The English Dominican Social Tradition

Aidan Nichols OP

Vincent McNabb

• 1868-1943• Irish – Ulster, Newcastle• Entered aged 17,

ordained at 23• Woodchester & Louvain• 1920 to Haverstock Hill• Renowned as a preacher

on the ‘social question’• Speakers’ Corner• Distributism

Back to the Land

“Something began to say, & indeed sing within me, ‘When we come back to the earth as God made it, and God made it for us, we need never waste an ounce of material or a moment of time.”

• The Church & the Land (1926)

• Nazareth or Social Chaos? (1933)

• Old principles of the New Order (1942)

• Hawkesyard garden in WWI

‘Exodus’

• Holy Family at Nazareth as prototype of Christian Society

• Autarchy – self-support• Back to a life with God• Pre-enclosure ‘golden

age’• 1930s solution to

unemployment• Catholics wanting rural

presence, but lack of episcopal support

Bede Jarrett

• 1881-1934• Born Blackheath, south

London• Entered aged 17, ordained at

27• Influence of McNabb in

Woodchester• Political history at Oxford;

interested in Aquinas on justice – right order in society

• Social Theories of the Middle Ages

• Medieval Socialism

Socialism & Land Ownership

• Tutor Ernest Barker: ‘Associations’: neither state nor individuals alone can attain the common good

• Tried to make the term ‘socialism’ take a form acceptable to Catholic thought – radical for contemporaries

• Medieval no concept of absolute property ownership; doctrine of almsgiving; common law

“man’s life differs, yet are the categories which mould his ideas eternally the same.”

Education

• Thomistic theory of education, adapting to the individuality of each child

• Applied in his teaching at Laxton, Northamptonshire

• “power latent in womanhood to influence and re-construct society”

Distributism: Lay Dominicans

• Eric Gill & David Jones• Both innovative visual artists as well as prose writers• Part of Ditchling ‘back to the land’ community of Catholic

artists & craftspeople• Distributism: “widespread small ownership of property,

with the small family-farm as the essential foundation of the well-ordered society”

Eric Gill• 1882-1940• Born Brighton, son of a

nonconformist minister, to RC 1913

• Trained in masonry & calligraphy; letter-cutter

• At Ditchling, interest in Aquinas & person in society, how to live whole & holy in the city

• Arts & Crafts tradition • Guild of St Joseph & Dominic:

good making, labour & contemplation

• Doctrine collected in essays, Autobiography & letters

David Jones

• 1895-1974• Born Brockley, South London,

son of Welsh printer’s manager

• Major modernist poet• Camberwell Art School• WWI soldier• Westminster School of Art

under Gill, joined him at Capel-y-Ffin community

• Thomist theology of gratuitousness of creation & gratuity of artist’s work

• Human nature as ‘creative beast’

Gerard Vann

• 1906-1963• Entered aged 17,

ordained at 25• Born in Kent• One of original

community at Blackfriars Oxford

Bonum Commune

• Like Maritain, ‘integral’ humanism, open to the divine• Christian organic society: only possible with Thomism

– Reformation destroyed view of society as an organism, then political divorced from ethical

– Thomism over communism, liberalism & fascism

• Work as vocation, but contemplation and leisure essential to creativity

• The Divine Pity (1956) his spiritual classic: – Beatitudes have social implications– Welfare of souls as well as bodies

• Morality & War (1939): a major source for the PAX movement into & beyond WWII

Thomas Gilby

• 1902-1975• Born Birmingham, family

to RC on eve of WWI• Entered aged 16,

ordained priest at 24• Taught moral theology at

Blackfriars Oxford, then at Blackfriars Cambridge

• Edited new English bilingual edition of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae

Tradition builds the City

• Between Community & Society (1953)– Humane city: spiritual friendship through Christ’s Church– Eschatological civilised society over primitive ethnological

community• Principality & Polity (1958)

– Good state is civilised: justice through freedom & co-operation– best law is custom enforced, so tradition vital

“altogether there are good grounds for calling St Thomas the first Whig, if a Whig is a man who believes that the

social and political life should be run according to a reasonable constitution, and who reserves to himself the right of deciding to break it in cases where the ordinary

rules do not apply.”

Herbert McCabe

• 1926-2001• Irish father; took

citizenship at heart of the Troubles 1974

• Entered aged 23• Editor of New

Blackfriars from Cambridge 1964

Christian Socialism• Slant (1964-1970)

– Christian Marxism or Catholic Social Teaching?– PAX movement for nuclear disarmament, Spode

House• These issues to New Blackfriars under

McCabe:– Christian humanity & community require

socialism; – Church corrupted by capitalism, needs to help

transform society

“the teaching of the Bible is that the goal of humankind, real unity in love can only be reached by dying to our injured human nature – the unity we have as members of Adam’s race – and rising again to a new physical human community in the risen Christ.”

Edward Booth

• 1928• Promoter of the social

teaching of the Church • Became Catholic while

reading history at Cambridge, then joined OP

• Schoolteacher• Returned to Cambridge,

doctorate in metaphysics

Catholic Social Thought

• Person as centre of social & economic life– Labour is more than a unit of power, it includes mind & skill– Personal links in the chain of production; echoes of Distributism– Work as expression of human dignity

• Magisterial CST – e.g. Gaudium et Spes - & economics of

• Erhard (Economics minister in Adenauer’s Germany)– As a model of prosperity in contrast with British social policy

• Baudhuin (Economics professor at Louvain):– Automation creates new forms of employment – Saw food supply would increase beyond population growth

• Thomistic: natural law dictates ownership of goods, duty to give to those in need, need for the state to serve

An English Tradition

• Thomas Aquinas’ influence a common thread• In a great variety of forms, but not popular

“The general failure of Catholic social teaching to inculturate itself into an indigenous English form… was matched by the inability of the British party system to

generate a visionary yet practicable social politics… for civil society at large.”

“An impressive corpus of social reflection that one day may be useful to a culture at present divided between

futurism and a love of historical roots.”