You don’t think so? Have a look at this week’s announcements.

Skipping past the Endeavour piece. And don’t get me wrong, I am not that kind of phobic, but don’t those folks know when saturation is reached. I mean, we get it, ok?

About a book about a magazine, within which is talk about distributism and its well known proponents, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc .

The Bookman is pleased to present this excerpt from a forthcoming book, Land & Liberty: The Best of ‘Free America’, which is edited and introduced by Allan C. Carlson, with a preface by Sir Roger Scruton. It will be published by the Wethersfield Institute.

First, an intro to a Southern U.S. back-to-the-land movement:

The Agrarian revival of the 1930s is most commonly associated with the Twelve Southerners linked to Vanderbilt University, who produced I’ll Take My Stand at the beginning of the decade. For the most part, their project was literary and theoretical: an intellectual defense and revitalization of an agricultural civilization in the Old South. The “Northern” response came from the circle of writers and activists who launched the journal Free America in 1937.

One of the twelve, 

. . . Herbert Sebastian Agar, descended from an old Louisiana family. After prep school, he gained a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton, the latter in English. After teaching in a private school in New Jersey, he left for London, England, in 1928, where he became literary editor of The English Review and a correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal. He took still another editorial post at G. K.’s Weekly,the journal owned and edited by the novelist, poet, essayist, and Christian apologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Here he found answers to his question in the Distributism of Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

Its “basic idea” . . . 

. . . was simple. As Agar frequently stated, “power follows property.” Political democracy could function well only within a system of economic democracy, where productive property—homesteads, land, tools, and natural resources—was widely distributed among families. Put another way, true liberty could only exist within a nation where the great majority of citizens were holders of real property.

Belloc and Chesterton drew their initial inspiration for these matters from the 1891 Papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII examined the growing “social question.” In this new age, Leo observed, liberal or capitalist economies saw ever more property being concentrated in ever fewer hands, along with a surging number of families left trapped in a new form of poverty—what Belloc later called “the servile state.”

The solution to this crisis offered in Rerum Novarum was that the law “should favor ownership [of land and homestead], and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” It was in this way that “the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty [might] be bridged over.” The means to this end included land reform that transformed tenants into farm owners, the promotion of productive homesteads, limits on retail chain stores, the decentralization of industry, and worker participation in the ownership and control of necessarily big enterprises.

This task, Agar explained, was as much a moral challenge as a political and economic one. Where contemporary Liberalism tried to find some way to reconcile restricted ownership with political freedom, without any prospect for success, this new Conservatism “offers risks and responsibilities rather than bread and circuses.” The instinctive desire for property ownership was still alive in America, Agar argued; “it is the task for conservatives to foster it.”

Enough for now. But so far the argument limps badly, too idealistic, bordering on if not melting into utopianism and in any event a general guide pointing a largely agreed-on goal — agreed on by non-socialists anyhow.

The “as much a moral challenge as a political and economic one” part raises a flag, to be sure, in that it’s looking for a degree of morality that probably is more than a nation can expect form most of its citizens. 

Mainly, however, the problem lies with the alleged preferential option (uh-uh) of Pope Leo for “land reform that transformed tenants into farm owners, the promotion of productive homesteads, limits on retail chain stores, the decentralization of industry, and worker participation in the ownership and control of necessarily big enterprises,” is a pretty fair description of New Deal and outright socialist options.

GK was a lovable man who fought a good fight for common sense and Christianity as a quite readable journalist and Belloc a more interesting but probably less lovable but immensely stimulating writer. As social philosophers, however, ah dunno.

“Criminal” architects and their journalistic supporters, called to answer for their abominations visible for all to be offended by in the City of Light:

Nor is this visual hell [in Paris] the consequence of the need to build cheaply. Where money is no object, contemporary architects, like the sleep of reason in Goya’s etching, bring forth monsters.

The Tour Montparnasse (said to be the most hated building in Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Bastille, the Musée du quai Branly, the new Philharmonie, do not owe their preternatural ugliness to lack of funds, but rather to the incapacity, one might say the ferocious unwillingness, of architects to build anything beautiful, and to their determination to leave their mark on the city as a dog leaves its mark on a tree.

The perspicacious polymath Dalrymple reviews a book much to his taste in First Things.

The candidate I voted for, now mayor, looking more like the one I did not vote for in the pre-runoff election because of her hopping on the anti-cop bandwagon.

We opened the conversation by asking Lightfoot about statements she made last month during a “Chicago Newsroom” interview, in which she referenced a rumor she’d heard but not verified that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police told cops to take no action over Memorial Day weekend. In that May 30 interview, Lightfoot says the FOP told cops, “‘If you see some criminal activity, just lay back, do nothing.’”

We asked her to clarify.

“What I said then and what I’ll repeat now was ‘I hope that’s not true,’” Lightfoot told Schutz on Monday. “. . . my point in bringing it up was to simply say, ‘I heard this but I hope it’s not true.’ Unfortunately, the second part is the piece that hasn’t been reported.”

No. Unfortunately the second part does nothing to change her passing on a rumor without the slightest effort to shoot it down.

Hot off the Religion News Service desk.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (RNS) — Speaking at a black church Sunday (June 9) in a city that is nearly 75% percent African American, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, said white Christians who are racially insensitive are disregarding the gospel.

Actually, I heard that very thought quite a while ago.

I love the way he punches back, missing some times but scoring enough to make it worth his (and our) while.

President Trump compared his record to that of former President Barack Obama while defending his new deal with Mexico to reduce illegal immigration, and in Trump’s opinion, it’s no contest.

Right. What’s he supposed to say? It’s a pretty good deal, with all its flaws? Come on. He’s in a no-holds-barred daily battle with his enemies. Great show, as usual calling out his opponents:

“If President Obama made the deals that I have made, both at the Border and for the Economy, the Corrupt Media would be hailing them as Incredible, & a National Holiday would be immediately declared,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “With me, despite our record setting Economy and all that I have done, no credit!”

Again, what’s he supposed to say? “I’m in disagreement with my friends in the New York Times”? Or “The ladies and gentlemen of the press see it their way, I see it mine”? With a stoical shrug? No thank you.

Latest? Said ladies and gents have a gotcha moment that warms hearts of their fans:

The comment came after Trump lashed out at the New York Times in a series of tweets for casting doubt on the breakthrough he claimed for his deal with Mexico to avoid tariffs and “stem the tide” of migrants on their way to the U.S. southern border. The Times disputed the credit he said he deserved, reporting that aspects of the agreement had already been agreed upon months before the president’s tariff threat.

High-fives in the news room. One step ahead, fellows and gals, one step ahead. Catch him wherever possible. Catch-and-release in next day’s paper team? What’s on for tomorrow? We owe it to our readers, eager for talking points.

Newsies yearn for their papier-mâché man Obama? So cool you wonder if he’s even alive — who stiffed them time and again, to the irritation of the DC press corps, but so what?

Now they have Trump out there for all to see, a real human being, and should be grateful.

Pell became a marked man when he exposed Vatican Bank’s huge hidden cache of cash:

In April 2016, without consulting Pell, the Vatican Secretary of State suspends an external audit of Vatican finances. The National Catholic Register quotes an unnamed source as saying that officials are afraid of what the audit will find, and want to get rid of Pell.  A year later, Pell was charged in Melbourne with sexual abuse. And that was the end of the Pell threat to the Vatican Bank insiders.

This mafia thing, it could all be a coincidence, and in any case, there are other factors in play in the persecution of George Pell, who was widely hated by Australian anti-clericalists. But it’s curious all the same. George Pell was the No. 1 enemy of the ‘Ndrangheta in the Vatican, and he showed early on in his tenure, when he uncovered all the hidden euros, that he meant business. Now George Pell sits in solitary confinement in a prison cell in Melbourne, convicted on pathetically shabby charges. The old guard in the Vatican won. The world is as it always was.

But his recently completed appeal seems to have hit the mark. If it did — it takes months for the decision — he might get back in the Vatican saddle.

Female victims multiply, males and gay priests decline.

Male victimization and homosexual priests rose together through the 1980s and have since fallen together. These twin waves have largely receded. Female victimization has not fallen, persisting today at roughly the same level as in the 1980s. See the figure below.

Key Findings:

• Overall, clergy sexual abuse of minors is recently rising: The priest sexual abuse of children dropped to an all-time low just after 2002 but has since disturbingly risen, though it remains well below its peak in the 1980s. Reports of current abuse averaged 7.0 per year from 2005-09, rising to 8.2 per year from 2010-14, a 17% increase. In the 1980s, there were an average 26.2 reports of current abuse per year. (See Figures 2 and 6 in the main report.)

FYI, Ruth Institute is on the no-fly list of the wild ‘n wooly Southern Poverty Law Center. Pay yr money, take your choice. Mine’s on Ruth, especially in view of the SPLC’s long-over-due fall from grace or at least its fall from unquestioning credibility.

I was in the middle of this story some years back, not about bishop as abuser and high-liver but as greedy for land owned by some aged sisters in which project he was bucked by the Jesuit president of Wheeling Jesuit university, deposed by his board wary of offending the good man in charge, who looked bad then and looks worse now.

He’d come to the job after years as head man at the Immaculate Conception Basilica in Wash DC, which high-income position he held at some part of the eminent McCarrick and the deposed Wuerl incumbencies.

The webs they wove.

How was I in this bishop’s story? By blogging incessantly about the drama of the deposed Jesuit and his hardy defenders, all at

The Great West Virginia President Firing

When Julio Giulietti was shot off his horse

Issue will be aired.

Some qq I would have: Will they become 2nd-class citizens in a celibate-dominated church? Will they receive 1st-class education, as in theology, bible study, and above all, preaching? Will celibacy continue to be respected etc.?

Call me suspicious.

Actually, Kasper is saying the right things (as if my endorsement carried weight):

“Personally, I’m very much in favor of maintaining celibacy as an obligatory way of life with a commitment to the cause of Jesus Christ, but this doesn’t exclude that a married man can carry a priestly service in special situations,” Kasper said.

In any case, the article touches many bases, including those marked by your faithful servant, Mr. Suspicious.