Thursday 24 October 2013

'The Inn Catholics' - Mike Hennessy to speak on Father Vincent McNabb OP...



Tuesday the 12th of November at 19.30 at the Greencoat Boys in Victoria.


Father McNabb was - with some notable exceptions, principally within his own Order - held in high esteem by his contemporaries, even by those such as George Bernard Shaw or the Webbs, founders of the socialist Fabian Society, who could have most been expected to dislike him. During Father McNabb’s life, G K Chesterton wrote of him, in the introduction to his, Father McNabb’s, book, Francis Thompson and Other Essays:

“Now I am nervous about writing here what I really think about Father Vincent McNabb for fear that he should somehow get hold of the proofs and cut it out. But I will say briefly and firmly that 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.”

Hilaire Belloc, who was in many ways temperamentally similar to Father McNabb, wrote this about him after his death in the Dominican journal Blackfriars in 1943:

“The greatness of his [Father McNabb’s] 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 [here, Belloc refers to Father McNabb visiting Belloc - at the latter’s request - immediately after the premature death of Elodie Belloc, his wife, in 1914] ... 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.”


Mike Hennessy, long-time Bellocian and a student of fine red burgundy wine, encountered the life and work of Vincent McNabb at the turn of the Millennium and has never recovered. A home-schooling father of eight children and a parliamentary official, he sees at close hand many of the glories and idiocies of which McNabb spoke and wrote, and has deepened his appreciation of, and admiration for, this saintly Dominican with each passing year.”


Tuesday 23 April 2013

Next 'Inn Catholic' Talk - Viscount Monckton to speak on 'Global Warming - The Scare that Died'...



Tuesday, 30 April 2013

19:30


Change of Venue!

The Greencoat Boy: 2 Greencoat Place, London, SW1P 1PJ (5 minutes walk from Victoria station).

Map: https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=SW1P+1PJ&aq=f&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=wl


The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, born 14 February 1952, “high priest” of climate skepticism, prevented several government-level scientific frauds while serving as a Downing Street special advisor to Margaret Thatcher, saving British taxpayers billions. In 1986 he was among the first to advise the Prime Minister that “global warming” caused by CO2 should be investigated. Two years later she made a speech predicting that temperatures would rise by 1 C° per decade, and set up the Hadley Centre for Forecasting: but she, like him, later changed her view.

Lord Monckton, businessman, newspaper editor, inventor of the million-selling Eternity puzzles, of the 100,000-selling Sudoku X puzzles and of a promising new treatment for infectious disease, Cambridge-trained classical architect, public orator and Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on climate change, is the world’s best-known climate sceptic. More than 3 million people have viewed his 2009 speech in the US giving details of the world “government” proposed by the UN in the draft Treaty of Copenhagen. The speech went platinum on YouTube in a week – the fastest-ever platinum for a political speech. In West Virginia on Labor Day, 2000, more than 100,000 attended a miners’ rally which he addressed live on a mountain-top – the only venue large enough. Tea Party rallies at which he spoke in Washington DC and in North Houston attracted 40,000 and 15,000 respectively. His article on climate science in the Sunday Telegraph on 5 November 2006 attracted 127,000 hits in two hours, crashing the paper’s website. His speeches at the St. Andrews and Oxford Unions were followed by student votes defeating climate alarmism for the first time in Scotland and England respectively. Wordpress ranked his summary of the draft Durban climate agreement in December 2011 as having received more hits than any other among its 500,000 blog postings on all subjects worldwide that day. A video of his talk to the Mannkal Foundation in Australia in July 2011 became the most-watched video in Australia in February 2012. In August 2012 his address to the World Federation of Scientists on climate economics drew praise from President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and led the Federation’s president, Professor Antonino Zichichi, to establish a permanent monitoring panel on the subject.