Catholic Coffee Drinkers

Winter break affords me the rare luxury of surfing Gilbert Magazine’s backlogged articles and catch up on the many aspects of Chesterton’s thought being played out in the post-modern world.   One article that caught my eyes was Roy F. Moore’s short piece that defended the ChesterBelloc idea of Distributism as being quite distinct from Marxist and other Socialistic ideologies. 

In my experience with Distributism, the proponents of the system are often mistaken as liberals and labeled Utopians.  This is unfortunate, for while I see that Distributism has some flaws, the Capital-Papists, who act as if the Free Market was an ex cathedra dogma, often become quite reactionary to anything that does not resemble the Anglo-American economy they’ve grown used to.  The shame of this mindset is, of course, that in becoming so reactionary they have failed to see the flaws in a Free Market economy where the wealth of nations falls to the hands of a few and inhuman conditions grown more fierce on a daily basis.  Chesterton was all too right when he called the world mad, even if some debate with his outline of sanity. 

Yesterday was the feast of a great holy man and martyr of the English Church, St. Thomas a Becket.  Somehow, in all my impiety, I completely forgot about it!  I had the pleasure of seeing what was the site of St. Thomas’ great shrine, which is now unfortunately destroyed and one candle shines where it once stood.  St. Thomas’ memory is still alive and well, and pilgrims still cry to him for a cure and an example on how to live a holy life.  Like St. Thomas More, Thomas a Becket shows us what it is to be a willing martyr for the Church in face of political opposition.  I reccomend a reading of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral to get a fine retelling of the story with the usual message that to act is to suffer and to suffer is to act.  St. Thomas a Becket, ora pro nobis!

Hope you all are having a wonderful Christmas and enjoying every bit of the holiday season!

The Scientific breakthrough of the year has proved something that men like St. Augustine and TS Eliot had been affirming for centuries. According to SMH, reporting on Science’s monthly report on the Genome Project, “Memory of past events and imagination about the future are intimately linked. The part of the brain called the hippocampus plays a role in both.”

I may seem sarcastic when I say that science continues to prove what many philosophers and theologians have believed for ages, while also correcting many errors that they like to fall into.  The “forgotten liberal art” is making leaps and bounds to affirm the other liberal arts in ways unimaginable in the foregoing materialist empirical age.  Good show you great women and men who slave over your microscope!

“That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery.”