Maisie Ward on Father Vincent McNabb

The crowd loved him

With her husband Frank Sheed the founder of the once major Catholic publisher Sheed and Ward, Maisie Ward became friends with the eccentric and radical Dominican Father Vincent McNabb. He was one of the most effective speakers for the Catholic Evidence Guild in their work speaking in London parks, including Hyde Park’s famous Speaker’s Corner, and a leading voice of the Distributist movement. The stories about Father McNabb are taken from her autography Unfinished Business.

I.

But it was something again to see him kneel in Parliament Hill Fields and kiss the feet of a particularly nasty heckler. The first time this happened, the man was stunned, the second time he rallied and said, “Get up, McNabb, you’re only play-acting.” And as Father Vincent dusted the earth off his habit he said quietly, “Well, well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it?”

II.

Someone once quoted, “He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.” “No, he won’t,” said Father Vincent. “He’ll live to run away another day.”

III.

But how the crowd loved him! Once I am told they ducked in the pond a heckler at Hampstead who had gone too far. “You’re going to hell, McNabb,” the man would shout, “and you know it.”

At Regent’s Park the old lady whom he addressed as “Mother” became known to us as “Mrs. McNabb.” She was difficult for the rest of us to cope with. “Thou shalt forgive thy brother,” she would shout in stentorian tones, “until seventy times seven — and not once more.” At this point we were lucky if her teeth fell out (as they generally did), for this gave us the chance of being heard while she was adjusting them. But she would always listen to Father Vincent.

IV.

On Good Friday we showed some very large Stations of the Cross, our men speakers taking turns in holding them aloft on one platform while the preacher spoke from the other.

Down to his death Father Vincent always preached these stations. His well-worn Bible was stuffed with notes he had made in preparation; like all his speaking, this was intensely scriptural. The Stations lasted an hour and a half, the crowd grew constantly.

One year the police estimated 5000, and his unaided voice reached to the edges of the crowd and beyond it to casual passers-by . . . .

After each station this hymn was sung and an act of contrition repeated. But the realization of what sin is and the motives for sorrow became even more powerful when on the following day Father Vincent examined the crowd’s conscience for them. Taking the Ten Commandments, he would tell them he wanted no word of confession from them but only that they should look at themselves and tell God that they grieved over their failures to their fellow men and to Him their Creator.

V.

Father Vincent would do the strangest things. I was startled one day, kneeling for his blessing, when he too dropped to his knees. There we knelt a while, side by side, talking eagerly.

VI.

In 1926 occurred the railway strike, alternatively called a lockout, defeated by a voluntary mobilization of the upper and middle classes. The threat of a general strike in support of the railwaymen was denounced by, among others, Cardinal Bourne, and we returned from our honeymoon to find considerable bitterness among Guild speakers.

Our theological charwoman, Miss Cozens, had been so shattered by the Cardinal’s pronouncements that she had felt unable to go to the sacraments until after a long conversation with Father Vincent NcNabb. It need hardly be said that on this question Father Vincent was poles apart from the Cardinal. I knew far too little to form an opinion, but my feelings were that I would rather be wrong with Father Vincent than right with most other people; he, more than anyone I knew, was in closest touch with the people most deeply affected, he had a love of God and man which was my constant admiration.

And through this very love he was able to show Miss Cozens that to bar from herself the means of grace because authority was — if it was — mistaken, would be utterly wrong.

VII.

“Why,” Father Vincent was asked — and it was the only time I ever saw him embarrassed — “don’t the Dominicans help the housing shortage by building houses on the priory grounds?” Father Vincent would gladly have filled the priory itself with slum-dwellers, let alone the grounds!

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