Michael Coren, at Catholic World Report, comments on the case for G. K. Chesterton as a saint. I as a Protestant don’t have a dogma in this fight, but it’s a great piece, in particular because Coren, as a man of Jewish ancestry, addresses the issue of antisemitism (which I’ve written about here, but with less expertise).
He did make some hurtful and thoughtless comments, in particular after his brother’s death, but when the testing time came—the rise of the Nazis—he was as active as he was angry. While many on the left were unsure how to respond to Hitler’s pagan racism, and some even sympathetic, Chesterton demanded that the Jewish people be protected and rescued. He was vehemently anti-Nazi before it was fashionable and before it was safe.
Tip: Daniel Crandall.
Chesterton made observations about us Jews, some of them less than complementary (http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1491739: Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mind and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything like a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperate and magnanimous address on “Zionist Policy,” he can actually say a thing like this, “The Arabs need us with our knowledge,
and our experience and our money. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks.” One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else
in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity. It is much as if President Wilson were to say, “Unless America deals with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires.” But would
President Wilson say it? It is as if the German Chancellor had said, “We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy.” But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that? Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it? Would even the Turks say, “The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will perhaps be in danger of massacres.” I suspect that a Turk would see the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves.
). But those observations were often honest opinions, and some were warnings that the early Zionist movement would have been well advised to heed.
I reserve antisemitism to people who actually want to harm us. If he were alive today I might be offended that Chesterton thinks I cannot be a proper American, but that is not enough to call him an enemy.
“Before it was fashionable and before it was safe”:
always high praise.
“Before it was fashionable…”
For Chesterton, right was right and never a fad. When he realized a mistake, he admitted it and corrected.
When a confirmed Calvinist like Doug Wilson says that he wants the Kingdom to move toward a more “Chestertonian Christianity” …