G. K. Chesterton Preeminent Model for the New Evangelization

The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton is a Catholic lay apostolate, recognized formally as a canonical private association of the Christian faithful. Our organization exists to draw people to the Catholic faith — or back to their Catholic faith — and to help them live joyful and holy lives.

Our mission is to promote Catholic education, evangelization, and the social teaching of the Church. We carry out our mission through our sponsored organizations, including member schools in the Chesterton Schools Network.

We look to G.K. Chesterton as the preeminent model for the New Evangelization: an articulate defender of the faith with charity for all (even with whom he disagreed); and a life permeated by an enduring sense of joy, wonder, and gratitude.

Our organization views education as an effective and essential tool for evangelization, one that has the potential to transform lives and sanctify entire families across generations.

We are committed to helping build up vibrant, joyful communities – local or virtual societies, schools, lay households, parishes – where people can experience the joy of learning and grow in holiness together. These communities will attract others so they, too, can experience Christ’s saving love.

Mission – Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton

I mention the G.K. Chesterton Society in particular because today on March 29 it is his  156th birthday.

If the missionary says, in fact, that he is exceptional in being a Christian, and that the rest of the races and religions can be collectively classified as heathen,{268} he is perfectly right. He may say it in quite the wrong spirit, in which case he is spiritually wrong. But in the cold light of philosophy and history, he is intellectually right. He may not be right-minded, but he is right. He may not even have a right to be right, but he is right. The outer world to which he brings his creed really is something subject to certain generalisations covering all its varieties, and is not merely a variety of similar creeds. Perhaps it is in any case too much of a temptation to pride or hypocrisy to call it heathenry. Perhaps it would be better simply to call it humanity. But there are certain broad characteristics of what we call humanity while it remains in what we call heathenry. They are not necessarily bad characteristics; some of them are worthy of the respect of Christendom; some of them have been absorbed and transfigured in the substance of Christendom. But they existed before Christendom and they still exist outside Christendom, as certainly as the sea existed before a boat and all round a boat; and they have as strong and as universal and as unmistakable a savour as the sea. –The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton.

G.K. also shares his birthday with

• 1903 – Bob Hope, Extraordinary funny comedian who starred in several movies with White Christmas singer Bing Crosby  (died 2003)
• 1906 – T. H. White,  author of The Once and Future King which includes  The Sword in the Stone, which was published as a stand-alone book in 1938. (died 1964)
• 1917 – John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States (died 1963)

Dying on this day in 1957  was  James Whale (born 1889, English director  of  Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935)) 

G.K. was an english writer who knew how to hook readers with his catchy wit and imaginative words. He wrote essays about Christianity, History, English Literature and is most famous for penning mystery stories featuring the priestly detective Fr. Brown.

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. “Odd, isn’t it,” he said, “that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon my province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there are your knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there are all your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men.” “Did you catch this man?” asked the colonel, frowning. Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. “Yes,” he said, “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” – The Innocence of Father Brown/The Queer Feet (1911)

A Twitch Upon the Thread is title for Part II of “Brideshead Revisited ” by Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh. Bishop Robert  Barron who leads the very mission based Word on Fire considers this book “the finest Catholic novel of the twentieth century.”

Classic novels like Fr. Brown is a good way to evangelize others with normal everyday things that people talk about.

Chesterton believed very strongly in Christ and his church. He let his enthusiasm and joy direct his worldview which permeated his writings.

I conclude that miracles do happen. I am forced to it by a conspiracy of facts: the fact that the men who encounter elves or angels are not the mystics and the morbid dreamers, but fishermen, farmers, and all men at once coarse and cautious; the fact that we all know men who testify to spiritualistic incidents but are not spiritualists, the fact that science itself admits such things more and more every day. Science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation, and will very likely admit the Resurrection when it has thought of another word for it. –Orthodoxy: