Saint Benedict Center Conference

Below is our completed speakers’ list. For details on each speaker, please see the links on the right of our main page. It promises to be a great lineup!

Dr. Robert Hickson — Retired Professor, Joint Special Operations University, U.S. Special Operations Command; Retired Professor, U.S. Air Force Academy; Former Green Beret.

Mr. Philip F. Lawler — Catholic journalist, editor of Catholic World News, author of The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture.

Mr. R. Cort Kirkwood — Award-winning journalist, author of Real Men, Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire, contributor to Chronicles, LewRockwell.com, and The Remnant.

Br. André Marie, M.I.C.M., M.A. — Prior, Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Richmond, N.H.

Mr. Gary Potter — Historian, Journalist, Essayist, Author of After the Boston Heresy Case and In Reaction.

Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe — Publisher, Distributist scholar, Founder and President of IHS Press.

Mr. Brian Kelly — Editor of Mancipia.

Mr. C. Joseph Doyle — Catholic Apologist, Executive Director of the Catholic Action League.

Mr. C. Brad Grinstead, M.S. — Biologist, Catholic Educator, M.I.C.M. Third Order Membership Director.

Mr. Tim Ehlen — Organizer of “Building Catholic Communities” (www.buildingcatholiccommunities.org).

Our tenth speaker has been announced: Mr. C. Brad Grinstead, M.S. Brad will be addressing the conference on the theme of Catholic education as part of the mission to evangelize America. You can read about him here.

Brian Kelly, Saint Benedict Center’s editor, is now slated to address our conference. His addition brings the list of conference speakers to nine, one shy of the complete roster. (Keep checking!)

Samples of Brian’s work are found on Saint Benedict Center’s web site. Our recent Mancipia newsletter provides a specimen of his editing as well as his writing. Other pieces of Brian’s work are:

• The Magnificat, Hymn of the Incarnation
• Red is for Martyrdom: Unsung Heroes of the Sacred College
• Saint Leo the Great: No Fear, No Compromise, the Lion in the Chair

Mr. Philip F. Lawler, the celebrated editor of Catholic World News and author of the recent blockbuster, The Faithful Departed (review), has been added to our roster of speakers. The schedule is not yet completed, but Mr. Lawler will speak late Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Tim Ehlen, organizer of Building Catholic Communities, has agreed to speak at our conference.

“Hungry to rediscover the rich history and tradition of community life based on Catholic principles,” Mr. Ehlen began Building Catholic Communities as “an informal confederation of scholars, architects, religious and lay leaders” to study and advance such ideals.

The group’s initial effort is an ongoing series of lectures exploring the theory and practice Catholic Social Teaching together with concrete models of structuring Catholic communities. He desires “not only to continue research on these two topics, but also to begin to plan and build actual Catholic communities.”

The effort caused no small controversy when leftist agitants at the Southern Poverty Law Center intervened with the Catholic University of America to stop the lectures, which CUA had been hosting. (See “Catholic University Pulls Lectures Because of SPLC.”)

Mr. Ehlen’s views on doctrine can be gleaned from an article he authored on the website of the Catholic Citizens of Illinois. In it, he argued that, “in the latter half of the past century, devout Catholics throughout the world have been slowly and carefully taught a new faith different from what had been practiced for centuries.”

Thanks to the folks at the ChesterBelloc Mandate, there are some savory morsels of our speaker’s work online. Most of these reflect John’s advocacy of the economic thinking known as distributism.

• Capitalism and Catholic Economics Part I
• Capitalism and Catholic Economics Part II
• Catholic Action
• Liberal Economics vs. Catholic Truth
• Why Money is Sick
• Work and Property

You can also see everything tagged “John Sharpe” on the ChesterBelloc Mandate Blog.

Finally, you can read this 2003 interview with our friend on Zenit’s web site: “Reviving the Church’s Social Doctrine for the 21st Century”

One need not be a strict distributist to see merit in the efforts of Chesterton, Belloc, Fr. McNabb and other great Catholic thinkers to craft an economic system using the social teaching of the popes as their foundation. Sadly, there has been no small amount of acrimony surrounding this issue — with brash accusations of “socialism” and “communism” being leveled at men who are deeply Catholic and adamantly opposed to such ideologies.

Efforts have been made to attempt a reconciliation between distributist theories and the free market economy. Wilhelm Röpke, the Swiss economist who advocated for “economic humanism” (which he also referred to as the “third way”), is one who attempted such a synthesis. Röpke was Protestant, but was influenced by the Catholic thinkers G.K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc and Christopher Dawson, in addition to the Protestant, Edmund Burke, one of the fathers of modern political conservatism.

John Zmirak, a Catholic scholar, defends distributism while also recommending Röpke’s synthesis. As that linked article indicates, Zmirak is trying to end the belligerency that has arisen between Catholic defenders of the free market economy and their coreligionists who advocate distributism. Zmirak is both avid reader of all the authors named and wrote an acclaimed book on Röpke.

Conference speaker, Mr. C. Joseph Doyle (bio), is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. To get an idea of Joe’s aplomb as a Catholic polemicist with a flare at taking on the enemies of the Church, see his excellent article, “Vichy Catholic,” which takes to task the putatively Catholic Boston Globe columnist who “has risen to prominence through his repeated attacks on the Church.”

If you are interested in sampling the kind of material our conference offers, and if you are inclined to meaty, manly biography packaged with erudite literary flourish, you will do well to read “Saint Boniface and the Missionary Culture of the Faith,” which we have just posted on the Catholicism.org site.

A wonderful compliment to Mr. Kirkwood’s Real Men.

Our schedule is not yet near completion, but Mr. Kirkwood’s slot will certainly be on Saturday.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men Ten Courageous Americans to Know And Admire (Cumberland House). He is an award-winning journalist, presently working as managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He has been writing about American politics and culture for more than twenty years. A graduate of Boston University and Loyola College in Baltimore, he lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

He has also contributed to the traditionalist Catholic fortnightly, The Remnant:

• Mission Impossible? Tom Cruise to Play German Catholic Hero
• What’s Wrong With Rudy Giuliani?

In a recent Ad Rem, Brother André Marie recommended Real Men. We reproduce here the text of that writeup: (more…)

Conference speaker, R. Cort Kirkwood, interviewed by Howard Phillips, of the Conservative Caucus. This video is about a half hour.