Comments for A Prophet for Our Times at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 10 out of 10 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Thu, 23 May 2013 10:55:12 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6413 There is nothing wrong with being a curmudgeon. - Father Benedict Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:32:52 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6407 William Z: London's Weiner Library, which archives examples of anti-Semitism, says of GKC: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on." And that's true. But it's also true that in Chesterton's Weekly there were anti-Semitic columns published (not by GKC, but under his editorship), and true too that he considered Jews foreign, even so Disraeli, which is why he was a kind of Zionist. But he was a good and great man, and his anti-Semitism was, at worst, of the "country-club" sort. Still, it was there. - Brad Miner Thu, 24 Mar 2011 08:18:07 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6406 To AGS and Brad Miner: Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man: “…the world owes God to the Jews… [T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…” These are hardly the words of anti-Semite. - William Z Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:16:12 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6404 If you want to know how to undermine the Catholic Church, read Belloc's "Cranmer". Written long before the post Vatican II tenebrae descended on the Church, the book anticipates the tactics of the post Vatican II pseudo-reformers thereby again proving the Devil has little imagination. - Yezhov Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:37:29 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6403 Dear AGS. Belloc's "The Great Heresies" can be found, free of charge, on the web. Search "Belloc: the Great Heresies" and it should bring you to his Contents page. Chapter 7 could have been published next week. I am reading "How the Reformation Happened" for the second time. When I read it the first time several years ago, I was able to understand what happened to our nation at the hands of the Baby Boomers. I had always thought that the Baby Boomers would grow up and grow out of their snit about not being given a perfect world (when they had been given everything else they ever wanted from their war-weary parents). I discovered, after reading Belloc, that Clinton and his Baby Boom generation were never going to grow up, but, instead, were trying mightily to bring to fulfillment what their young-adult, college-inspired experience of sit-ins and marches told them would be the ideal world. They were the ones that the world was waiting for. Of course they had no idea what the ideal world looked like or how they were going to build it out of the rubble, but they did their best to tear it down, anyway, and worry about the details later. Just the other evening, I heard the chaos of our present world described by very intelligent persons as being akin to 1914--a chaotic time that led to a horrific war. And then I came upon these words from Belloc yesterday: " . . . it was Revolution: one more in the list of those foaming fits and seizures which fall at intervals upon mankind." (p. 42) I think we can add 2011 to the list of those years: 1517, 1914, 2011, and I'm sure that there are many, many others. Understanding that we are living through one of those fits and seizures doesn't make it any less frightening. - Louise Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:16:16 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6402 AGS: Project Gutenberg (texts) and Librivox (audio) have good selections of Belloc available. (And, as with Chesterton's, there is anti-Semitism in Belloc's work. One can't help thinking that in the cases of both great writers it was a kind of an inherited, cultural blindness . . . but it is there.) - Brad Miner Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:51:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6401 Auden thought Belloc failed to be read to the same popular extent as Chesterton because he was the greater anti-Semite. I would love someone to post etext editions of his work on the web. It has been done for Newman, why not for Belloc? His work is so hard to come by. - AGS Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:37:17 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6400 Wonderful! I've always wanted to read him myself! (Unfortunately at UCSB we were too busy reading about union heroes like Walter Reuther and disparaging rapacious colonialist missionaries like Father Damien and Mother Teresa!) - Jacob R Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:43:08 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6399 I've been reading Belloc for forty-five years since I saw him praised on the back of a dust jacket, comparing him to Wm F Buckley and to Cobbett. Every return to Belloc delights. I would make a course in Belloc a requirement in every Catholic college and university in the land. His detractors try to dismiss him as anti-Semite or even, if you can believe it, a precursor of the Nazis. He has no peer as a master of English prose, nor any peer for the breadth and depth of his learning, and his humor. Be a man. Read Belloc. - Dennis Larkin Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:33:46 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/a-prophet-for-our-times.html#comment-6398 Thank you for a very timely tip, Mr. Saunders. I was searching about for good Lenten reading and this book sounds ideal. Belloc's quote about "knavish imbecility" in the Church reminds me of a quote from a Cardinal (I apologize, I cannot recall his name) just after Vatican II-It is well the Church is divine, otherwise this Council would have destroyed it. - Bill Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:32:10 +0100