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Fascism and British Catholic Writers 1924–1939: Part 2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kevin L. Morris
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One of the best guides through the territory of the pro-Fascist sympathies of the British Catholic literati is Robert Speaight, who, in his biography of Belloc and his autobiography, achieved a dispassionate view of 1930s English Catholicism, while making no secret of his own moderate temperamental inclination to the Right, even admitting to having been attracted to Action Franchise. Speaking of the 1930s Catholic intelligentsia he remarks:

It was characteristic of a common train of thought that one of the most interesting ventures of [the Catholic publisher] Sheed and Ward was entitled Essays in Order, and that Order was the name of a . . . [Catholic] magazine ... we were so impatient with the shibboleths of the Left that the sophistries of the Right ... left us relatively undisturbed. The mystique of ‘order’ was worked for considerably more than it was worth, with an illegitimate extrapolation from the theological to the political field.

He refers to both the influence of continental Rightists and that of the Church in teaching Catholics to fear Communism. Of Belloc he observes he had ‘nothing but contempt for the representative government. ... he seemed to think that, on the whole, fascism was a good thing for foreigners.’

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 80 , Issue 936 , February 1999 , pp. 82 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

35 For Speaight's comments see The Property Basket Recollections of a Divided Life (Collins & Harvill Press, 1970) pp.164, 372Google Scholar, 220–21; and for Jerrold see his essay in Woodruff, Douglas (ed.) For Hilaire Belloc (Sheed & Ward, 1942)Google Scholar.

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42 Jerrold op. cit. (Sheed & Ward, 1939) pp. 152–5.

43 Lunn op. cit. (National Book Association [1937]) p.8.

44 Tablet 10 Apr. 1937, p. 506.

45 Tablet 15 July 1938, p.69.

46 Tablet 4 July 1936, p.7.

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70 Ib. p. 113.