Catholic Worker Classic Reissued: The Church and the Land by Fr. Vincent McNabb. Reprinted by IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia 2003.

Reviewed by Sheila McCarthy

Two years ago, an exciting new adventure in publishing began. IHS Press (Norfolk, VA) was founded exclusively to dedicate itself to republishing the great works in Catholic social thought of the last century. This comes as good news to all who have searched used bookstores to no avail looking for titles by Vincent McNabb, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Penty and others that Peter Maurin recommends in his Easy Essays. Peter enthusiasts need look no further, for all those mentioned are in the IHS catalog, in addition to Jean Ousset's Action and Heinrich Pesch's Ethics and the National Economy.

IHS Press recognizes in the currents of thought currently prevailing little that is different than a century ago: "value-free yet bureaucratic 'progressivism' on the one hand, and the rehashed, laissez-faire free-for-all of 'conservatism' on the other." The alternative to this two-sided coin remains the same-the social teaching of the Catholic Church. IHS Press wants to help people rediscover the works of Catholic economists, historians, and social critics who articulated how modern problems that stem from the false principles of "Reformation, Renaissance, and Revolution" are only made worse by industrialization and secularism.

The most striking idea in The Church and the Land (reprinted 2003) comes near the end, when Vincent McNabb offers a challenge to a young man. A duke has just sold his land to pay his debt; the firm that bought the land parcels it out into five acre plots, puts up a house and well on each plot, and then sells them individually, making money many times over what they had paid for the property. Fr. McNabb tells the young man this story, and then instructs him to be "as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves." He challenges him to pool together resources and do the same, having already convinced him of the importance of a return to the land. While reading this essay, I couldn't help but think of the situation many religious orders are facing today. These communities are attracting fewer members while finding it more challenging to sustain their livelihood. Once craft makers and framers, many have turned to investing in the stock market. Communities that own vast tracts of land are considering selling them off, or have already begun to do so.

Will all these great fields and forests turn into yet another strip mall, office building or luxury condo? Vincent McNabb has a better idea, if his vision can be applied to this situation. These large tracts of land could be turned into small farms, three to five acres each, and sold to a family. These families could, in working their own land, raise most of their own food, worship at the monastery, and with such a life, sanctify the land, which was the original purpose for the monks' working it.

Fr. McNabb would be the first to admit that most back to the land attempts in the last hundred and fifty years (as of 1925) have done little else than provide arguments against brainless enthusiasm. He also sees very clearly that people now are less suited for life on the land than they were a hundred years ago (again, as of 1925), having been most likely removed from the farm by a generation or two (now three or four).

Fr. McNabb brings to bear the lesson learned from Exodus-a religious motive is needed to leave the town for the land. He extends this from Egypt to the New Testament: If not for John the Baptist's prophetic gifts, people would not be streaming out of the city to the wilderness, nor would Matthew have given a thought to leaving the counting house for the itinerant life had Jesus not called him.

Fr. McNabb advocates recovering the Bible's hold as a book of economics. The Hebrews' experience in Egypt as slaves making bricks was only possible, he argues, because of the unitized, centralized and industrialized wealth of the nation, which results inevitably in oppression. He writes that "the very poor are everywhere a city fungus of the rich. No agricultural civilization has ever produced them. But city life, with its unstable industrialism, not only produces and fosters them for its self-existence, but keeps them within the city by unfitting them for life on the land." This is why, he argues, the Hebrews cried out for a return to the flesh-pots of Egypt after their liberation-they had been made unfit for the land through and as part of their oppression.

For Fr. McNabb the question of unemployment is the question of the land. He cites British statistics of two million workers unemployed, but with a decrease in three million on the land. People are unemployed because the land is unemployed, he concludes. In 1895 there was no word "unemployment." When work becomes employment, according to Vincent McNabb, it is no longer just a relation to a thing, but to a person or employer. If we speak of the evil of unemployment, then employment is the only remedy, and the employer is the chief benefactor. The problem for the unemployed, says McNabb, is not their unemployment but their poverty. This evil of poverty can be reduced to an evil of wrong production.

Vincent McNabb advocates subsistence farming, buying and selling as little as possible. He points out that none of the necessities of life come from factory-production-they come from the land. He demonstrates how little bread would cost if most people raised wheat, and only a few manufactured motors. Fr. McNabb believes the town should be the servant of the country, and that growing only one commodity finally impoverishes the country by making it the servant of the town.

Subsistence farming is contrasted with a life organized for money making, which this Dominican sees as an error of taking gain to be godliness. This life, he points out, made it possible for the timber merchants to ruin the American forests. Fr. Vincent McNabb minces no words: Sin pays, he says, but it pays death. The wages of sin are death.

The Church and the Land is made up of short little essays, only a page or two in length. In them, Fr. McNabb discusses topics so seemingly diverse as home schooling, regional eating and birth control. Canned food and industrial capitalism are equally repugnant to him. Worship, on the other hand, is essential, and he points out that the sacramental life of the Catholic faith invokes a whole way of life. He writes about the unity of Marxism and Capitalism in their common materialistic leveling of people, a position Pope John Paul II took up many years later in the encyclical letter Centesimus Annus.

Many will hear in these ideas an echo of Peter Maurin. Vincent McNabb was one of Peter's main influences, especially regarding his ideas on a return to the land. The Church and the Land is even more important today than when it was first published eighty years ago. Vincent McNabb knew nothing of agribusiness, suburbia, pesticides or genetically modified foods. His words at times foreshadow our current situation. To keep things from getting worse, and to better appreciate the growth in organic farming and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA farms), one would do well to read this book. Religious orders with land on their hands would do well to divest it by investing in small family farms.

Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Worker.

Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, January-February 2004.