Soon after
entering the Catholic Church in the early 1920s, G.K. Chesterton published St. Francis of Assisi, a “sketch of St.
Francis of Assisi in modern English.” This he followed up a decade later with a
companion volume, Saint Thomas Aquinas:
The “Dumb Ox”.
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| "The Dumb Ox of Sicily" |
Both books are
clearly the work of an intelligent amateur, an enthusiast (in the good
sense). Neither book was ever intended
as authoritative or even — the bane of honest Academics — particularly
original. As Chesterton informed his
readers, “It will be understood that in these matters I speak as a fool; or, as
our democratic cousins would say, a moron; anyhow as a man in the street.”
(G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas:
The “Dumb Ox”. New York: Image
Books, 1956, 146.)
Despite that (or
perhaps because of that), the books are remarkable — and remarkably effective, if
taken for what they are. For example, St. Francis of Assisi was very
successful at highlighting the absurdity of the efforts of the Fabian Society
and other forms of religious or spiritual socialism that inherited the mantle
of the “Neo-Christian” movement of the first half of the nineteenth century.
This was— and
continues to be — a serious problem, as anyone familiar with the so-called
“Spirit of Vatican II” can testify. As
Dr. Julian Strube of Heidelberg University argues, pre-Marxist socialism of the
early nineteenth century and the new religious ideas of “the Enlightenment” of
the late eighteenth century were inextricably linked together, each influencing
the other’s development.
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| Henri de Saint-Simon |
The “New
Christianity” of Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fournier, and the
“Neo-Catholicism” of Félicité de Lamennais were essentially the invention of a
new “esoteric” and socialist religion under the name of Christianity, but
divided into a number of competing sects. The movement had an enormous influence on modern
ideas of religion (Julian Strube, Ein Neues
Christentum: Frühsozialismus, Neo-Katholizismus und die Einheit von Religion
und Wissenschaft, Koninklijke Brill NV. Leiden, 2014).
This was
especially the case regarding the interpretation and understanding of Catholic
social teaching. The term “social
justice” came out of the New Christian movement, and continues to be understood
by many people in light of those principles down to the current day. This is in spite of the work of Pope Pius XI,
as analyzed by CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., to help
people understand Catholic social doctrine in light of traditional philosophy
(especially the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas) and natural law theory.
The New Christian
movement’s hijacking of the principles of orthodox Christianity naturally alarmed
Leo XIII and subsequent popes; the reference to “new things” in Rerum Novarum was not by chance, nor was the
focus of his first three encyclicals accidental. All were directed at the growing problem,
variously called spiritualism, magnetism, social Christianity, New
Christianity, Neo-Catholicism, etc., etc.
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| William Hurrell Mallock |
As New
Christianity was particularly strong in Anglican “High Church” circles —
ironically as a result of the Oxford Movement — the popes’ focus on the problem
favorably impressed such people as William Hurrell Mallock, Robert Hugh Benson,
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. It seems to have influenced the former’s
positive attitude toward the Catholic Church and the conversions of the latter three.
Strube has
identified four major characteristics of what he terms “socialist religiosity”
in opposition to orthodox Protestant or Catholic Christianity. Not all of these are present in all forms of
socialist religion/religious socialism, but they are prevalent. These are,
1) A reliance on
Enlightenment religious criticism.
2) A different
philosophy of history, almost always centered on the class struggle and
portraying Jesus as a social/socialist revolutionary.
3) An artificial
synthesis of science and religion, forcing one to conform to the principles of
the other without attempting to reconcile them.
4) A union of
civil and religious society, whether subsuming the State into the Church or vice versa, to establish and maintain
“universal harmony.” (Ibid.; cf. Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society.
London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1963, 18-21.)
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| David Émile Durkheim |
Interestingly,
“universal harmony” in this life was the goal of the school of socialist
thought founded by the French sociologist David Émile Durkheim, that he called
“solidarism.” Derived directly from the
“religion of humanity” of Auguste Comte (who for a while was secretary to Henri
de Saint-Simon, founder of the short-lived cult of “New Christianity”),
Durkheim’s solidarism had a great deal of influence on modernism, which
continued the tradition of “Neo-Catholicism” founded on the work of Hugues-Félicité
Robert de Lamennais. (Strube, Ein Neues Christentum, op. cit., 161.)
Father Heinrich
Pesch, S.J., would reorient solidarism along genuinely Christian/Thomist lines,
and transmit this tradition to his first generation of students. Two of these students, Fr. Gustav Gundlach,
S.J., and Fr. Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., were members of the Königswinterkreis discussion group
co-founded by another student of Fr. Pesch, the jurist and political scientist
Dr. Heinrich Rommen, and were called to Rome in 1931 to consult on the writing
of Quadragesimo Anno in order to
refute as effectively as possible the New Christian/Neo-Catholic schools of
socialist-religious thought.
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| Eugène Melchior de Vogüé |
Unfortunately, by
1931 the principles of New Christianity had hijacked the interpretation of Rerum Novarum forty years previously
(cf. the Vicomte Eugène Melchior de Vogüé, “The Neo-Christian Movement in
France,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
January 1892, Vol. 84, No. 500, 239).
Thanks in large measure to the efforts of Msgr. John A. Ryan of the
Catholic University of America, whose mentor, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, was
prominent in socialist and spiritualist circles, principles of New Christianity
rapidly became the accepted standard of interpretation of Leo XIII’s encyclical. This was despite the pope’s clear intent of using
it as a powerful refutation of the socialist and pseudo-religious principles of
New Christianity — the “new things” to which he referred in the opening
passage.
Consequently,
even Fr. Pesch’s Catholic solidarism was reinterpreted by those outside the
relatively small circle of his first generation of students in terms of socialist
New Christian principles. This turned
the interpretation of Fr. Pesch’s thought 180 degrees from its original intent,
and undermined Quadragesimo Anno just
as Rerum Novarum had been sabotaged.
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| Richard Henry Tawney |
It should
therefore come as no surprise to discover that the Anglican socialist economist
and writer Richard Henry Tawney, who was one of the leaders of the Fabian
Society, serving on its executive from 1920 to 1933 (Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society.
London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1963, 288.), was “in” to what Strube loosely
terms “esotericism,” and that Chesterton called “Esoteric Buddhism.” A few years prior to the publication of
Chesterton’s book on St. Francis, Tawney had presented a grossly distorted
version of Christianity in The
Acquisitive Society (1920) that accepted the basic principles of “New
Christianity” as a given (cf. Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophies at War, op. cit., 22).
Adding insult to
injury, the Fabians and other New Christians had adopted St. Francis of Assisi as a kind of patron saint. This was for presumed virtues that Il Poverello never exhibited, and which
would have been completely alien to him.
These included St. Francis’s alleged rejection of the tyrannical authority
of the pope, assertion that true Christianity is socialist, and a presumed
syncretic acceptance of all faiths as equally valid — see, for example, Fabian
Society co-founder Havelock Ellis’s essay “St. Francis and Others,” collected
in Affirmations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926, and
George Bernard Shaw’s comments in the Preface to Back to Methuselah, 1896.
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| George Bernard Shaw |
Adding to that
Shaw’s rather waspish comment that Chesterton didn’t know what socialism is (and
his declarations of Mallock’s alleged stupidity for not being a socialist) gave
Chesterton sufficient reason to refute the “New Christian” ideas of religion,
politics, and economics, and other travesties of truth and common sense. And the best way to do that was, obviously
(at least for Chesterton), a book presenting a true picture of St. Francis.
Chesterton’s book
was so successful in refuting the Fabians’ romantic perversion of St. Francis’s
message that it called forth a counterblast a few years later. This was
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), which many consider Tawney’s magnum opus, and which (along with the
works of E.F. Schumacher) has become virtual Holy Writ for New Christianity.
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