Literary Giants Literary Catholics (12 page)

Somehow, Lord Howe managed to weave into his discussion of Chesterton and
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
some rather rickety logic in support of his own personal hobbyhorse of increased European integration with the implication that Chesterton would have agreed with him. Thus the bizarre statement that “you can’t lose sovereignty like losing virginity—you have it, then you don’t” was uttered in the manner of a Chestertonian epigram. Similarly, Lord Howe accused those who wished to halt the further erosion of sovereignty as wishing to erect “a cardboard curtain” around the United Kingdom, implying, by describing Chesterton explicitly as “a good European”, that Chesterton would have agreed with his own Eurocentrist views.

Thankfully, Chesterton is able to reply to Lord Howe from beyond the grave, issuing devastating ripostes in the very words of the novel that Howe was holding up as his “inspiration”. Above all,
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
is a powerful parable on the rights of small nations to preserve their identity in the face of the cosmopolitan encroachments of imperialism. Its principal theme was expounded in the words of “the President of Nicaragua”, a mysterious figure who makes one fleeting but hugely significant appearance before “bowing profoundly” and disappearing into the fog. Before taking his bow, he neatly sets the scene for what is to follow. “Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem”, he exclaims passionately. “The Yankee and the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea.” He continues by delivering a spirited defense of the cultural integrity of small nations, and a damning indictment against the forces of imperialism.

That is what I complain of in your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, “This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.” You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus?

The scene thus set, the plot unfolds until Adam Wayne, the “Napoleon” of the novel’s title, declares war in the name of Notting Hill to defend his beloved borough against plans by the central powers to develop parts of it against the wishes of the local people. Adam Wayne’s local patriotism was epitomized by the proclamation that a place, however small, “which is large enough for the rich to covet . . . is large enough for the poor to defend.”

Not surprisingly, perhaps,
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
was the favorite book of Michael Collins, the Sinn Fein leader who was largely responsible for negotiating the treaty with Britain in 1921. It is said that Lloyd George, hearing of Michael Collins’ literary taste, presented a copy of
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
to every member of his cabinet prior to their meeting with the Irish delegation so that they might better understand the Irish leader’s mind.

There is little doubt that Collins’ interpretation was closer to the spirit of Chesterton’s novel than Lord Howe’s, though it seems a little perverse that the Irish, having fought so dearly for their freedom from England, should subsequently sell it off so cheaply to the European Union. It is also more than a little surreal that the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists should seek to escape from the arms of hated uncle Albion into the grasp of Big Brother Brussels. It is almost as though imperialism is evil if advanced by force of arms but praiseworthy if achieved by sleight of hand.

As though remembering, perhaps too late, the principles of Michael Collins and other early Nationalists, the recent vote by the Irish to reject the Treaty of Nice had more than a touch of
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
about it. Significantly, however, the Eurocentrists were not about to allow the one small squeak of a solitary nation to stand in the way of the next giant leap of European expansion. With utter contempt for the right of democratic self-determination, the wishes of the Irish were dismissed as irrelevant.

“The modern world . . . is on the side of the giants”, complained Chesterton in an attack on H. G. Wells in his book
Heretics
. Wells was a “heretic”, according to Chesterton, because his novel
The Food of the Gods
was “the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer told from the point of view of the giant”. In Chesterton’s eyes, “Jack” represented the small nation fighting for its independence against the giants of imperialism, or the small businessman fighting for his existence against the giants of multinational commerce. To side with the giant against Jack was to betray humanity. Surely, if the ghost of Chesterton were to return, it would point an accusing finger at Lord Howe and number the former chancellor among the latter-day “heretics”.

And as for Howe’s peculiar reading of
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, one is reminded of Chesterton’s observation, made in a letter to his friend Maurice Baring, that it was “extraordinary how the outer world can see everything about it except the point. . . . I find that if I make the point of a story stick out like a spike, they carefully go and impale themselves on something else.”

Lord Howe did at least attribute one thing to Chesterton correctly. In calling him “a good European”, he was stating a sublime truth. Chesterton, like his Anglo-French friend, Hilaire Belloc, loved the “Europe of the Faith” with its noble traditions and its unity with the concept of Christendom. Yes, Chesterton is every inch a “good European”, and, like all good Europeans, he is, and has to be, a Eurosceptic. That’s why his ghost still has the power, through the books he has left as a legacy, to fight the euro from beyond the grave. In taking on Chesterton’s “Napoleon”, Lord Howe has met his Waterloo.

7

_____

A review of

Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy

by Jay P. Corrin
⁺

T
HERE IS MORE THAN A LITTLE IRONY
—albeit unintentional—in the title of Jay P. Corrin’s study of the volatile relationship of the Catholic intelligentsia with the turbulent politics of the twentieth century. The irony resides in the author’s failure to rise to the challenge he sets himself. Dr. Corrin, indubitably an intellectual and presumably a Catholic, fails to achieve his purported objective because he insists on subjecting the object of his study to his own subjective agenda.

Dr. Corrin betrays himself in the language of his introduction. In the very first sentence he divides “Catholic intellectuals” into two simplistically convenient categories: the “progressive” and the “reactionary”. Immediately we know that the heroes are those whom the author places in the former category, whereas the villains are condemned to the ignominy of the latter. Thus, from the outset, we are reduced to the dialectic of the stereotype. The “progressives” are enlightened, reasonable, up-to-date, in tune with the times, “with it”. The reactionaries are unenlightened, unreasonable, out-of-date, behind the times and very much “without it”. The former are to be praised, the latter condemned—or, perhaps, if we are feeling charitable, patted patronizingly and platitudinously on the head with self-assured and self-righteous smugness.

This, of course, is the language of the liberal secularist, the inheritor of the “progressive” philosophy of the superciliously self-named “Enlightenment”. It is the language of those who believe that human society is forever “progressing” from the primitive past to the enlightened future. It is the language of those condemned by G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis as the “chronological snobs” who contemptuously kick down the ladder by which they’ve ascended. Unfortunately, it is also the language employed by Dr. Corrin. Thus he states glibly that the Second Vatican Council “called upon Catholics to broaden their historical perspectives, move beyond a static theology fixed to the past, and embrace the kinds of changes that would allow the Church to be more in step with contemporary society” (1). Really? Did Vatican II call upon the faithful to abandon the faith of their fathers; did it suggest that the anchor of tradition be cut free so that the Church can drift freely with the tides of time, going with the flow of the present rather than being “fixed” to the lessons of the past? Is it the duty of the Church to move “in step with contemporary society”? Certainly G. K. Chesterton didn’t think so. Chesterton, one of the “intellectuals” scrutinized in Corrin’s book, responded to those who made similarly glib statements in his own day with the riposte that we did not need a Church that will
move with
the world but a Church that will
move
the world. The Church is called to lead society, not to be led by it.

In reality, the much-vaunted
aggiornamento
of Vatican II had nothing to do with surrendering to modernity. On the contrary, it had everything to do with enabling the Church to engage modernity, to respond to it, to
react
to it. Paradoxically, one of the earliest fruits of
aggiornamento
was Pope Paul VI’s encyclical
Humanae vitae
. It was a perfect example of the Church’s response to what Dr. Corrin called the “challenge of resolving the conflicting demands of religion and modernity by aggiornamento” (1).

The spirit of Vatican II, truly understood, had precious little to do with opening the windows to let in the malodorous scent of modernity. It had everything to do with opening the windows so that the scent of incense within the Household of Faith might waft more freely into the world beyond. Needless to say, the world has often been incensed by the incense.

Even more incredibly, Dr. Corrin complains that, prior to Vatican II, the intellectual and spiritual life of the Church “had become rigidified by tradition”, whereas “Protestantism, on the other hand, had centuries of experience trying to accommodate itself to the culture of modernity” (1). Is Dr. Corrin seriously asking us to take this seriously? The compromise of Protestantism with the zeitgeist, its unholy marriage with modernity, has merely resulted in a “progressive” theological fragmentation and fading. Today there are thousands of Protestant sects preaching thousands of mutually contradictory views. Those that are most “accommodating” to modernity simply fade away into shades of agnostic gray; those that are least “accommodating” to modernity, and are in fact reacting against it, such as the Fundamentalists, are flourishing. If there is a lesson to be learned from Protestantism’s “centuries of experience”, it is that the zeitgeist devours its suitors.

Dr. Corrin’s introduction serves as the key to understanding his misunderstanding of the issues upon which he focuses. Quite simply, he is too prejudiced to judge. His obsession with stereotypes and the overly simplistic labeling of “friends” and “enemies” is irritatingly irrational. One becomes tired of the criticism of “tradition-bound clerics” seeking “a return to a hierarchical age of paternalistic authoritarianism” in defiance of “an imaginative, progressive, and carefully reasoned Catholic response” (2-3).

At times Dr. Corrin’s labels become almost libelous. His woeful demonizing of Hilaire Belloc betrays a superficial and selective reading of the facts. Anyone who has studied the life of the mercurial and oft-times bellicose Belloc will know that he defies the straitjacket of simplistic categorization with which Dr. Corrin endeavors to constrain him. Belloc is beyond Dr. Corrin’s comprehension of him, or lack thereof.

Similarly, Dr. Corrin’s inability to see beyond the “liberal” labels of the Spanish civil war results in a distorted and contorted view of historical realities. Catholics who supported the Nationalists in that fratricidal conflict were not, ipso facto, “fascists” or fellow travelers, as Dr. Corrin insinuates. Many despised fascism but felt, nonetheless, that it was their duty to oppose the rabid atheism of the communists and anarchists. We should never forget that during the Spanish civil war 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and about 300 nuns were murdered.

In order to understand the motives of the vast majority of Catholics who opposed the communists and supported Franco, however reluctantly, we might posit a simple question: Were the British and Americans during the Second World War “fellow travelers” or quasi communists because of their alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union? Surely not. Only McCarthyism would suggest otherwise. In essence, Dr. Corrin’s tarring of Catholics with the fascist brush is akin to an inverted McCarthyism.

The great tragedy of Dr. Corrin’s book is that it could and should have been much better. The subject itself is fascinating, and the compendium of facts that he assembles is a fitting testimony to the considerable historical research he has undertaken. As a historical document it has much to offer. The history is, however, marred by the author’s philosophy. One wonders, for instance, why Pope John Paul II’s encyclical
Centesimus annus
fails to warrant a single mention in a study of the Church’s social doctrine, such as this purports to be. Written on the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s
Rerum novarum
, the document that, in many ways, was the springboard for distributism, the political creed that is at the center of Dr. Corrin’s book, the present Pope’s reiteration of the Church’s social teaching would have been an appropriate place to conclude such a study. This particular sin of omission is exacerbated by the failure to mention the teaching on subsidiarity in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church
, a teaching that not only answers “the challenge
of
democracy” but that serves as a challenge
to
the plutocratic macrodemocracies that hold sway in most of the world today. Perhaps these omissions are due to the fact that the encyclicals and
Catechism
were written by “tradition-bound clerics” not deemed sufficiently “progressive” to qualify for favorable treatment.