Vincent McNabb

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Fr. Vincent McNabb
Fr. Vincent McNabb

Very Reverend Vincent McNabb, O.P. (July 8, 1868 – June 17, 1943) was an influential Irish scholar and priest. Father McNabb was born in Portaferry, County Down, Ireland, the tenth of eleven children. He died at St. Dominic's Parish in London. He is buried in St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, London.

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[edit] Education and Vocation

Young Vincent was educated during his schooldays at the diocesan seminary of St. Malachy's College, Belfast. On November 10, 1885 McNabb joined the novitiate of the English Dominicans at Woodchester in Gloucestershire, England and was ordained in 1891. After studies at the University of Louvain (where he obtained in 1894 the degree of lector in Sacred Theology) he was sent to England where he spent the remainder of his life in service to the English people.

[edit] Career

Fr. McNabb was a member of the Dominican order for 58 years and served as a professor of philosophy at Hawkesyard Priory, prior of Holy Cross Priory, priory librarian, a lecturer at the University of London, as well as serving in various official capacities for his Dominican province. With his hand-loomed habit and cobbled boots he was a fixture of London for half a century. Tens of thousands of people would have heard him preach in Hyde Park where he did not shy away from taking on all challengers, Protestants, atheists, and freethinkers, before vast crowds every Sunday, or would have heard him debate such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw in the city's theaters and conference halls on the burning social issues of the day.

Fr. McNabb was described as a 13th-century monk living in 20th-century London, pursuing such tasks as reading the Old Testament (and taking notes on it) in Hebrew, reading the New Testament (and quoting from it) in Greek, and reading the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (and writing his reflections on them) in Latin. Throughout his life, Fr. McNabb has little to call his own, except his Bible, his breviary, and his copy of St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae. He never slept in a bed, instead sleeping on the wooden floor of his cell, nor did he own a chair. When studying, reading, writing or praying, he was on his knees, and like St. Dominic, walked everywhere he went.

Fr. Vincent McNabb's Grave
Fr. Vincent McNabb's Grave

McNabb's mission was threefold: the first was reunion between the Catholic Church and the Anglicans, the second was social justice inspired by St. Thomas and Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, which called upon "every minister of holy religion…to bring to the struggle [for a broad distribution of property] the full energy of his mind and all his powers of endurance" [1]; and the third was to shore up both faith and reason, both of which were and are under assault by modernists, with doctrinal foundations.

With this mission in mind, Fr. McNabb felt his first priority was service to the poor. He fulfilled this by catechizing poor children and visiting the sick and dying, even going so far as to scrub the floors of incapacitated strangers who had no one to clean for them. An extension of his charity to the poor can be found in his dedication to the idea of distributism.

[edit] Social Justice

Along with English writers/thinkers G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, Fr. McNabb saw that those who were poor in religion and property should have both. What McNabb brought to the movement was a Thomistic analysis of modern economic, social, and political structures, which remains valid today. That analysis is, above all, an argument against "economic rationalism" and "social planning" because McNabb saw clearly how the goal of both was the sacrificing of the family upon the altar of so-called Efficiency.

[edit] Quotes

  • "We preach not only from the pulpit, but we preach as we step up to it and away from it."
  • "You and I are in the Church. Some of us are grateful to God that we were within that Church within almost a few hours of being born. And we have lived long years in that Church and never with a sense of disappointment, save at our own failures. It has been everything to us. It has been Christ to us. All its great sacraments that we have received have been instituted by Him with such a fitness for us that sometimes we wondered if they had not been made especially for us, and its organization, God's special mercy to us. How we should thank God that He instituted Peter as a Rock on which His Church is built, and the successors of St. Peter to carry on that work of the Church, and for the bishops and clergy. I speak, not as one of them and the most unworthy, but as one who, from childhood, has received those mercies and as one of a family who stood morning by morning at the altar. I will not say, my dear brethren, that it is a great duty to have continued loyally to the Church; it is a privilege." - From his last homily st St. Dominic Parish.
  • "I went to see him (Chesterton) as he died. I asked to be alone with the dying man. There that great frame was in the heat of death, the great mind was getting ready, no doubt, in its own way, for the sight of God. It was Saturday, and I think that perhaps in another thousand years Gilbert Chesterton might be known as one of the sweetest singers to that ever-blessed daughter of Sion, Mary of Nazareth. I knew that the very finest qualities of The Crusaders was one of the endowments of his great heart, and then I remembered the song of the Crusaders, Salve Regina, which we Blackfriars sing every night to the Lady of our love. I said to Gilbert Chesterton: "You shall hear your mother's love song." And I sang to Gilbert Chesterton the Crusader's song: "Hail, Holy Queen!"
  • "I have devoted my life to the preaching of platitudes - it is one of the satisfactions of my life. I like the old things - sun and moon, fresh air, bread and butter, work, friendship, avoiding the occasions of sin. Sometimes the devil would say to me, "Now, Father Vincent, people don't like those sort of things, give them something modern." My Guardian Angel says, "It isn't your duty to be modern. You must give something true."
  • "It is a great delight to me to go out like this in my Dominican habit. I'm a poor specimen, of course, but I am a Black Friar. I should think anyone could see that. A part of London is called after my people. I'm a piece of Old London walking about. I have to confess as it were to being proud. I am not worthy of it, of course, but still I am proud of it even if it is not proud of me."
  • "In the course of my professional life of many years I have come across many groups of well-meaning persons who seem to have great trouble in accepting the rulings of omniscience. I always remember a study circle that met during the 1914-1918 war to discuss the subject of war and peace. Speaker after speaker of both genders and all grades of society stood up and gave good advice to God. I found it very difficult to continue to sit and listen to it. If God had not given me a heart of mirth I could not have stayed. I thought "I can't speak very solemnly about this. I shall introduce a little levity to relieve the anguish of mind." So I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, before I die I would like to found a society quite new but quite necessary - a society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Almighty God." One of the memories of my life is that in less than forty-eight hours I received a very pained message from a dear old gentleman who rebuked me for my levity and I had been nearly dead with their very-near-blasphemy!"
  • "One of my chief hecklers in the ghetto had a dear daughter who became a Catholic. She married a man who ran away from her within a year. She looked after her father and her mother-in-law. She died of a broken heart. Her father told me that every year on the anniversary of her death he used to go up to the Sister Superior of the hospital where she died and take some flowers. He said, "I couldn't go this year; I couldn't afford the flowers." I will tell you in my unworthiness what happened last Thursday (I'm not sure I can tell it!) I was at a street corner talking. He stood there silent, not a word. At nine o'clock I moved away. He said, "Are you going to walk back? You shouldn't, you know. Here's your fare." Blessed are the poor! Few things have ever touched me more than that. Out of his poverty, he offered me my fare. Imagine that coming from one who has not the faith. What am I to do when I see him next? To kiss his feet would be unworthy of him. I shall pray and I ask you to pray that God my give him the consolation of the Faith."
  • "At my years there is the great trumpet of death and how to prepare for that is a great concern. Perhaps the best preparation for that uncertain tomorrow is the fulfilling of the duties of the certain today. Great trumpets are sounding telling us to prepare with a preparation of love that will make death merely the change from one mode of loving God to another."

[edit] Quotes about Fr. McNabb

“ "... he is one of the few great men I have met in my life; that he is great in many ways, mentally and morally and mystically and practically... nobody who ever met or saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him." G. K. Chesterton ”
“ "The greatness of his character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgement, was altogether separate from the world about him... the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness... I can write here from intimate personal experience ... I have known, seen and felt holiness in person... I have seen holiness at its full in the very domestic paths of my life, and the memory of that experience, which is also a vision, fills me now as I write — so fills me that there is nothing now to say." Hilaire Belloc ”
“ "Father Vincent is the only person I have ever known about whom I have felt, and said more than once, 'He gives you some idea of what a saint must be like.' There was a kind of light about his presence which didn't seem to be quite of this world." Ronald Knox ”

[edit] Bibliography

  • St. Thomas Aquinas and Law Catholic Truth Society Pamphlet (1931)
  • Bishop Brownlow (1830-1901) Catholic Truth Society pamphlet (1902)
  • Where believers May Doubt : or, Studies in Biblical Inspiration and Other Problems of Faith, Burns and Oates (1903)
  • Oxford Conferences on Prayer – Herder (1904)
  • Oxford Conferences on Faith – Herder (1905)
  • Our Reasonable Service - Benziger Bros. (1913)
  • Children's Hour of Heaven on Earth, P.J. Kenedy (1914)
  • Europe's ewe-lamb and other essays on the Great War, R&T Washbourne (1916)
  • Doctrinal Witness of the Fourth Gospel - Catholic Truth Society pamphlet (1922)
  • From a Friars Cell - P.J. Kennedy (1923)
  • The Mysticism of St. Thomas - Basil Blackwell (1924)
  • The Church and the Land 1927 Benziger Bros. Pamphlet (1927)
  • Infallibility – Herder (1927)
  • The Catholic Church and Philosophy (Calvert Series) Macmillan (1927)
  • New Testament Witnesses to St. Peter - Benziger Bros. (1928)
  • Thoughts Twice-Dyed - Benziger Bros. (1930)
  • New Testament Witnesses to Our Blessed Lady - Sheed & Ward (1930)
  • God's Book and Other Poems - St. Dominic's Press (1931)
  • Nazareth or Social Chaos - Burnes Oats and Washbourne (1933)
  • Geoffrey Chaucer: A Study in His Genius and Ethics - B. Humphries (1934)
  • Wayside, a Priest's Gleanings - Benziger Bros. (1934)
  • The Craft of Prayer (1935)
  • St. John Fisher - Sheed & Ward (1935)
  • Science of Prayer (A Revised Edition of Oxford Conferences on Prayer) - St. Dominic's Press (1936)
  • The Craft of Suffering : Verbatim Notes of Instruction on Suffering Given During Retreats at the Cenacle Convents (Sisters of the Cenacle) 1930-35 (1936)
  • God's Way of Mercy, Verbatim Notes of Retreat Instructions (1936)
  • Francis Thompson and Other Essays - Intro. by G. K. Chesterton - B. Humphries (1936)
  • Frontiers of Faith and Reason - Sheed and Ward (1937)
  • God's Good Cheer – (1937)
  • St. Elizabeth of Portugal - Sheed and Ward (1937)
  • The Church and Reunion (1937)
  • In Our Valley, Notes on Retreat Instructions - Benziger Bros. (1938)
  • Life of Our Lord; to the Reader - Sheed & Ward (1938)
  • Joy in Believing - Burnes, Oats & Washbourne (1939)
  • Mary of Nazareth - P.J. Kennedy (1939)
  • St. Mary Magdalen - Burnes & Oates (1940)
  • Eleven, Thank God - Sheed and Ward (1940)
  • Confession to a Priest - Catholic Truth Society (1941)
  • Some Mysteries of Jesus Christ – Benziger (1941)
  • Catholics and Nonconformists - pamphlet, Catholic Truth Society (1942)
  • Did Jesus Christ Rise form the Dead? - Catholic Truth Society (1943)
  • Old Principles and the New Order - Sheed and Ward (1942)
  • An Old Apostle Speaks - pamphlet, Blackfriars (1946)
  • A Father McNabb Reader - P.J. Kennedy (1954)
  • The Prayers of Fr. McNabb - pamphlet, Newman (1955)
  • A Vincent McNabb Antholgy. Selections from the Writings of Vincent McNabb, O.P. Blackfriars (1955)

[edit] External links