DOI:10.1111/nbfr.

12460

Vincent McNabb 1868-1943, an Anniversary

Commemoration
Aidan Nichols

Abstract

This commemorative article, drafted for the 75th anniversary of Vin-

cent McNabb’s death in 2018 (it was also the hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of his birth), re-tells his story, visits the unresolved ques-
tion of his sanctity, and, by considering his themes, seeks to point
up his amor intellectualis, and not just cordialis, the generosity of a
many-sided man.

Keywords
Donald Proudman, Fernand Valentine, Hilary Carpenter, Michael de
la Bedoyere, Easter Rising

Background

Vincent McNabb was born in 1868 at Portaferry, a maritime town

in County Down some twenty-five miles from Belfast. With his ten
siblings, he came from an Ulster Catholic family with naval connex-
ions to Britain to where the family moved when he was fourteen.1
In the words of his Dominican biographer Ferdinand Valentine, he
‘remembered too rarely that he was not an Englishman’ and ‘most
Englishmen forgot (and these included a number of his own brethren)
that he was a foreigner’.2 Valentine was writing in 1954, which was
more than a decade after the territory of the Irish Free State had been
declared a Republic. McNabb on the other hand had been born into
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Even in 1954, by
which date Eire was lost forever, the surviving portions of that Union
included County Down. So the word ‘foreigner’ was hardly in place.
But Valentine required it. He needed it so as to say that what English
Dominicans forgot in judging McNabb was his ‘Gaelic passion

1
Vincent McNabb, O. P., Eleven, thank God (London: Sheed and Ward, 1942).
2
Ferdinand Valentine, O. P., Father Vincent McNabb. The Portrait of a Great Domini-
can (London: Burns and Oates, 1954), p. 4.


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2 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration

for drama in all its forms, including pantomime’.3 That is part of

Valentine’s explanation for why some of his fellow-friars had no
time for McNabb, regarding him as an insufferable poseur. One fairly
obvious riposte was forthcoming in a ‘Catholic Worker’ pamphlet
written jointly by a friar and a layman and published at the latter’s
expense. Agreed, he ‘courted publicity’. Yet this was ‘not because he
loved publicity, but because a sermon is not a sermon unless people
hear it. And if one can make the whole world hear it, all the better.4 ’
Valentine’s book was criticised by McNabb’s admirers for its
heavy-handedly psychological approach to its subject. Hilary Carpen-
ter, the English Dominican Provincial who mandated its publication,
was aghast when the first of a series of extracts, run by a weekly
paper, The Catholic Herald, received the headline, ‘To Some He was
a Mountebank, to Others a Prophet’.5 Carpenter had appealed in ad-
vance to the editor, Michael de la Bedoyere, not to proceed. ‘We
protested to you that such a piecemeal presentation of this partic-
ular book would inevitably lead to misapprehension on the part of
your readers’. The predicted outcome, disastrous for the promotion
of McNabb as a future saint of the Church, had come about. ‘That
our apprehensions were well-founded is manifest in the immediate
reactions we have received after the first extract with its deplorable
and misleading headline.’ Carpenter conceded that ‘Father Vincent
was an enigma to some; the very greatness and uniqueness of his
character inevitably made it so, at any rate to those who narrowly
saw only one facet of him’’. He defended Valentine’s effort as ‘a
living and thrilling portrait’, but ‘a portrait that must be seen as a
whole, not in its first brush strokes’.6
I shall return in the Conclusion to the evaluation of Valentine’s
‘portrait’. But one thing the author was surely right about. That was
the significant non-playing – at any rate in the period after the First
World War – of McNabb’s Irish card. In 1921 the editor of another
religious weekly, the Catholic Times, asked McNabb to comment
on the civil strife then tearing apart the newly founded Irish Free
State. ‘If, as I have been informed, you are an Irishman [this ‘if’
was extraordinary in reference to a man who was already the best-
known Dominican of his generation in the English-speaking world],
I am sure you will be anxious to say something for the old land

3
Ibid.
4
Donald Proudman, O. P. and R. P. Walsh, Fr Vincent McNabb, O. P. (Wigan: pri-
vately published, n. d.), p. 7. Consulted in Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box
27. Proudman was the proposed Vice-Postulator of McNabb’s ‘cause’ for beatification, on
which more anon.
5
Catholic Herald, 6 May, 1955.
6
Letter 9 May 1955 from Hilary Carpenter, O. P., to the Editor, Catholic Herald.
Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 27.


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 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration 3

at this great crisis in her destiny.’7 McNabb adduced a supernatural

vocation as the ground for a non-reply. He had been given a mission
to pay back to the island of Britain (or ‘England’ as he called it)
the generosity once shown the Irish by St Patrick. He had taken the
English people ‘to my heart, where God had first written love of my
own birthland, and Patrick, the friend of God, had written the love of
this land of my choice and of my second birth’, i.e. love of England.8
No further comment transpired except to say that anything tending
to separate the sister islands was deeply regrettable.
There was a reason for this elusiveness: a deep sadness born of
the failure of his hopes for a solution to the ‘Irish Question’ within –
rather than outside – the British imperial polity. In the summer of
1916, in the wake of Dublin’s ‘Easter Rising’, he had written an open
letter to Herbert Asquith, then prime minister of the United King-
dom, in the columns of The Catholic Times. The Catholic Church in
Ireland, said McNabb, had ensured the law-abidingness of its flock by
condemning, during the nineteenth century, a succession of dissident
movements, either illegal or of border-line legality. Fenianism, ‘boy-
cotting’, the Irish National League’s ‘Plan of Campaign’: these were
movements that sought to subvert the existing civil order in the island
by extraordinary means. The Home Rule Bill placed before Parlia-
ment in 1913 was the rightful reward for the historic patience of Irish
Catholics: an altogether ‘lawful political action commanded by a high
religious motive’. How unmistakable the contrast with the challenge
to law and order offered by army officers sympathetic to Protestant
Loyalism in Ulster – seemingly sanctioned as this prospective mutiny
was by no less a figure than Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief.
‘[F]or the first time the religious elements of Irish Nationalism were
unable to restrain the sword’ – as wielded by the leaders of the
bloodily suppressed Easter Rising. McNabb appealed to Asquith to
read the message now ‘written in the ruins of Dublin’. Asquith must
‘calm the startled steeds of Irish national life and . . . yoke them once
more with their fellow Gaels across the seas in the vast empire which
is largely the harvest of their force of mind and soul’.9 McNabb’s
own life was geographically inexplicable without the Union, if not
the Empire. And the English Dominican Province that he joined was
itself an imperial venture – with missions in the West Indian colonies
and the Union of South Africa, then a dominion of the British Crown.
Back in Ireland, Joseph McNabb had been the youngest and
physically the weakest of the boys of his family, but by way of

7
Vincent McNabb, O. P., ‘The Call of St Patrick’, in idem., Francis Thompson and
Other Essays (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1955 [1935]), p. 67.
8
Ibid.
9
Idem., ‘The Example of Ireland’, The Catholic Times and Catholic Opinion, 4 August
1916. Consulted in Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2.


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compensation he was intellectually gifted – something his educators

at St Malachy’s College Belfast were quick to realize when he
returned as a boarder after the family’s migration to the Newcastle
area. At home he was devoted to a highly competent mother, who
before her marriage headed a millinery department in a major New
York store. He was in awe of his father, a disciplinarian who,
as a master mariner, was inevitably away at sea for much of the
time. Valentine’s forty pages on McNabb’s childhood and youth are
dominated by an attempt at psychoanalysis of his subject, in an
effort to explain the sometimes wildly diverse reactions of people to
McNabb in later life – and the sometimes breathtaking insouciance
he showed towards the communities whose life he shared in Do-
minican priories. On Valentine’s speculative hypothesis, McNabb’s
‘will-to-community’ had been undermined by the strain of a family
setting marked by sibling rivalry and the obligation to welcome
periodically a father whose intimacy with his mother he resented.
The scene was set for outbursts of over-compensatory self-display
and a startling level of habitual indifference to the reactions of those
around him. Yet Valentine’s biography, or quasi-biography, was not
a demolition job. Its sub-title ran, ‘A Portrait of a Great Dominican’.
Valentine considered McNabb ‘a brilliant and even a profound
thinker’, a ‘theologian of unusual competence’, who impressed by
his ‘towering personality and his sanctity’ of which he ‘knew nothing
at all’.10 ‘I want to state quite firmly at the beginning of this book,
after sifting a good deal of the evidence, that in my opinion, the
degree in which father Vincent fulfilled his vows of poverty, chastity
and obedience was heroic, and that this was accomplished only after
a bitter and lifelong struggle, by persevering self-sacrifice and prayer
sustained and crowned throughout by the grace of God.’11

Entry into the Order

Seemingly, it never occurred to McNabb to become an Irish Domini-

can. His decision to enter into the Order of Preachers was triggered
on Tyneside. His attention had been caught by the devotion to the
parochial poor of a curate at St Dominic’s Priory, Newcastle, an
establishment founded on the basis of an urban mission of the sec-
ular clergy a generation before. In Late Victorian Newcastle, Lewis
Weldon was a legendary figure, more than once summoned to the
Docks to deal with conflict situations getting beyond police control.12

10
Ferdinand Valentine, O. P., Father Vincent McNabb, op. cit., p. xv.
11
Ibid., p. 16.
12
Ibid., p. 35.


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A ‘preferential option for the poor’, in the modern Church jargon,

would be second nature to McNabb as friar and priest.
This orientation to the poor was confirmed by the austerity of
the Order he joined in its English Victorian incarnation. In 1885, the
date of his entry to the novitiate at Woodchester Priory in Gloucester-
shire’s Stroud valleys, the oral memory reached back to that house’s
heroic age. At a moment when the Dominican Order seemed on the
point of extinction in England, a house of regular observance arose,
meeting all the demanding criteria of the then Master of the Order.13
Extreme simplicity of life combined with punctilious observance of
the Choir office and other religious duties, was the ideal of Vincent
Jandel, and it was also the lesson his Irish namesake now learned.
He did not take kindly to signs of emerging embourgeoisement in his
fellow Religious. His life-style became legendary for its practice of
poverty, reinforcing his identification with the industrial poor.
While his ordination studies were carried out within the framework
of the English Dominican Province, for higher studies (1891-1894)
he was sent to the Catholic University of Louvain, a stronghold of
the Thomistic revival. McNabb admired the Belgium of the period,
notably for its peasant agriculture, lack of a mega-metropolis, and
combined love of its own cultural (especially artistic) past with an
openness to other nations.14 Knowing that a fervently Catholic coun-
try, albeit with its measure of anti-clericals, would not appeal to
all English observers, McNabb was moved to assiduous activity in
raising funds for Belgian war relief. His 1916 appeal to public opin-
ion, Europe’s Ewe-Lamb, was an apologia, inspired by the prophet
Nathan in his challenge to King David (II Samuel 12:1-15), for one
of Europe’s smallest and most defenceless countries. It was another
expression, this time on the international level, of opting for the
poor.15 Somewhat incongruously, he was rewarded by royal bestowal
of membership of a chivalric order, with the right to wear the ap-
propriate insignia. In March 1919 Albert I of the Belgians, on the

13
Bede Jarrett, O. P., The English Dominicans (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne,
1921), pp. 201-202. By introducing the name of (Henri-Dominique) Lacordaire, in context
a red herring, Jarrett downplayed the Observantine inspiration owed to Jandel. For the
ideological rivalry between these two French founders in the nineteenth century revival,
see Bernard Bonvin, Lacordaire Jandel. Suivi de l’édition originale et annotée du Mémoire
Jandel (Paris: Cerf, 1989).
14
Writing to the Irish magazine The Leader, he paid a pseudonymous tribute to Belgium
on three counts: intensely practised agriculture, decentralisation, and the moderate character
of its nationalism: ‘Kintragh’ [ Vincent McNabb, O. P.], ‘Three Years in Belgium’, The
Leader, 12 January, 1901, pp. 313-314. Consulted in Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers,
Box 2.
15
Vincent McNabb, O. P., Europe’s Ewe-Lamb (London: Washbourne, 1916).


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advice of his government’s minister for foreign affairs, enrolled him

as Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Couronne.16

His theological teaching

When McNabb returned from Louvain, equipped by an excellent

Thomistic education in philosophy and theology, he was marked
out for the teaching institutions of the Province. During the years
1894 to 1897 this meant giving instruction in Aristotelian logic at
Woodchester. From 1898 it entailed lecturing in theology (in effect,
commenting on Aquinas’ Summa theologiae) at Hawkesyard, near
Lichfield in Staffordshire, the first purpose-built study house of the
‘restored’, i.e. post-Reformation, English Dominican Province. In
1900, elected prior at Woodchester, he was not thereby removed from
teaching. Hawkesyard had been opened before its buildings were
complete. Pressure on accommodation suggested recourse to a com-
promise formula: at the beginning and end of studies (the first year
of philosophy and the last of theology) young friars would be taught
at the Gloucestershire priory. During a priorship rich in freshly made
West Country contacts,17 he continued to lecture on theology, along
now with Scripture, and more especially, the teaching of Hebrew.
Having done well at Woodchester, in 1908 he was elected superior
at Holy Cross Priory, Leicester where he remained until 1914,
putting the priory on the civic map, and becoming in the process an
influential commentator on the local education system – if at the cost
of acquiring a reputation for flamboyance and general eccentricity,
at least among his brethren. In 1914 he returned to Hawkesyard to
teach not only theology but also – a new subject for a Dominican
curriculum – ‘social science’. These years of the First World War
witnessed his espousal of the social philosophy known as Dis-
tributism – an offshoot of the social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII –
and a commitment to the (connected but distinguishable) ‘Back to
the Land’ Movement. Both occupied a great deal of his energy
through contributions to public debate – though he had to be
careful when, as so often, speaking on platforms of the Catholic
Evidence Guild to treat Distributism and Agrarianism purely as
ethical issues. The Guild, founded in the last months of the Great

16
Royal warrant conserved in Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2.
17
For one of the most fruitful of these, see the numerous references to McNabb in
Giles Mercer, Convert, Scholar, Bishop: William Brownlow, 1830-1901 (Bath: Downside
Abbey Press, 2018). Brownlow’s debt to McNabb was augmented in the first biography:
Vincent McNabb, O.P., Bishop Brownlow (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1902). I am
grateful to Abbot Geoffrey Scott of Douai Abbey for drawing my attention to Mercer’s
study.


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War for public preaching by Catholic laymen, and seized on by

McNabb as the perfect instrument for his purposes, did not allow
political stance-taking by its speakers.
Even before this development, he was becoming known. In the
years 1903 to 1904, he gave Conferences on theology and spiritual-
ity to undergraduates in the University of Oxford. Written up as two
treatises, one on the theology of faith and the other on prayer, they
were published as Conferences on Prayer (1903) and Oxford Confer-
ences on Faith (1904), by a reputable non-Catholic publishing house,
Kegan Paul. Re-published half a century later under the title Faith
and Prayer for the tenth anniversary of his death (this preceded by
a year the Valentine biography), they prompted Carpenter to remark
that whereas, by the time of his death, McNabb was well known as
a popular preacher, justice had never been done to his mastery of
theology.18
The Oxford Conferences include apologetic accounts of the agnos-
ticism, atheism and scepticism induced by contemporary scientism.
They also provide reports on the life of faith that are really as much
phenomenological descriptions as they are Scholastic analyses. But in
his later theological writing he moved away from intellectual gener-
alities, exhibiting instead a breathtaking confidence in the definitive
nature of Thomism as a system of thought. In ‘Aquinas and the
Common Good’, included in his jubilee collection Francis Thomp-
son and Other Essays, he wrote, ‘Saint Thomas had the supreme
genius to give mankind the only intellectual synthesis that has yet
been offered to human intelligence’.19 McNabb’s way of dealing with
post-mediaeval, indeed post-Thomasian, philosophy, was ruthless. In
The Catholic Church and Philosophy he had this to say. ‘In the same
way as philosophy is supposed to be the organised truth about things,
any so-called philosophy which misses the truth about things is not
philosophy. We can call it “false philosophy” as we say “artificial
eggs” or “sham butter” or “dummy man”. But eggs are eggs, not
sham eggs, and philosophy is philosophy, not false philosophy. To be
philosophy it must be true; if it is not true, it is not philosophy’.20
End of story.
The Scholastic (i. e. Thomistic) philosophy, is, for McNabb not
only true. It is also, in a phrase he borrowed from the French
vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson, ‘the natural metaphysic of the
human intelligence’ – words originally intended by Bergson as a

18
Hilary J. Carpenter, O. P., ‘Preface’, Vincent McNabb, O. P., Faith and Prayer
(London: Blackfriars Publications, 1953), p. viii.
19
Vincent McNabb, O. P., ‘Aquinas and the Common Good’ in Francis Thompson and
Other Essays, op. cit., pp. 18-22, and here at p. 21.
20
Idem., The Catholic Church and Philosophy (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne,
1927), p. 96.


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recommendation of Aristotelianism. ‘Grecian thought’, said McNabb

and here he rejoined Bergson for he was thinking especially of
Aristotle, was ‘common sense raised almost to the infinite’, and by
this token it was ‘destined to have dealings with the Word made
flesh, who was the Infinite stooping down to human ways of life and
speech’.21 The Church of the Incarnate Word saved Greek thought
(so understood) just before that thought became swamped on its
own pagan terrain by Epicureanism and Stoicism. The use to which
Catholic theology subsequently put this philosophy has ennobled it,
not least by guaranteeing its existence with a warrant higher than
its own. In McNabb’s sweeping words, ‘Philosophy came into its
own, only when it came into the Catholic Church’.22 He could be,
however, a more careful historian of thought than these audacious
comments might suggest. He recognised that Thomism was indebted
to Platonism and not just to Aristotelianism, a truth not widely
registered by scholars until well into the twentieth century.23 At
one point he comes close to saying that Aquinas used Aristotle’s
style to express Plato’s truths. ‘Although not a few of Plato’s noble
intuitions, overlooked or set aside by Aristotle, were resumed by
Aquinas, yet the austere truthfulness of Aristotle’s literary style was
the unfailing guide of every line Aquinas penned.’24
More important than any adjudication of the relative contributions
to Aquinas of Plato and Aristotle was the union of what he called
‘Grecian philosophy and Catholic faith’ – and hence of philoso-
phy with theology. As he explains in deliberately dramatic rhetoric,
Hellas, ‘betrothed to Christ by the great decisions of the General
Councils’, sought in vain ‘to find a lifemate elsewhere than in the
Catholic Church’.25 Hellenic thought tried mating with Nestorianism,
Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Judaism, in that order, ending with Moses
Maimonides near to Thomas’ own time. But this was not just a story
of travelling down cul-de-sacs. Had there been no Arab or Jewish
philosophy Scholasticism, i. e. Thomism, would not have emerged.
‘Catholics are agreed that their philosophy was a reaction or resis-
tance on the plain of culture to the formidable attack made by the
intelligence of Islam and Israel. But it was not merely a reaction or
a defence; it was a most courteously and gratefully acknowledged

21
Ibid., p. 6.
22
Ibid., p. 15.
23
The earliest bespoke study arguing for a strongly (Neo-) Platonist dimension to
Thomas’ metaphysics, is Cornelio Fabro, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo
San Tommaso d’Aquino (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1939), but a case has been made for a
start-of-the-century anticipation in François Picavet, Esquisse d’une philosophie générale
et comparée de la philosophie mediévale (Paris: Alcan, 1907, 2nd edition). Thus Marcus
Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 14.
24
Vincent McNabb, The Catholic Church and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 30.
25
Ibid., p. 31.


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acceptance of what was good and true in the philosophic activities of

Islam and Israel.’26 What a shame it was driven out by the decline
that followed.
The answer to modern pseudo-philosophy – that is, philosophy af-
ter Aquinas, had to await the decade of his own childhood, the 1870s.
It came in two documents: Vatican I’s Constitution Dei Filius, from
1870, which affirms both reason and faith in their inter-relationship,
and the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII restoring
the use of the philosophy of St Thomas in the Catholic ‘schools’ or
faculties. McNabb found the teaching of Dei Filius and Aeterni Patris
reflected for the use of seven year olds in The Children’s Catechism,
otherwise the ‘Penny Catechism’, so called from the modest price
charged for that publication by the Catholic Truth Society.27 Infant
pedagogy was not of course the chief aim of the Conciliar and papal
documents. Their aim was, essentially, recall to right principles. In
his essay St Thomas Aquinas and Law, he remarked: ‘If [Thomas]
states principles with the naı̈ve simplicity of an arithmetical table –
if indeed he seems to justify those who once called him the Dumb
Ox, it will be found that his simplicity is often as consummate a
masterpiece as those line-pictures that the artist made by the skilled
rubbing-out of elaborate drawings. None but the life-long student of
his thought can realize how any one principle of St Thomas, even
in Law, may have meant for its almost platitudinous expression the
understanding of a hundred principles in Physics, Psychology, Ethics
and Metaphysics.28 ’
One claim he made for Thomist principles should be remembered
when looking at his social involvement. In The Catholic Church and
Philosophy he drew from the assertion that, ‘Philosophy’s first duty
is to justify mankind’s intuitions’ the inference that ‘The philosopher
is . . . the guardian of the poor’.29

Ecumenism

Treating the Penny Catechism as the highest expression of wisdom

suggests a rather complacent Catholicism, and indeed in matters ec-
umenical, McNabb seemed at times a typical Roman Catholic of
his period, invoking the English martyrs to bear witness against the
betrayal of Christian tradition at the sixteenth century Reformation.
In St John Fisher, written for Fisher’s canonization in 1935, he de-
scribed Fisher’s life and death as the ‘greatest tragedy of an age that

26
Ibid., p. 38.
27
Ibid., pp. 107-109.
28
Idem., St Thomas Aquinas and Law (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1955), p. 18.
29
Idem., The Catholic Church and Philosophy, op.cit., pp. 3-4.


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wrote Hamlet and Macbeth’.30 Writing of Fisher’s penitential aus-

terities he explained, ‘This quiet scholar from the Yorkshire moors
is steeling himself to withstand Tudor Totalitarianism and to give
a knight’s chivalrous defence to an almost defenceless woman who
was “England’s Queen and England’s guest”’ (namely, Catherine of
Aragon).31 Paul III, pope when Fisher died, had called him ‘defender
of the rights of the Church universal’, and McNabb found this ‘al-
most the equivalent of canonization’.32 But then a surprising note is
struck when we go on to read, ‘Yet Rome’s concern for peace delayed
the official canonization until four centuries of misunderstanding had
led the severed parts of England to feel the need of reunion through
mutual understanding’.33 For, despite his somewhat over-confident
Thomism and his strongly felt attachment to the Catholic martyrs,
McNabb believed that rapprochement between the Churches of Eng-
land and Rome was in his own time not far off.
This brings me to his ecumenical activities. McNabb’s book Infal-
libility (to begin with that), started life as a set of articles requested
by the American Episcopalian Franciscans at Graymoor, New York
State, for their magazine The Lamp. This led in turn to an invitation
to serve up the meat of the articles in the form of a 1905 lecture
in Holborn Town Hall for the Society of St Thomas of Canterbury,
another Anglo-Catholic body. It was a careful account in which he
was obviously aware that, speaking of conciliar and papal infalli-
bility, an Anglo-Catholic audience would be able to follow him in
much, though not all, of what he had to say. He began from what he
calls, surely following Newman – though he may have gone back to
Newman’s source, the lifelong Anglican Joseph Butler – ‘antecedent
probabilities’. There is an antecedent probability that the Word incar-
nate left behind in the world some source of infallible guidance. As
he remarked: ‘To our own way of looking at the matter, deep and pa-
tient thought on Christ the Way, the Truth, the Life, must lead men to
realize that unless active Infallibility is now in the world somewhere,
the Christians who saw Christ were better off than we who do not see
him, and hence that there is some exaggeration in his words, “It is
expedient for you that I go; for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come
to you”’.34 The claim of the apostolic Church, with Peter at its head,
to have received that Paraclete, the uncreated Spirit of truth, is pre-
cisely what we find in the New Testament, the Fathers and the ancient
Councils, thus justifying our initial expectation. McNabb stressed
that ecclesiastical infallibility is by its nature only ‘assistance’, not

30
Idem., St John Fisher (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935), p. 9.
31
Ibid., p. 38.
32
Ibid., p. 126.
33
Ibid.
34
Idem., Infallibility (London: Sheed and Ward, 1927), p. 18, citing John 16: 7.


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‘inspiration’ as with Scripture. Much less is it ‘revelation’ as with the

teaching of the Saviour. Moreover, it is primarily negative in charac-
ter. As he put it: ‘Neither Popes nor General Councils have taken the
lead in thought. They have no mission to lead into new ways, except
in so far as they have warned minds off wrong ways. Infallibility
has laid down nothing new; it has but safeguarded and explained
what was old.’35 There is no question here of the ‘God of surprises’
so beloved a century later in the pontificate of Pope Francis. The
Constitution Pastor aeternus restricts the operation of infallibility to
matters of faith and morals, while for any ex cathedra definition on
those topics there must be, in McNabb’s words, a clear ‘intention to
settle, close, or define the doctrinal discussion’ before the faithful are
bound to give interior assent.36 In an appendix for the appearance of
the lecture in book form in 1927, he explained there had been mis-
understanding of the claim that in such ex cathedra definitions the
pope does not need the consent of the Church for his judgments to
be valid. The pope does need the pre-existent mind of the Church for
his judgment to rest on adequate witness. What he does not need is
corroboration from its subsequent mind for his judgment to have ad-
equate sanction. This was an intelligent defence of the 1870 ‘Vatican
Decrees’, though doubtless he did not convince all hearers.
Between the lecture and the book came the 1920 Lambeth Confer-
ence, which concluded with an appeal from the Anglican bishops to
‘All Christians’ to come together into unity. McNabb’s enthusiastic
response did not go down well in the Vatican offices. By this time
he already had a dossier in Rome, thanks to a report in a Catholic
weekly of a lecture entitled ‘The Ministry of Women’ given some
years earlier at Caxton Hall, part of a series of public lectures on the
philosophy and theology of Aquinas. In the 1990s the then archivist
of the English Province, Father Bede Bailey, decanted the results of
his researches at Santa Sabina, the seat of the ‘General Curia’ of the
Order.37 McNabb had stood in at the last moment for another speaker
on a topic prompted presumably by early Feminism. He had spoken
spontaneously. A note-taking journalist described him as saying that
women have a teaching office at least equal to that of the priest
at the altar and while a time might come when there would be no
more priests in the world there would never be a time that lacked a
Catholic home where women could exercise that office in their ca-
pacity as mothers. The Master of the Order, having received a copy
of the offending article from the papal Secretary of State, wrote to
McNabb’s Provincial, Bede Jarrett, that if the report were accurate,

35
Ibid., p. 33.
36
Ibid., p. 69.
37
Bede Bailey, O. P., ‘Father McNabb and Rome’, The Chesterton Review XXII, 1-2
(1996), pp. 125-138.


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McNabb must be ‘suspended indefinitely from preaching, lecturing

and writing to the public press’.38 Jarrett replied that the reporter
(a woman) was theologically illiterate and the report unfounded, but
was told he would be expected to show ‘prudence and vigilance’
in ‘controlling henceforth all Father McNabb’s public utterances’.39
That was in 1921. In 1923 complaint was made about his article ‘The
Lambeth Conference’, later reprinted in McNabb’s essay collection
From a Friar’s Cell along with two others on relations between Rome
and Canterbury. There was particular annoyance at a comparison of
Lambeth 1920 to an Ecumenical Council (actually McNabb had de-
scribed it as numerically comparable to the Ecumenical Councils
but called it otherwise a ‘provincial council speaking a modern lan-
guage’, hailing it as the first such on this scale since antiquity).40 The
Irish Dominican Michael Browne, then a professor at the Angelicum,
asked to read the article for a doctrinal opinion, noted with disfavour
McNabb’s view that episcopal jurisdiction derives from sacramental
ordination, not from papal authority. This was an anticipation of the
discussion on the same issue during the passing of Lumen gentium at
Vatican II where Browne, by then a cardinal, was among the conser-
vative minority opposed to what were considered episcopalist views
of Church order.
The essay on the Lambeth Conference was certainly eirenic. New-
man’s dire prophecies of the unstoppable decline of the Church of
England, said McNabb, had in the event gone unfulfilled. The Oxford
Movement, if it had regenerated English Catholicism had done much
the same for English Anglicanism and possibly more. Referring to
the Catholic Church in England, he wrote that it ‘would be impos-
sible to say whether its growth has been greater than that section of
the Church of England which calls itself Catholic’.41 The ‘forward
movement’ of those in communion with Canterbury and York was
above all towards regaining the truths, sacramental life and ecclesi-
astical communion once lost at the Reformation.42 Had not Lambeth
1920’s Committee on Reunion and Intercommunion itself declared
that ‘no projects of union can ever be regarded as satisfactory which
deliberately leave out the Churches of the Latin Communion’?43 The
successor article in From a Friar’s Cell records how at Lambeth only
three bishops voted against receiving this Report.44 It was extremely
38
Cited ibid., p. 129.
39
Cited ibid., p. 131.
40
Vincent McNabb, O. P., ‘The Lambeth Conference’ in idem., From a Friar’s Cell
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1923), pp. 39-51, and here at p. 40.
41
Idem., ‘The Lambeth Conference’, art. cit, p. 45.
42
Ibid., p. 47.
43
Cited ibid., pp. 47-48.
44
Idem., ‘Canterbury and Rome’, in idem., From a Friar’s Cell, op, cit., pp. 52-62,
and here at p. 56.


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generous of the Anglican bishops, said McNabb, not to be still smart-

ing at the dismissal of the validity of their ministerial orders in Leo
XIII’s letter Apostolicae Curae. The explanation was that, slowly but
surely, they were being emancipated from what he called ‘secular
and royal pressure’ in their outlook.45 They now had a chance to see
that the schism was none of their predecessors’ making, but the fault
of the Crown. From the Roman side, he went on, consider the tact
shown in not using the names of the pre-Reformation sees when the
Catholic hierarchy was re-established in 1850. He hinted that in the
event of reunion the bishops of the sees created then should give way
to the ancient see-holders; the bishop of Clifton had said as much for
himself in relation to his separated brother of Bristol, in 1896. More-
over, the new (i. e. 1916-17) Code of Canon Law, by specifically
excluding the Oriental Catholic Churches from its provisions, shows
what might be available for Anglicans, thanks to ‘Rome’s traditional
breadth of toleration’.46
Setbacks in the 1920s did nothing to dispel McNabb’s Anglican
sympathies. In 1936 he published, first in the pages of the Dublin
Review and then as a free-standing pamphlet, a controversial piece on
‘Causes of Christian Disunion’.47 It was in fact his own Englishing of
Cardinal Pope’s distinctly moderate ‘legatine address’ at the opening
of the Council of Trent. What raised eyebrows was not so much
the address as the ‘Dedicatory Letter to his Grace the Archbishop
of Canterbury’, then Cosmo Gordon Lang, with which McNabb
prefaced his translation. McNabb recalled how ‘when the Lambeth
Conference first met after the Great War and made its great efforts
for Peace, your predecessor, Archbishop Davidson, ensured that his
own heart’s desire for a United Christendom should be furthered
by Your Grace being made chairman of the Committee on Reunion.
From that Committee and, as we believe, mainly by Your Grace’s
personal efforts, was issued the historic Appeal to All Christian
People.’ McNabb found that a reason why it was ‘almost a necessity
to see Your Grace’s name on these pages, as if in these days of God-
unguided nation-building two shepherds [he meant Pole and Lang]
should cry across the centuries and unite in calling mankind back
to repentance and to God’.48 Across the Thames, another shepherd,

45
Idem., ‘The Lambeth Conference’, art. cit, p. 50.
46
Ibid., p. 49. Unfortunately when what was available for Anglicans was eventually
made clear under Pope Benedict XVI, the resultant document Anglicanorum coetibus
enrolled the Ordinariates for former Anglicans quite explicitly under the Latin Church,
rather than regarding them as a tertium quid – a distinctive body analogous to the Eastern
Catholic Churches in union with Rome.
47
Causes of Christian Disunion. Cardinal Pole’s Legatine Address at the Opening of
the Council of Trent, 7 January 1546 (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1936).
48
Vincent McNabb, ‘Dedicatory Letter to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury’ in
ibid., p. 2.


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Arthur Hinsley, the recently enthroned archbishop of Westminster,

was not so enthusiastic. He wrote to Bernard Delany, the English
Dominican Provincial, ‘I do not think that the Commission for the
censorship of books would pass that Dedicatory Letter’, and won-
dered whether perhaps some explanation might be forthcoming.49 In
forwarding the correspondence to McNabb, Delany added, ‘I think
the most discreet thing is to make no public reference or retractation.
But do you think the reprint ought to be still circulated?’50
Vincent McNabb’s ecumenical spirit was not exhausted by concern
for Anglicans. In his 1913 Catholic Truth Society pamphlet Our Re-
lations with the Nonconformists, he went out of his way to praise
the Free Churches for their ‘informing political life with standards of
conscience’.51 Historic English Conformity, he argued, was ‘pleading,
not for the separation of Church and State but for the destruction of
the feudal and Tudor relations of Church and State’ – a very differ-
ent matter.52 English Catholics were in many ways indebted to them.
‘They were our yoke-fellows in penal days; they were beaten with
the same things; they filled the same prisons; they went with us as
pilgrim fathers to the great west land.’53 And McNabb risked annoy-
ing Anglicans, normally his preferred ecumenical interlocutors, when
he went so far as to say that Free Churchmen ‘grew and prospered
so undeniably that the law-established Church, in view of their mil-
lions, could make no pretence to be the English Church – that is, the
sole ecclesiastical organ of the English people’.54 In an extraordinary
step (for the period), a re-printing in 1943 under the title Catholics
and Nonconformists included a highly approbatory foreword by the
then Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, a Congregationalist in-
stitution. Nathaniel Micklem praised the Dominican writer’s charity
and restraint. And he agreed with McNabb that the Mother Church
of both the Protestant and the Tridentine reforms was the same, the
‘great mediaeval Church of the West’.55

49
Letter of 4 May 1936 from Arthur Hinsley to the English Dominican Provincial,
Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 3.
50
Letter of 16 June 1936 from Bernard Delany to Vincent McNabb, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2.
51
Vincent McNabb, Our Relations with the Nonconformists (London: Catholic Truth
Society, 1913), p. 8.
52
Ibid., p. 6.
53
Ibid., p. 3.
54
Ibid., p. 4.
55
Nathaniel Micklem, ‘Introduction’, in Vincent McNabb, O. P., Catholics and Non-
conformists (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1943), p. 4. See further on this aspect of
McNabb: Herbert Keldany, ‘Vincent McNabb – Pioneer Ecumenist’, New Blackfriars LX.
712 (1979), pp. 367-370.


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Spirituality

McNabb gained his audience owing not least to his image as a spir-
itual master with a reputation for holiness. The Oxford Conferences
of 1903 to 1904 had not only been an exercise in apologetics and a
phenomenological-cum-Scholastic theology of faith. They were also,
more simply, reflections on the nature of prayer. As such they her-
alded a series of later contributions to spirituality. During his long
period in St Dominic’s Priory Haverstock Hill (now the Rosary Shrine
of the archdiocese of Westminster) from 1920 until his death in 1943,
the Cenacle Convents at Hampstead, Stamford Hill and Grayshott
(on the Surrey Downs) were preferred outlets for communicating his
spiritual teaching. Many of these texts were published in his lifetime,
including one entire Retreat based on the Lord’s Prayer. Such talks
would have been attended by a combination of Religious Sisters and
laywomen – by far the largest constituencies among recipients of his
private correspondence on matters spiritual.
The Conferences entitled The Craft of Suffering were given at
these centres between 1929 and 1935. In the Introduction he writes
of those whom ‘the Crucified had invited to His side at the royal
banquet of pain’ as of all teachers ‘the most beloved and the best’.56
Speaking very directly about both moral and physical suffering was
one of his hallmarks. ‘[S]omething has happened to human beings,
so that now [sorrow] is an absolute necessity. Some impurities have
to be washed away by suffering.’57 ‘The flowers of perfection which
I have witnessed in souls have only been in conjunction with some
sort of suffering’.58 His remarks were often striking. This could be
in a prophetic way. ‘Some of us expect to see almost regularised
official murder as the world’s bewildered answer to the problem of
suffering.’59 This was verified with the legalization of euthanasia in
various civil jurisdictions in the later twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, though the issue had been a pre-occupation since at least
the Edwardians. The impact could also be, and more frequently was,
in a devotional way. On the tears of Jesus at the grave of Lazarus in St
John’s Gospel, he said: ‘This is the Passion in little, the Compassion
of God for human suffering’.60 Or again, on the need for religious
authenticity, ‘Until we feel we need saving, we should not approach
Jesus Christ.’61 Or yet again under the heading ‘Standing at the

56
Vincent McNabb, O. P., The Craft of Suffering (London: Burns, Oates and Wash-
bourne, 1936), p. X.
57
Ibid., p. 38.
58
Ibid., p. 13.
59
Ibid., p. 3.
60
Ibid., p. 20.
61
Ibid., p. 66.


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Cross’: ‘Then we beseech Him, by His perfection, to give us some

mystical thirst towards perfection, a thirst that will be lifelong . . .
We must not dread the thirst. We must rather dread the lack of that
thirst.’62
In another collection, God’s Way of Mercy, dedicated to Gilbert
Chesterton who had just died, he said of Mary Magdalene, ‘[Christ]
suddenly called her by her name. That was at the moment when He
was going to bid her to go from Him – to go from the consolation of
His presence to the greater consolation of His will.’63 And again, on
the words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
convertere as sung in Holy Week, ‘[O]n Good Friday, when it is sung
for the last time, it sounds like God’s last prayer to my soul. “Oh,
my beloved, turn thou to the only love of thy soul”. “Oh, Lover of
my soul, turn me, turn me to Thee.”’64 Or less ecstatically, ‘[W]hat
a glorious thing it is when human beings will reason and discourse
about God. Then their souls are on the way to God. Even those who
are wondering whether God exists have their faces towards God’.65
In yet another set of these Conferences, The Craft of Prayer, he
proved an extreme exponent of the primacy of petitionary prayer.
As he put it, in the rather gushing language he sometimes used
for the benefit of the middle class ladies who would have formed
the majority of his Cenacle audience, ‘Our Blessed Lord and our
dear Lady may be quite amused at some of our prayers. ‘“There is
that dear child. She thinks she is praying. Really she is asking for
nothing at all”’.66 He explained that ‘St Thomas Aquinas is right. The
essential prayer is the prayer of petition’, though he adds that this
will be, above all, petition ‘for the supernatural’.67 That assertion
indicates a retrenchment of his doctrine of prayer as given in the
Oxford Conferences where his reflections on both liturgical prayer
and the prayer of Christ required him to paint on a wider canvas.
The prayer of praise, the prayer of thanksgiving, could hardly be
omitted in those contexts, though even then he went out of his way
to insist on the importance of petitionary praying. Christ’s own prayer
of petition as man did not end, said McNabb, with the ‘glorification
of his natural body’, and has not ended now, since he still has to ask
for the ‘glorification of his mystical body, the Church’.68

62
Ibid., p. 103.
63
Vincent McNabb, O. P., God’s Way of Mercy (London: Burns, Oates and Wash-
bourne, 1937), p. 5.
64
Ibid., p. 31.
65
Ibid., p. 84.
66
Idem., The Craft of Prayer (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1935), p. 57.
67
Ibid., p. 59.
68
Idem., Faith and Prayer, op. cit., p. 203.


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 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration 17

His Retreat materials typically included much that, through speak-

ing from a memory that was thoughtful and not simply well-stocked,
gave insight into his experience as friar and priest – and indeed as
human being.69

Bible

Famously, Vincent McNabb’s cell contained, as to books, only his

breviary, his copy of the Summa theologiae and a Bible. Many of his
writings rehearse the simplest biblical materials as in, for example,
toward the end of his life the 1941 Some Mysteries of Jesus Christ.70
Nothing could be more straightforward as collections of texts with
brief explanatory comments than The New Testament Witness to St
Peter (1928) or The New Testament Witness to Our Lady (1930),71
or the trio of little books, A Life of our Lord, Mary of Nazareth
and St Mary Magdalene, all of which appeared in the same year,
1940.72 Moreover, all the Cenacle Conferences took their departure-
point from biblical citations, selected and remarked on in a similar
spirit.
It would come as a surprise to readers of these works which com-
bined apologetics and devotion in a naı̈f way, to encounter the exeget-
ical sophistication of his early essays on biblical inspiration. There
they would find, if they could follow the philosophical prose, a very
subtle account of how the charism of biblical inspiration might be
considered compatible with what appear to be errors in historical and
cosmological matters in the Scriptural text. Here McNabb synthe-
sized two areas of his teaching: Bible and logic. Thus with reference
to Joshua 10:13, he wrote, ‘Take the proposition, “The sun stood
still”. As it stands detached from all context, it may or may not be
scientifically or absolutely false in its literal sense. But the quasi-
modal proposition, “to all appearances”, or “it was commonly held
that the sun stood still”, may be absolutely true . . . Now the light
of divine inspiration ensures the hagiographer’s certitude of what is

69
See, for instance, the memoir by an intelligent North London laywoman, a civil
servant in the War Office, who had attended many of his days of recollection, Dorothy
Finlayson (ed.),’I Well Remember. The Unconscious Autobiography of Father Vincent Mc-
Nabb, O. P. Pierced together from verbatim records of his spoken words at Retreats during
the years 1928 to 1943’, Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 6.
70
Vincent McNabb, O. P., Some Mysteries of Jesus Christ (London: Burns, Oates and
Washbourne 1941).
71
Idem., The New Testament Witness to St Peter (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928);
The New Testament Witness to Our Lady (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930).
72
Idem., A Life of our Lord (London: Sheed and Ward, 1940); Mary of Nazareth
(London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1940); St Mary Magdalene (London: Burns,
Oates and Washbourne, 1940).


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objectively certain. We may argue from his certitude to the objective

certainty. If he is certain of the mode of a proposition, then the mode
is objectively certain. But in this case it would be a fallacy to argue
from the certainty of the mode to the certainty of the proposition,
from the quality of the dictum to the quality of the res.73 ’
These essays occur in the collection entitled, significantly enough,
Where Believers may Doubt. Sub-titled ‘Studies in Biblical Inspira-
tion and other Problems of Faith’, it was dated 1903, that is, three
years before the gathering storm of the Modernist crisis burst on the
Catholic Church with the promulgation of Pius X’s encyclical letter
Pascendi and, in the following year, the anthology of reprobated cita-
tions from Modernist writers, Lamentabili. It is a moot point whether
McNabb would have published the essays defending Père Lagrange
of the newly founded Ecole biblique in Jerusalem,74 and likewise
commending Newman’s highly controversial 1884 articles on bib-
lical inerrancy,75 had he been writing in the aftermath of the year
1907. The historian of twentieth century English Christianity Adrian
Hastings considered that, along with other eminent clerics, McNabb
decided to re-invent himself as a ‘man of letters’ so as to avoid eccle-
siastical difficulties after that date – though he was unable to escape
those difficulties entirely.76

Social comment

‘Man of letters’ does not really strike the right note for Vincent
McNabb. But if the phrase is to be used then it was as a belles lettriste
that he chose to call the capital of the United Kingdom ‘Babylondon’.
London was a spiritual Babylon, like the pagan imperial Rome of
the Johannine Apocalypse and the Letters of St Peter which is why
people should get out of it, preferably to the land, that is, into the deep
countryside, where they could escape the horrors of industrialism and
the cynicism of speculative finance and contribute instead to reviving
England’s declining agriculture and the rebirth of crafts, as in the
Tertiaries’ community of Hilary Pepler and Eric Gill on Ditchling
Common in Sussex. He welcomed the evacuation of children from
London in anticipation of the ‘Blitz’ as the initial stage of return

73
Idem., Where Believers may Doubt. Studies in Biblical Inspiration and other Prob-
lems of Faith (London: Burns and Oates, 1903).
74
See Bernard Montagnes, Marie-Joseph Lagrange. Une biographie critique (Paris:
Cerf, 2004), pp. 203-264.
75
J. Derek Holmes (ed.), The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Biblical
Inspiration and Infallibility (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).
76
Adrian Hastings, ‘Some reflexions on the English Catholicism of the late 1930s’, in
idem. (ed.), Bishops and Writers. Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism
(Wheathampstead: Anthony Clarke, 1977), pp. 107-126, and here at p. 110.


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 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration 19

to sanity, writing in September 1939 to the editor of the Agrarianist

periodical The Cross and the Plough ‘I am inclined to think that
with the bombing of townsfolk into the country the first work of The
Cross and Plough has been done’.77 Yet paradoxically McNabb loved
Londoners as E. A. Siderman’s A Saint in Hyde Park makes plain
in its numerous anecdotes of his good-humoured exchanges with
hearers, many of them Cockney, at Speaker’s Corner.78 He would
doubtless have said he loved Londoners enough to wish them out of
the place. They would repay his affection when they came in droves
to visit his body as it lay in the Lady Chapel here for three days
after his death, and then filled the church and the road outside at his
funeral.
In McNabb’s case, ‘Back to the Land’ was combined with
adherence to the wider social movement of ‘Distributism’. His
conversion to Distributism took place under the influence of Hilaire
Belloc, and can probably be dated to a visit to King’s Land, Belloc’s
Sussex home, in Easter Week 1916. Like Chesterton he moved to
Distributism from something more resembling Socialism. In January
1914, while still in Leicester, he had started a controversy in the pages
of The Tablet by seeming to endorse Socialism, an economic theory
condemned by the late nineteenth century papacy. A leading Catholic
trades unionist, Thomas Burns, wrote in protest that McNabb’s
article had made life difficult for those of us ‘engaged in forming
an organized opposition to Socialism in the democratic movement’;
McNabb had ‘confused Catholic social thinkers instead of guiding
them’.79 In fact there were already bishops, such as Thomas White-
side of Liverpool, who were beginning to come to terms with what
they called a ‘new Socialism’ represented by the Labour MP Philip
Snowden: it might turn out to be in Whiteside’s words ‘a Socialism
with which we can make friends’.80 Writing to the paper at the
end of January, McNabb denied he had ever formally advocated
Socialism, but the sense of his remarks was accurately conveyed
by an anonymous correspondent in the last issue of The Tablet for
February 1914. ‘Father McNabb suggests that Socialism has at last
overflowed the vessel within which it has hitherto . . . . been stored
and he would fain have us, Catholics, lap up the spilth of the precious
elixir. But why should we, inheritors of the glorious traditions of the
Catholic Church, stoop to drink at that muddied stream?’81

77
Letter of 19 September 1939 from Vincent McNabb, O. P., to Harold Robbins,
Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 27.
78
E. A. Siderman’s A Saint in Hyde Park. Memories of Father Vincent McNabb, O. P.
(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950).
79
Cited in Ferdinand Valentine, O. P., Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., op. cit., p. 136.
80
Cited ibid.
81
Cited ibid., p. 137.


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Perhaps the vehemence of response played a part in his change of

mind. At any rate he became in the upshot a Distributist instead –
but the most radical version of a Distributist, a Back to the Land
Distributist, a position which combined support for Leo XIII’s great
social encyclical Rerum novarum, with the bucolic Romanticism of
the English literary tradition.82 Disclaiming any competence other
than that of a priest and a preacher he nonetheless argued tirelessly
for a social vision shared with Belloc and Chesterton in such writings
as The Church and the Land,83 Nazareth or Social Chaos,84 and Old
Principles and the New Order,85 which span the years 1923 to 1942
and, while it lasted, in the official magazine of the Distributist Guild,
G. K.’s Weekly. Bernard Delany, prior of the London St Dominic’s
when McNabb died, summed up the story succinctly enough. ‘It was
while Prior of Hawkesyard that he made common cause with Eric Gill
and Hilary Pepler, whom he frequently invited to the Priory. Between
them they strove to work out those principles of social doctrine,
work and art, and their relations to agriculture and modern industry
which came to be associated with the group known as Distributist.
Armed with the Summa of St Thomas and the papal encyclicals,
especially Rerum Novarum, they set out upon a perhaps too idealistic
campaign of social justice and economic emancipation. Fr Vincent
was the enthusiastic inspirer of the group, its theological adviser, and
often the mouth-piece who put its ideals into terse and epigrammatic
utterance.’86 McNabb’s social vision was encapsulated in the Latin of
his memorial stone in the oratory at Ditchling, long since demolished,
Agri colendi pro foco non foro: ‘Cultivating the Fields for the Hearth
not the Market-place’.
He was disappointed by what he considered the feeble response
of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to the appeals of the
Catholic Land Movement. From 1930 onwards, a number of ‘Catholic
Land Associations’ had sprung up in different areas of the country,
with at any rate nominal episcopal approval. In 1935, the only Asso-
ciation to formulate a major scheme of re-settlement and training, on
land at Market Bosworth, in western Leicestershire, sought in vain

82
See Aidan Nichols, O. P., ‘The English Dominican Social Tradition’, in Francesco
Compagnoni, O. P., and Helen Alford, O. P. (eds.), Preaching Justice. Dominican Con-
tributions to Social Ethics in the Twentieth Century (Dublin 2007), pp. 394-441, at pp.
394-441. For the wider context, see Adrian Cunningham, ‘Primary Things: Land, Work,
and Sign’, The Chesterton Review XXII, 1-2 (1996), pp. 73-87, and Bryan Keating, ‘The
Catholic Land Movement in England’, in ibid., pp. 89-99.
83
Vincent McNabb, O. P., The Church and the Land (London: Burns, Oates and
Washbourne, 1923).
84
Idem., Nazareth or Social Chaos (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1933).
85
Idem., Old Principles and the New Order (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942).
86
Bernard Delany, O. P., ‘Father Vincent McNabb, O. P., 1868-1943’, a typescript
produced for the Dublin journal Studies, Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 6.


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the bishops’ permission to make an appeal for funds in the parish

churches. The bishops, whose financial focus was concentrated on
the building of schools, could be portrayed by Catholic critics of
Agrarianism as realistic. English Catholicism was disproportionately
urban compared with the nation at large. Contrastingly, McNabb was
gratified by the posters put up by the Government of George VI dur-
ing World War Two: ‘Use shanks’s mare’, ‘Grow more food’, ‘Dig
for victory’.87 Alas, the future lay with scientific farming in ever
larger units.

Conclusion

Vincent McNabb had a far more complex mind than some of his
more sweeping comments would suggest. Despite his role as a fer-
vent apologist for Roman Catholicism, he was not uncritical of the
historic and contemporary Church. He was positively scathing about
the financial ambitions of the mediaeval Cistercian abbeys and dis-
contented with the weak response of existing monasteries of men
and women in England to the self-support ideals he favoured for the
economy at large.88 As in his essay ‘Are Catholics selfish?’, he ex-
coriated the unwillingness of Catholics to work on the land which, in
his view, was an ethical necessity to help feed an urban population:
‘Shall we be blind enough to think that with this selfishness we may
hope still, to convert the world?’89
For such an austere liver, his liturgical instincts were very High
Church. He deplored the contraction of the Western Catholic marriage
rite which, he said, had lost the velatio nuptialis, the giving of the
nuptial blessing under a canopy, and the final crowning with flowers
as described by Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century, and for that mat-
ter the prostration before the altar and the six prayers and blessings
prescribed in the Sarum rite as published at Douai as late as 1604.90
In ‘The Riches of Ritual’ he attacks those who having attended high
Mass or a feast-day Benediction, said by way of complaint, ‘Give me
a simple service’ any time.91 On the contrary! The Church, he wrote,
‘covets to give God “a worship of supreme perfection”, which must
involve art, man’s ‘highest expression of intelligence and emotion’.92

87
From the anonymous obituary in The Tablet for 26 June, 1943.
88
Vincent McNabb, O. P., ‘The Mistakes of Monasticism’, in idem., Francis Thompson
and Other Essays, op. cit., pp. 69-74.
89
Idem., ‘Are Catholics selfish?’ in ibid., pp. 33-35, and here at p. 35.
90
Idem., ‘The Ritual of Marriage’ in ibid., pp. 39-46.
91
Idem., ‘The Riches of Ritual’ in idem., The Wayside. A Priest’s Gleanings (London:
Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1934), pp. 122-127, and here at p. 122.
92
Ibid., p. 126.


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22 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration

This will mean suitable architectural spaces, iconographic decoration,

stately choreography, the use of supernatural-sounding music, and the
lavish employment of incense.
In his funeral panegyric, Delany called McNabb’s life ‘according
to twentieth century standards astonishing and even disconcerting,
eccentric some will say; but remember, “eccentric” is a relative term:
it depends where you place your circle or fix your centre. To place
the centre in God and God’s eternal truth and glory is clearly to put
oneself out of joint with some of the elements of a world that forgets
or ignores God or even denies his existence altogether’.93 Valentine
recalled how an elderly friar had said of him while McNabb was still
living, ‘What that man needs more than anything else is a spiritual
director’. Valentine replied, ‘You might as well talk of directing
St Paul, St Dominic, Moses or a thunderstorm’. His interlocutor
said, ’But he would be different and perhaps not quite so eccentric’.
Valentine retorted that then he would not be Father Vincent. And he
preferred him as he was.
This discussion of his virtues or lack of them did not go away.
The London editor of the Cork Examiner reported in mid-October
1954 that ‘Petition forms are being signed in London this weekend
for forwarding to the proper Ecclesiastical quarter, asking for the
Church’s mark of Holiness on the late Fr Vincent McNabb, O. P., the
famous preacher and social teacher, who was the son of an Ulster
sea captain’.94 In early 1955 an enquiry took place into his possible
beatification. The Dominican postulator-general required the English
Provincial, then Hilary Carpenter, to produce testimony from fifty
witnesses.95 The list of those asked to comment extended eventually
to sixty-nine.96 A questionnaire was sent out from Haverstock Hill.
It consisted of a hundred queries, arranged under the headings,
Life, Virtues in general, Faith, Hope, Love of God, Love of One’s
Neighbour, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Obedience,
Chastity, Poverty, Humility, Gifts, Reputation for Sanctity during
Life, Reputation for Sanctity after Death, Signs after Death.97 This
was a translation of a Roman original, made available to the English

93
God’s Happy Warrior. A Sermon preached at Saint Dominic’s Priory church, London,
by Father Bernard Delany, O. P., on the 21st of June, 1943, at the Funeral Mass of Father
Vincent McNabb, O. P., S. T. M. who died on the 17th of June, 1943 (Oxford: Blackfriars,
1943).
94
‘Famous English Dominican. Petition to Review his Life and Work’, Cork Examiner,
19 October 1954. Consulted in Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 27.
95
Letter of 2 March 1955 from David Donohue to Bernard Delany, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2.
96
‘List of suggested witnesses of Fr Vincent McNabbb’s life and sanctity’, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 27.
97
Questionnaire, with accompanying letter dated ‘February 1955’, Dominican Archives,
McNabb Papers, Box 27.


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 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration 23

Dominican Postulator of Causes, Kenneth Wykeham-George, O.

P., in Latin and French. Not surprisingly, the witnesses found the
literary form rebarbative and resorted to informal prose for their
replies. The answers received were in toto sufficiently contradictory
that the idea was soon dropped. Talk of beatification re-emerged
around the date of the 50th anniversary of his death in 1993. A
couple of years later, a special issue of The Chesterton Review was
dedicated to him. The articles were overwhelmingly positive, but
one that was well-researched, by a former Dominican student, bore
the title, ‘Was Father Vincent McNabb a Dangerous Crank?’98
Delany, who had been his provincial and prior, and had been with
him when he died, planned an official biography that remained in-
complete and unpublished. Having completed a substantial fragment,
Delany was naturally displeased to hear that his successor as Provin-
cial had in effect approved an alternative biography - the work by
Ferdinand Valentine described at the opening of this article. ‘You say
[Valentine’s work] has grown to such an extent that it really amounts
to a “Life” and will be taken as such and that it will inevitably queer
my pitch. Yet you find it difficult to object to its publication (even
though it queers my pitch?). Am I to take it that I can save myself
the trouble of proceeding further with what I am trying to do?’99 But
Valentine had actually given Delany the chance to say he objected
to publishing his ‘characterological’ sketch: ‘I make little attempt to
give a life of him or to interfere with the work of writing such a life
which has been assigned to you’.100 Carpenter wrote to Delany the
year after publication of Valentine’s study, noting Delany’s disagree-
ments with Valentine’s ‘psychological interpretations’ and claiming
the need for a full biography remained. ‘I would ask you to absolve
me from any motive other than the desire to meet a pressing need’, i.
e. in view of the proposals for opening a process of beatification.101
Disheartened, and in the hardly convenient setting for such a
project of Stellenbosch in South Africa’s Cape Province where
he was student-master of a Jarrett foundation in the ‘Afrikaaner
Oxford’,102 Delany had re-read McNabb’s books, articles and
as much of his journalism as he could access – along with the
‘Notes’, copiously filled notebooks, that furnished his subject

98
Hugh Walters, ‘Was Father Vincent McNabb a dangerous crank?’, The Chesterton
Review XXII. 1-2 (1996), pp. 101-111.
99
Letter of 5 April 1954 from Bernard Delany to Hilary Carpenter, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2.
100
Letter of 7 November 1953 from Ferdinand Valentine to Bernard Delany, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2.
101
Letter of 12 August 1955 from Hilary Carpenter to Bernard Delany, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box. 2.
102
Kenneth Wykeham-George, O. P., and Gervase Mathew, O. P., Bede Jarrett of the
Order of Preachers (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1952), pp. 67-75.


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24 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration

with aide-memoires for his own thoughts and reflections on the

thoughts of others. The notebooks, Delany inferred, generated
much of his later writing. In their terse and disjointed charac-
ter they reminded him of ‘the method (or lack of method) of
Coleridge in his Table Talk, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld –
an unfinished style that does not always commend itself to English
readers’.103 Yet they left him with a ‘strange, inspiring presence’,104
persuading him that the hero-worship McNabb elicited in Delany’s
own early years in the English Dominican Province had not been
deluded or in vain. He could take comfort from Dorothy Finlayson’s
critique of the Valentine study, from which study the present essay
began.105 In her opinion, it ‘just glossed over’ such things as ‘his
glorious kindness to the sick and the poor, his love of little children,
his intense love of his brethren and the Order, his selflessness, his
love of souls outside the Fold, the way he inspired others to love
the Scriptures and St Thomas’, concluding, ‘oh, so many things’.106
Though Delany’s book was never written his assiduous gathering of
data and opinion from those who had known McNabb, now found
among the McNabb papers of the English Dominican Archives,
as well as his careful preservation of the testimonials sent him,
would assist any future evaluation of the person (the saint?) more
comprehensive than this brief commemoration can be.
Among the testimonials, I especially liked ‘Remarks’ made to
George Taylor, O. P., in the library of St Dominic’s Haverstock Hill,
which remembered conversation can probably be dated on internal
evidence to 1935. They were three in number. First: ‘Mysticism with-
out asceticism is the very devil’. Second: ‘I’ve had no time to read
the Fathers: all my time has been spent on St Thomas’. Third: on
declining to acquire for the conventual library Henry Davis’ newly
published Moral and Pastoral Theology which was destined to be-
come a standard work on presbytery bookshelves:107 ‘A Jesuit, a
manualist! My dear Father, everything is in St Thomas if you know
where to find it’.108 There we have his Thomism, in its strengths as

103
Bernard Delany, ‘Vincent McNabb’, p. 5, Dominican Archives, McNabb Papers,
Box 6. Compare idem., ‘Father Vincent McNabb in the Field’, Blackfriars XXXV. 412-
413 (1954), pp. 295-304, which reproduces much of this material. (The Notes, bound in
folders and alphabetically arranged, can be found in Boxes 13 to 23 of the McNabb Papers.
A ledger with a full index is included in Box 1.)
104
Bernard Delany, ‘Vincent McNabb’, art. cit., p. 6.
105
For Finlayson, see note 68 above.
106
Letter of 8 September, 1955 from Dorothy Finlayson to Bernard Delany, Dominican
Archives, McNabb Papers, Box 2. Emphasis is original.
107
Henry Davis, S. J., Moral and Pastoral Theology (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935),
4 volumes.
108
George Taylor, O. P., ‘Remarks of Fr Vincent’, Dominican Archives, McNabb
Papers, Box 26. Emphasis is original.


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 Vincent McNabb 1868–1943, an Anniversary Commemoration 25

well as its limitations. It was a biblical Thomism, for he stressed

the use of Scripture in Thomas (albeit without reference to Aquinas’
biblical commentaries, neglected as these were until quite recently).
It was a metaphysical Thomism, concerned, in the face of modern
unbelief, with creation ontology and the metaphysics of morals. It
was a spiritual Thomism, seeking to exploit the resources of a ‘spir-
itual master’ – to use the title for Thomas popularized by the French
Dominican Jean-Pierre Torrell.109 Lastly, it was, if the phrase may
be allowed, a ‘principial’ Thomism, concerned to draw out princi-
ples that could be applied in areas Aquinas had barely considered, as
with ecumenism and social philosophy. But it was hardly – save for
some references to Aquinas the Augustinian – a Thomism of patristic
ressourcement. The English Dominicans of the next generation, from
the 1930s to the Second Vatican Council would seek, at least in part,
to make good that lack.

Aidan Nichols
Blackfriars,
Buckingham Road Cambridge CB3 0DD,
Cambridge, United Kingdom

[email protected]

109
Jean-Pierre Torrell, O. P., Thomas d’Aquin, Maı̂tre spirituel (Fribourg: Editions
universitaires/Paris: Cerf, 1996).


C 2019 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers