Hilaire Belloc
Crews, Clyde F.
lit by time's searchlight, ~d past or present ones. He never considers the possibility that temporal becoming involves the actual creating of events rather than the mere revealing of them....
...Additionally, in a volume that seeks to be definitive, a bibliography would most likely be in order, even though it is to be found in Speaight...
...As Wilson admits, the aggressively preconciliar Mr...
...Commonweal: 540...
...Clyde F. Crews H ILAIRE BELLOC was once in attendance at Mass at Westminster Cathedral and remained standing, Frenchfashion, throughout the service...
...His virtuosity in ethical theory needs a better metaphysical ground before Theory X can be developed...
...Critically-minded readers may want to take up his 1922 text The Jews and decide for themselves...
...Belloc: the hyperbolic mentor I HILAIRE BELL0C A.N...
...I think it is especially important for any advocacy stance not to rely primarily upon the uniqueness or righteousness of the experience underlying its advocacy, but to engage in discourse, and to take into account the criticisms brought against it, FRANCIS SCHOSSLER FIORENZA Class act South Bend, Ind...
...I was then a student in Abigail Quigley McCarthy's English class at the College of St...
...As early as the 1890s, Belloc had been, according to Dean Inge, about the only man in England who did not support the Jewish Colonel Dreyfus in the scandalous anti-Semitic affair that rocked France...
...The new biography by A.N...
...While Cardinal Henry Manning had an influence on Leo XIII's writing, of course, to say that Rerum Novarum "was really written by Manning" is probably to say too much...
...The latter claim is a much stronger claim...
...The very precise and carefully edited 1978 Church in a Secularized Society by Roger Aubert (Volume Five in the Christian Centuries series) lists Liberatore and Zigliara as primary writers of that landmark document...
...I like Hans Ki~ng, both in the book Sheehan reviewed (Eternal Life...
...To capture either the man or the fascination with him is a tall order...
...That is most unfortunate, For instead of using his office to teach and to raise questions, he is resorting to institutional power...
...I'm sorry, sir," said the sacristan, "I didn't know you were a Catholic...
...Belloc, extraordinarily smug in his European cultural Catholicism, wrote what most Catholics today would consider not only "nonsense," but "violent and vitriolic" nonsense as well...
...According to John Paul II, the church itself must be in solidarity with the poor struggling for integral liberation...
...Wilson's biography brings this lesson effectively forward, while manifesting for all to see the complexities and caveats associated with the life and thought of Hilaire Belloc...
...I concur with Baum's imp mant points that Gutitrrez's use of Marxist social analysis is very generic and is certainly subservient to his Christian ideals, for it transforms such analyses...
...In his study, Mr...
...Within the church, for all its troubles, Belloc perceived roof and hearth...
...I therefore wholeheartedly subscribe to the Concilium statement that Baum, my wife Elisabeth, and others have authored and signed...
...MARJORIE SHELLEY Scholarly erosion Silver Spring, Md...
...Such actions place those of tts sympathetic to liberation theology in a difficult situation...
...Again a knowledge of whitehead would have widened Parfit's horizons and would inevitably have affected his ethical analysis...
...Wilson has shouldered his task well...
...He played out that manifest destiny again in the late 1920s by being one of the few who relentlessly took up academic arms against H.G...
...That question is distinct from the preferential option for the poor...
...I found this ending both winsom~ for its honesty I I III and a challenge for continued "venturing...
...Repeated, short comments throughout the volume can run the risk of becoming intrusive: Manning's presbytery "since despoiled by modernist priests...
...Belloc replied, "Go to hell...
...III III Correspondence IIIIIIIIIIIIH IIIIII I III (Continued from page 514) which acknowledges the workers and, in the third world the poor, as the dynamic element of modem society and hence calls for "the solidarity of workers and with workers" and, in the same paragraph, for "the solidarity of the poor and with the poor...
...A sacristan came up to him and whispered, "Excuse me, sir, we kneel here...
...Perhaps what Parfit needs most is a more adequate theory of reality, one that includes time, physical events, living organisms, and human institutions in a comprehensive vision...
...Wilson takes on, in a way that I, at least, did not find in Speaight, the hard question of why Belloc has not ultimately "survived" as, say, Chesterton has...
...It is in this latter spirit th~tt I have raised my questions...
...Wilson Atheneum, $17.95, 386 pp...
...Belloc himself always maintained, publicly at least, that he was a true friend of the Jewish people...
...The analysis is clear, crisp, and concise...
...As a twenty-six-year-old making his first trip through America, he wrote of the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: "This place is ugly...
...There are some small annoyances...
...Nevertheless, there are some differences...
...I have argued elsewhere that his theological effort was so successful that the key concepts of his theology of liberation have been received in the church's official teaching in Latin America--and in Canada...
...It will be fascinating to follow his voyage...
...Belloc, for all his hideous exaggera5 October 1984:539 tion, poor historical craftsmanship, and sometimes thoughtless bravado, remains a mentor to later ages in his conviction that rebuttal and intellectual fisticuffs can be effective ways of loving and serving both the truth and those who seek it with a sincere heart...
...Wells for the anti-religious drift of the mighty best-seller The Outline of History...
...He prevailed against two, and has allegedly sought the same fate for Gutitrrez...
...God made it the night after a debauch when His ideas were neither many nor interesting . . . . Here I lecture to horrible people...
...They didn't sell well in their time and are all but unobtainable today...
...Except for a few lean years, I have subscribed as a long-time reader and friend...
...Outside of it -- and he meant outside the specifically Roman Catholic expression of it -- all else was Night...
...GREGORY BAUM The author r e p l i e s Gregory Baum letter emphasizes points on which I betleve we are in basic agreement, despite differences in detail...
...Catherine and Commonweal was a class requirement...
...Everyone who knew Belloc also knew that he was a Catholic from the cradle, of the scrapping, contentious, and not infrequently obnoxious sort...
...It rightfully takes seriously the social conditioning of knowledge...
...Whitehead's way is one possibility...
...In a readable, well-paced text, the author, literary editor of the Spectator, novelist and biographer of Milton, shows us the bright and dark sides of Belloc, contemporary and friend to the likes of Chesterton, Shaw, and Wells...
...Yet it raises the question of how the experience and knowledge of a particular group relates to the wider society...
...In his liberation theory Gutitrrez has been in dialogue with Marxism and made use of some analytical tools derived from Marxism, but he has significantly transformed these notions and created an original Catholic approach...
...There is no doubt about it: in life and in death, Hilaire Belloc has' never failed to fascinate people...
...To raise questions and to tender criticisms can appear to support the institutional violence against liberation theologians rather than to dialogue with them to develop, to modify, and to defend their positions in the public forum...
...More of Belloc's "disastrous habit of backing the wrong horse," as Wilson describes it...
...Plus XII, "last of orthodox popes...
...I contend that Gutitrrez's social analysis would become much more nuanced if he would take into account two very specific neo-Marxist critiques of traditional Marxism: Bloch's retrieval of the bourgeois culture, in particular, the significance of rights language, and Habermas's reconstruction of the traditional Marxist conception of historical development...
...Roman Catholic pulpits today "are themselves hardly ever used...
...IllllllllllllllIHll[ Ill l [ Illllllllllllll Illl REVIEWERS FREDERICK FERRI~ is the head of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Georgia...
...It is no mean task to take on the life of a man who in 1910 published a long essay under the title On Everything...
...FATHER CLYDE F . CREWS recently published English Catholic Modernism (University of Notre Dame Press), and chairs the department of theology at Louisville's BeUarmine College...
...According to some news reports, Ratzinger sought not only to raise questions, but also to use institutional and coercive force against several theologians by removing them from teaching positions...
...I have praised Gutitrrez's theology for its anti-Marxism since it displays the antiideological nature of Christianity...
...I raise this issue not to deny the existence of relations of dependency, but to emphasize that autonomy is much more than the overcoming of relations of dependency, and that the task of liberation theology is consequently much more complex...
...Belloc (1870-1953) wrote over 150 prose works...
...Belloc, who sat in the .British Parliament in the years shortly before the First World War, was to interpret that wa~ ultimately as a struggle between Catholicism and Barbarism...
...In particular, Belloc is remembered for his "robustly anti-Jewish statements" that continued throughout his life...
...Wilson has been able to draw on new source materials and thus supplement Robert Speaight's fine and careful biography of 1957...
...His books include Language, Logic, and God, recently reissued by the University of Chicago Press...
...To the Editors: I would like you to know that I have read/subscribed to Commonweal since 1943...
...Liberation theologians are threatened by death squads or by expulsion from their homeland...
...a need, perhaps for a little more finetuning on historical context...
...To the Editors: This is to urge you to continue an interest in dialogue with Thomas Sheehan and his argument [August 10] that Catholic theologians are posing problems for the faith...
...Ironically, if this way is taken it will lead Parfit not necessarily to traditional religion but to an organismic conception of the universe which includes a theoretical place for God as the final context for all reasons and persons...
...His was a personality that could mingle a keen theological appreciation of incarnational, sacramental, and moral instincts with eyebrow-lifting impieties...
...The question of the relation of the basic communities to the unix~ersal church is raised by Ratzinger's letter -theologically significant and legitimate...
...To argue that others, liberals, neo-Marxists, and even churchmen, have pointed to the negative relations of dependency does not respond to the crucial issue: whether it would be necessary for liberation theology to take into account criticisms of the theory of dependency as an adequate theoretical explanation...
...Also, a single editorial addition about the post-conciliar church by the author might well be welcome...
...Second: a difference exists between the preferential option for the poor and the claim that the oppressed have some special epistemological status or hermeneutical privilege...
...I am not a Catholic...
...Parfit is just leaving the harbor...
...Wilson, styled definitive by the publisher, makes a steady and studied attempt to plumb the sources of the intrigue...
...The book ends on an unresolved note, looking for, but not finding, a "Theory X" that will interpret how individual persons defined as societies of occasions (to use Whitehead's language rather than Parfit's reductionist terminology) should be conceived in communal terms...
...In a carefully nuanced panegyric delivered in Westminster Cathedral in August, 1953, Father Ronald Knox had said of Belloc that conflict was his destiny...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 17
