Monsignor Knox believed the common man "has been standing at a point in the road where modernism opens out on one side, and, if you like, intellectual suicide on the other. He is looking nervously down each of these in turn; the one thing that never seems to occur to him is ... to go straight on. Let him trust orthodox tradition to determine what he is to believe, and common sense to determine what is orthodox tradition."
"Common sense", "orthodox tradition" - if you detect in these words an echo of GK Chesterton, then you might like to know that for Monsignor Knox "He had been my idol since I read the Napoleon of Notting Hill as a schoolboy" and "Chesterton's philosophy, in the broadest sense of that word, have been part of the air I breathed, ever since the age when a man's ideas begin to disentangle themselves from his education. His paradoxes have become, as it were, the platitudes of my thought."
Likewise Chesterton regarded Knox as having done the most to help him decide to become a Catholic and had written to him requesting instruction. It was only because of scheduling difficulties that Chesterton was instructed and received by Father John O'Connor, the inspiration for Father Brown. One wonders what might have been had it been Father Knox, especially since both were founding members of the Detective Club.
Thus it seems very appropriate for the Library to follow last year's seminar with one on this eloquent and original writer, whose name is forever immortalised in a poem written, incidentally, by Chesterton:
Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed,
Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks,
To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed
Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox
FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE SEMINAR
WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE IN THE COMING WEEKS.
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