Prophecy and the Poor: Fr Vincent McNabb and Distributism

Extract

Fr Vincent McNabb (1868-1943) was one of the most widely- known Dominicans of the English Province from the years prior to the First World War up to his death in the Second. Apart from his work internally within the Order he was well-known to Londoners for his appearances for the Catholic Evidence Guild at Speakers’ Comer in Hyde Park and for his involvement in social action, which sometimes made the tabloid headlines. He was involved in the ecumenical movement, in speaking and writing prolifically on all kinds of topics on all sorts of platforms and in all kinds of publications, sometimes far beyond Catholic or even Christian circles. He was a spiritual director and retreat giver of distinction, and he gave lectures on Aquinas under the auspices of the University of London Extension Lectures scheme — an unforgettable teacher according to many students. Clearly an apostolate of remarkable range.

He was a man who aroused strong feelings, and some within the Order were critical of him. One of the grounds for criticism concerned his involvement with Distributism, the social and philosophical movement most commonly associated with Belloc and Chesterton, and it is this area of his life which provides the focus of this article.

McNabb was unique in the influence he wielded in this most lay of movements, although in a private letter of 1932 Fr Vincent denied being a Distributist. His rejection of the label can perhaps provide a point of departure for trying to understand the place of Distributism in McNabb’s thinking.

Fr Vincent was quite clear that he was, first, a Dominican priest and, secondly, a theologian. From an early age he had held firmly that priests should not be involved in politics — in 1914 he wrote in The Tablet that ‘Tragic events during my school life in the North of Ireland have given me a deep-seated distaste for the priest-politician’.