Father McNabb and Central Heating

Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., (1868-1943) was a Dominican Scholar and preacher. Born in northern Ireland, he studied in Belfast, Gloucestershire, and Louvain. He was ordained in 1891 and was a leading figure in the Catholic Revival in England in the fifth of the twentieth century. To people like Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Ronald Knox, McNabb was something of a saint, albeit a quirky one. The Dominicans conferred on him their highest rank, Master of Sacred Theology.

McNabb worked energetically for social reform and confronted the intellectual issues of the day as a writer for Blackfriars, a preacher at Hyde Park Corner, and an author of some thirty books. He deplored city life and modern machinery, and as a writer he even refused to use a typewriter. When someone once tried to persuade him how efficient the typewriter was, he replied with characteristic sharpness, “And the central heating in hell is very efficient, too.”
(From John Deedy, A Book of Catholic Anecdotes)