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St John Fisher
by Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P.

“DEAR reader! you are about to take part in perhaps the greatest tragedy of an age that wrote Hamlet and Macbeth. Greater even than the writer’s part will be yours, the reader’s and hearer’s part. Only your hearing ear and your seeing eye will bring the tragedy to its own. But your seeing eye and hearing ear must first recognise that a greater than Hamlet or Macbeth is here. They are but splendid fiction. But the tragedy of the first and only Cardinal to receive the martyr’s crown is as real as the Yorkshire moors where John Fisher was born, or as Tower Hill where the Cardinal Bishop of Rochester was beheaded. Do not expect anything melodramatic or miraculous in this tragedy of tragedies: all on the hero’s side is as sober in colouring as the heather on a Yorkshire moor. All is as normal as the steadiness of the hills or the falling of flakes of snow.

Search as you may in the plain tale of this Yorkshireman who was spokesman of England’s faith and chivalry, you will find no gesture, no stir, no noise, but only a humble self-distrusting quest of the best. But, dear reader, in this outwardly emotionless love of God and men to see a tragedy beyond all telling or seeing will call from you the best of your mind and heart.”

Paperback, size 8.5" x 5.5", 129 pages

St Elizabeth of Portugal
by Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P.

Today, people are fond of the saying, “Wherever you find a great man you find a great woman.” Regardless of how true that may be in modern politics, it is certainly true in the case of St. Elizabeth of Portugal. This saintly Queen and mother, worked tirelessly for the good of her subjects and her kingdom. The Author, Fr. Vincent McNabb, has the following to say:

“Gradually as the writer re-read his own story of the Saint’s life, this story of a Wife, a Mother, a Queen in the flagrant setting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seemed worth telling not only to the twentieth century but to all time. In the telling of it a thousand things worth man’s thought and scholars’ investigation would be suggested.

There would be the great problem of wedded love and wedded lawlessness which the modern world thinks it is meeting scientifically by a Decree Nisi of a Divorce Court. St. Elizabeth’s manner of dealing with her husband’s infidelities was evidence that the men of those days had no monopoly of heroism and that the home, no less than the Holy Places, could be fit for heroes. It is agreed by historians of King Diniz, her husband, that his public acts were wise enough to earn for him the title of the Portuguese Justinian. Unfortunately, historians of kings, especially of kings renowned for bravery or wisdom, have little to say of the queens who so often have had no little share in their husband’s triumphs if not on the battle-field at least in the council chamber.

It is our opinion—which our readers can reject as they will—that King Diniz’s chief claim to wisdom is that he knew a good wife when he wed her and that he recognized wisdom even when it came from the mouth of a woman whom not love but international politics had given him as a wife.”

Though a short work, Fr. McNabb beautifully elucidates the life of this saint, and makes her life a testament not only of peace in the affairs of the world, but even in the home, by prayer and self sacrifice.

Paperback, size 8" x 5", 55 pages

Old Principles and the New Order
by Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P.

The Distributist movement, led by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, and supported by Vincent McNabb, O.P., promoted a particular type of subsidiarity. Contrary to socialism and communism, which advocate for the redistribution of wealth, distributism seeks the distribution of the means of production to as many people as possible and advocates for a “return to the land,” with agriculture as the economic primary and the family as the basic unit of cooperative society. Per McNabb, the Church and her ministers must enter this territory: “The Church is not primarily interested in politics or economics, because neither politics nor economics are primary. Yet the Church is necessarily, and greatly interested in politics and economics because both politics and economics are moral.”

Striking at the heart of the morbid modern economic collective, Old Principles and the New Order states incontestably that isolation from God, guarantor of all good things, “can end only in social slavery or in social chaos.” Apropos in its own time, this message remains uncomfortably applicable to the contemporary age. And yet in its unabashed assertion of first principles, one still able to chart a course toward decent and happy living for each citizen and every community.

Paperback, size 8.5" x 5.5", 210 pages