Free Republic

"Catholic intellectual?" Is that a contradiction in terms? Of course not. It is silly to say so, even though progressives like to float the idea every once in a while when they are having a hard time pushing through one of their favored reforms. The 20th century was, after all, the century of Chesterton, Belloc, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox and Jacques Maritain.In fact, it would be easier to make the case that Catholic intellectuals sometimes spend too much time being intellectuals, too much time with scholarly explorations of the Faith, and not enough with the child-like imagery on their Christmas...

Hilaire Belloc, who lived from 1870-1953, and wrote during most of those years, epitomized the word prolific. Roughly 150 titles are attributed to him, though a few of these are collections of newspaper essays. Some people set out to read everything Belloc ever wrote, which would be a mistake. Belloc was a writer by trade. He wrote to pay his bills. Thus, by his own admission, some of his writing was "hack work." Of course that leaves much that is simply brilliant — and the critic was probably right who said that Belloc may have written bad books, but he...

(Page 71)"Today we are accustomed to think of the Mohammedan world as something backward and stagnant.... We cannot imagine a great Mohammedan fleet.... (Belloc warns to not be complacent!)The last effort they made to destroy Christendom was contemporary with the end of the reign of Charles II in England. It failed during the last years of the seventeenth century, only just over two hundred years ago. Vienna, as we saw, was only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland ON A DATE THAT OUGHT TO BE AMONG THE MOST FAMOUS IN HISTORY -- SEPTEMBER...

Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by. One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam's past and predicted, in his book THE GREAT HERESIES, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic revival,...

Same-Sex Marriage and the Living Document March 4, 2004 “According to definition,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “the ideal citizen of this Modern State must be free to act on his individual judgment of morals, must reach conclusions on all matters by private judgment, but must accept the coercion of any law whatsoever when it has been decided by a majority of such individual citizens so concluding.” That about sums it up. The Modern State, now called Democracy, has no moral principles, but we have a duty to obey it anyway. Why? Majority rule, you know. But sometimes the courts overrule the...

Race with the Devil From the Hell of Hate to the Well of Mercy By Joseph Pearce "A sound atheist cannot be too careful of the books that he reads." So said C. S. Lewis in his autobiographical apologia, Surprised by Joy. These words continue to resonate across the years that separate me from the bitterness of my past.  What is true of the atheist is as true of the racist, which is what I was. A hell of hatred consumed my youth. Eventually I stumbled out into the brilliance of Christian day, but, looking back along that path, I...

THE GREAT HERESIES by Hilaire Belloc Chapter Four The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed It might have appeared to any man watching affairs in the earlier years of the seventh century_say from 600 to 630_that only one great main assault having been made against the Church, Arianism and its derivatives, that assault having been repelled and the Faith having won its victory, it was now secure for an indefinite time. Christendom would have to fight for its life, of course, against outward unchristian things, that is, against Paganism. The nature worshippers of the high Persian civilization to the...