Background
Belloc, Hilaire was born on July 27, 1870. He was a son of Louis Swanton and Bessie Rayner (Parkes) Belloc.
Belloc, Hilaire was born on July 27, 1870. He was a son of Louis Swanton and Bessie Rayner (Parkes) Belloc.
Hilaire Belloc grew up in England, and would spend most of his life there. His boyhood was spent in Slindon, West Sussex. He was a student of Oratory School, Edgbaston, and Balliol College, University of Oxford (Bachelor of Arts). Mr. Hilaire became a Brackenbury history scholar and 1st Class in Honour History Schools in 1895.
Mr. Belloc was known to be an author, poet, and essayist. He was a member of British parliament from 1906 to 1907. Hilaire Belloc made several lecture tours of the United States with G. K. Chesterton.
Military service: Joined the French Army in 1891 and served in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery at Toul, France.
In 1937, Hilaire Belloc was invited to be a visiting professor at Fordham University by university president Robert Gannon. Mr. Belloc delivered a series of lectures at Fordham which he completed in May of that year. While pleased to accept the invitation, the experience left him physically exhausted and he considered stopping the lectures early.
Mt. Belloc suffered a stroke in 1941 and never recovered from its effects. He died on 16 July 1953 at Mount Alvernia Nursing Home in Guildford, Surrey, from burns and shock following a fall he had while placing a log into a fireplace at King's Land. He is buried at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation of West Grinstead, where he had regularly attended Mass as a parishioner.
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An 1895 graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, Belloc was a noted figure within the University, being President of the Oxford Union, the undergraduate debating society. He went into politics after he became a naturalised British subject. A great disappointment in his life was his failure to gain a fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford in 1895. This failure may have been caused in part by his producing a small statue of the Virgin and placing it before him on the table during the interview for the fellowship.
From 1906 to 1910 he was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament for Salford South. During one campaign speech he was asked by a heckler if he was a "papist." Retrieving his rosary from his pocket he responded, "Sir, so far as possible I hear Mass each day and I go to my knees and tell these beads each night. If that offends you, then I pray God may spare me the indignity of representing you in Parliament." The crowd cheered and Belloc won the election.
His only period of steady employment was from 1914 to 1920 as editor of Land and Water, a journal devoted to the progress of the war. Otherwise he lived by his writing and was often impecunious.
One of Mr. Belloc's most famous statements was "the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith"; this sums up his strongly held, orthodox Catholic views, and the cultural conclusions he drew from them. Those views were expressed at length in many of his works from the period 1920-1940. These are still cited as exemplary of Catholic apologetics. They have also been criticised, for instance by comparison with the work of Christopher Dawson during the same period.
As a young man, Hilaire Belloc lost his faith. Then came a spiritual event, which he never discussed publicly, that returned him to Catholicism for the remainder of his life.
Hilaire Belloc's Catholicism was uncompromising. He believed that the Catholic Church provided hearth and home for the human spirit. More humorously, his tribute to Catholic culture can be understood from his well-known saying, "Wherever the Catholic sun does shine, there's always laughter and good red wine." He had a disparaging view of the Church of England, and used sharp words to describe heretics, such as, "Heretics all, whoever you may be/ In Tarbes or Nimes or over the sea/ You never shall have good words from me/ Caritas non-conturbat me". Indeed, in his "Song of the Pelagian Heresy" he becomes quite strident, describing how the Bishop of Auxerre, "with his stout Episcopal staff/ So thoroughly thwacked and banged/ The heretics all, both short and tall/ They rather had been hanged".
At the time of his writing, the Islamic world was still largely under the rule of the European colonial powers and the threat to Britain was from Fascism and Nazism. Mr. Belloc, however, considered that Islam was permanently intent on destroying the Christian faith, as well as the West, which Christendom had built. In The Great Heresies, Belloc grouped the Protestant Reformation together with Islam as one of the major heresies threatening the "Universal Church".
Hilaire Belloc cited the many beliefs and theological principles Islam shares with Catholicism. For Mr. Belloc, the common ground includes the unity and the omnipotence, personal nature, all-goodness, timelessness and providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all things, and His sustenance of all things by His power alone, the world of good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in war against God, with a chief evil spirit, the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this life, coupled with the doctrine of reward and punishment after death, the Day of Judgment with Christ as Judge, and the Lady Miriam (Mary) as the first among womenkind—and exactly which, in Mr. Belloc's view, identify it as a heresy: where Islam decisively diverges from Catholicism is the "denial of the Incarnation and all the sacramental life of the Church that followed from it"—with Islam regarding Jesus as a merely human Prophet.
Quotations:
Mr. Belloc's 1937 book The Crusades: the World's Debate, he wrote:
"The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved — to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? ... There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine.... We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice.... Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril."
Served as driver 8th Regiment, French Army.
Physical Characteristics: He was powerfully built, with great stamina, and walked extensively.
Quotes from others about the person
At his funeral Mass, homilist Monsignor Ronald Knox observed, "No man of his time fought so hard for the good things."
Mr. Belloc married Elodie Agnes Hogan on June 16, 1896. Elodie and Belloc had five children before her 1914 death from influenza: Louis, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Hilary, Peter. After Elodie's death, Belloc wore mourning for the remainder of his life, keeping her room exactly as she had left it.