LONDON IS A PLACE
Leonard Feeney
BOSTON
The Ravengate Press
MCMLI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. The Fog“Whenever London had on its hands anything larger than a small poet, he either became a pantheist, and therefore too unlocal for London; a transcendentalist, and disappeared into China by way of opium; or else a man with a good honest heartache, who ran off to the Continent and was buried in Rome or drowned on the shores of Greece.”II. Skyshine
“The London politician always receives you in a formal and conservatively arranged office, seated at a neatly tidied desk. And when you finally get in to see him (past the various secretaries and sub-secretaries who have tried so urbanely to discourage the visit), you never have an audience with the London politician, as you might with the Pope. He always has an audience with you. The American politician is all mouth. But the London politician is all ears.”III. More Fog
“When the Jew from the Holy Land went to the Rhineland, he found Christian corruptions there to ease his conscience and soothe his religious nostalgias. This gave the Jew his chance to be a mental Messiah, and to start a procession of prophetic intellectualism that has lasted down to our day. The climax came when an apostate Catholic from Austria ran into Germany with a queer mustache, took over the militia, and out-Jewed the Jews. He became the super-German. And that was the end of Germany.”IV. London Spring
“Greece and Rome issued into London by way of a French aqueduct, and the loving London heart, and the resolute London mind, had no power to cope with them according to the French formula. And so Athens and Rome divided again, once they reached London. All the heads went resolutely into the universities, and all the hearts went regretfully into the gutter.”V. Clouds Over London
“John Henry Newman was constantly praised for the clarity of his English prose and the limpid lucidity of his style. That he possesses these qualities, no one can deny. But his is the cold clarity of clear water in a fish bowl, in which one looks in vain for the fish.”VI. Child in the London Streets
“Lord Russell started a school for children, with a curriculum that would do credit to a stable. The children were exposed to all temptations, and encouraged to settle them in terms of their own instincts. No counsel or correction was allowed to be given them. It was a school where impulses were fostered, and noted, and statistics constantly kept. Lord Russell was forced to close this school. The children had turned into savages. Light begets light. Darkness generates darkness. The offspring of a demon are little devils in the flesh.”VII. Hyde Park
“Speaking of policemen, there is no place in the world where crime is more difficult to commit than in London. And this is because of the swiftness and severity with which crime is detected, sentenced, and punished. London’s laws are so strict, and punishment is so extreme, and judicial sentences so swiftly made, that a potential criminal does not dare to come within a mile of the crime he would like to perpetrate.”VIII. London Preachers
“One might think that because Archbishop William Temple, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, was an Anglican on a higher plane than Dean Inge, that he would be definite about things that are doctrinal, authoritative about them, and occasionally apostolic. He was not. Many of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermons disregarded entirely the facts of Faith. They were concerned only with Faith as a function. It can be truly said of him, no matter how shocking it sounds — that he did not believe in God. He believed in belief.”
Other Writing
• Freemasonry in the Life and Times of Pope Pius IX (1950)“The visible leaders of Masonry — and of all the secret societies subsidiary to it — are never the real leaders! For beyond the visible leaders there is an inner circle whose members are hidden and unknown to the public. Beyond this inner circle, there is another, still more secret ring. At last, at the very top, there sits the lone head and his small — six at most — carefully chosen coterie of advisers, who direct the invisible government, not only of Masonry, but of the world.”• Designs Of The Jews On Art And Architecture
“Just enter any of the brand-new churches your local bishop has lately erected with the help of a Jewish fund-raising expert. You will notice that Our Blessed Lady has been streamlined, the Stations of the Cross have been reduced to fourteen studies in abstract composition, and the Crucifix has been distorted into some weird sub-human shape.”• The Waters of Salvation (1952)
“THE Catholic Faith in the United States of America is always academically ascribed to the Baltimore Catechism. The Baltimore Catechism was confected at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, by a group of American Bishops under the control and influence of James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. James Cardinal Gibbons was a Catholic prelate who did not hesitate to get up before a Methodist congregation, in a Methodist Church, and give a supposedly Catholic sermon while reading from a Protestant Bible!”• London Is A Place (1951)
“When the Jew from the Holy Land went to the Rhineland, he found Christian corruptions there to ease his conscience and soothe his religious nostalgias. This gave the Jew his chance to be a mental Messiah, and to start a procession of prophetic intellectualism that has lasted down to our day. The climax came when an apostate Catholic from Austria ran into Germany with a queer mustache, took over the militia, and out-Jewed the Jews. He became the super-German. And that was the end of Germany.”• Leonard Feeney Omnibus (1943)
“Another contemporary, H. G. Wells, offered hope that sanity might blossom in some brain of the future. Chesterton was quick to analyze this mixture of biology and guesswork masquerading as prophecy, and he exposed it to relentless ridicule. In the end he made more of a monkey out of Wells than Evolution ever had.”• Bread of Life (1952)
“I am not going to depart from the teachings of Jesus Christ and the infallible definitions which safeguard those teachings, given to us by the Holy Roman Pontiffs of the Catholic Church, no matter how little it pleases people who, because of doctrinal weaknesses in their Faith, like to have religion an evasive, pushed-to-the-side, interfaith affair!”• A Latter-Day Athanasius (Fr Feeney Biography)
“One day, the world will know and embrace the One True Faith. We know this because Our Lord assured us. And when it does, it will acknowledge its debt to Father Feeney for having shown us that only in and by that Faith can there be true unity.”• Father Feeney Bibliography
An incomplete listing of Fr Feeney’s prose and verse.
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