabb. He became something of a legend even in his own lifetime. He may have seemed to some to have been given overmuch to paradox, seemed something of a living paradox himself. This was partly because of his own uncompromising sincerity, which stood out so forcibly in an age so much committed to what is sham and unreal. But it was still more because he was so well fitted by nature and grace to appreciate and to reflect the supreme paradox of divine Truth Incarnate, divine Truth which is not merely a divine Idea but also a divine Person, the Word made flesh, the Word which moves both mind and heart and which, so freely received, must be no less freely given to others....

In him there was a rocklike and unquestioning faith and an unswerving loyalty to the teaching of the Church. Yet he knew that he must be prepared to give a reason for the faith that was in him, must be prepared to defend that loyalty. He knew too, none better, how the visible things of creation could help make manifest the invisible things of God. It was with this in mind that he devoted himself to the deep study of philosophy, of theology, and of Holy Scripture. Above all, he steeped himself in the Gospel till it became alive for him, and he found understanding and love of the Word of God in the Incarnation, found too his own divine commission to preach and to teach....

(From 'After Ten Years', a sermon preached at the tenth anniversary 'Requiem for Father McNabb', October, 1953)