Hilaire Belloc
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Hilaire Belloc’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
we are surrounded by an atmosphere of and presented with the machinery of anti catholic history history which produces its anti catholic effect not so much by misstatement of fact that is rare as by anti catholic selection anti catholic tone and anti catholic proportion
how are we to meet the evil how are we to teach our catholic youth true history that is catholic history for it behooves us to remember what in a protestant country it is easy to forget that the catholic church is not one of many opinions but the truth
its clergy are not part of the clergy of all denominations but the priests of god with sacramental power what it says definitively on any matter is not to use the modern jargon a subjective truth it is an objective truth
it is not the presentation of something in the mind it is the presentation of something that would go on being there though all human mind were destroyed and truth supports truth as untruth supports untruth catholic truth is not something stuck into general history like a pin into a pincushion it is part of the universal truth the same attitude which makes a man deny the morality of divorce
and affirm the morality of private property will make him tell the truth about history when he comes to write it in matters apparently remote from catholic doctrine
there is a catholic truth about the conquest of england or the war of the roses or the frankish monarchy in gaul quite as much as there is a catholic truth about the manichaean heresy or the nature of the reformation by this i do not mean that in these temporal matters dependent upon positive evidence there will not be differences in judgment among the most learned of catholic authorities but i do mean
that a whole library of different and conflicting books written by catholics and dealing with the history of europe would be catholic in nature and would teach catholic history and that a similar collection of books written by anti catholics however much they differed among themselves would be anti catholic in tendency and produce an anti catholic effect upon the reader and so far as they indoctrinated the reader
would be indoctrinating him in lies our first difficulty is the lack of text-books here we may note a very deplorable accident of the immediate past ever since modern accurate detailed history began pretty nearly every text-book of note has been written in direct antagonism of the faith of the mass of protestant work that goes without saying all the german protestant work
and all the english protestant work is anti-catholic the man who waved his arm at the british museum and said books written by dons to attack the church was exaggerating but there was something in what he said there is no answer to this truth to say that many of the writers are what is called fair to the catholic church you cannot be called fair to the truth
the truth is not one of two interesting antagonists around whom you have to keep a ring if you do not support it you cannot help attacking it to talk of being fair to the catholic church in history is exactly parallel to talking of a judge being neither partial on one side nor impartial on the other
a protestant historian is not to be commended for instance because he admits that many of the monasteries suppressed by thomas cromwell were well conducted rather is the catholic historian to be commended who thoroughly exposes the ill-conduct of many of these monasteries but who tells us what really happened
and what really happened was that the monastic institution was uprooted in england not because it had gone bad nor because it was outworn nor because it was unpopular but because it was for the moment unfashionable in the smart intellectual world of that generation because it was the chief defence of the papacy and of unity of religion and above all
because the king and the avaricious men who surrounded him wanted other people's goods.
These three things combined explain that capital disaster in English history, the fiscal and territorial revolution of 1539.
And if you do not put these three causes forward as the three great causes of the event, you are writing bad history.
it would be difficult to say why all the great text-books since modern history began have been anti-catholic with the exception of lingard and even the great lingard was influenced by the protestant society in which he lived and for which he wrote i can only connect so singular a phenomenon with the general story of catholic academic work the church was as it were taken aback by the onslaught of scepticism in the eighteenth century
the french political system the monarchy which was the chief defence of the church at that moment happened to be in decay and when the storm blew that institution over the scattered and defeated catholic army of europe took some time to rally it did not really rally till our own time there is also probably a large element of chance in the matter great historians are few just as great poets are few
at any rate whatever the cause there you have it every name you mention montesquieu momson michelet freeman stubbs tritschke and a host of minor ones tells the story of europe and of his own country against the church
the popular rhetorical historicans do the same thing the same is true of the dull and would-be accurate school-books green who wrote for sale leaves the innocent youth upon whom he imposed under the impression that all history led up to a divine climax the protestant society of his common room
and there may be i have not read them other later text-books continuing the same tradition the great compendiums such as the oxford history or the much superior rambaud and lvis are in the same boat section one
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