The Catholic Farm Has The Answers (No, Really!)
My Remarks Given At The Saint Benedict Center's 2022 Conference! This Talk Even Has Some Kanye West audio in it!
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NOTE: This audio and video and all the other great speeches from the Saint Benedict Center’s 2022 Conference are available here.
Below is the audio from my recent presentation at the Saint Benedict Center of Richmond, New Hampshire. I am enclosing the slideshow presentation as well as the text and the link to Kanye West’s remarks given to Tucker Carlson recently. This talk is the product of at least 30 months of research and development of the topic and I beg your patience that you listen to it in its entirety. God bless and Mary keep you!
THE CATHOLIC FARM HAS THE ANSWERS
“Politicians will not make a land fit for heroes to live in. It is heroes who make a land fit for all the other poor people to live in; even such poor little people as the politicians.” - Chesterton
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
The Cult of Death has done to the farm and our food supply what it’s done to everything else it touches: it killed it and the land with it.
• It’s not just pesticides, it’s the out of scale process.
The rape of the land. The promotion of evil through poisoned food via poisoned media.
Simple, restore the Catholic Farm.
The title of this talk was a bit inspired by Commander John Sharpe’s talk here at the SBCC last year. He inspired me to read the great Southern, agrarian classic “I’ll Take My Stand” so the sub title of this talk is “I’ll Take My Stand..... On A John Deere” (pre-wifi and spyware version).
I wish to make the case that practicing the Faith is like living and working on a farm and living and working on a farm is nearly inseparable from practicing The Faith.
THE BASICS
Let’s start with the basics and the definition of the word “farm” which seems to have come about in the early 16th century making it a fairly modern term.
It comes from the latin firmus which means "strong; stable," figuratively speaking "constant, trusty”.
But “farm” is actually older than that and comes from an Anglo-Saxon word feorh which means, literally “life”!
In Genesis 31 God basically commands us to live on farms.
“Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life. [18] Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herbs of the earth. [19] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken.”
I say all this as an introduction to lay the foundation for the rest of this talk which will conclude with us consuming the fruits of farming preceded by saying Angelus and practicing the Faith.
WHY FARMS?
Because God loves us and wants us to eat bacon, of course! First thing Adam and Eve did after Eve ate them out of house and home was find a place to settle down and start a farm so they could get to work on growing those herbs with the sweat of Adam’s brow. Now let me axe you a question: WHO taught Adam how to build and work a hoe-and no that’s not an Eve joke?
After God revealed certain things about birds and bees to him, he taught himself because it was natural to him i.e. that is hoe’s were made for human hands.
Why is this and what does it have to do with the Catholic Church?
The first parable Our Lord told is the parable of The Sower in Matthew 132 and what is the sower? Well he’s not Sower Pharisee he’s Sower MacDonald. When you think about it nearly all of Our Lord’s parables have something to do with the farm.
The Rich man builds bigger barns. The householder and The vineyard. Weeds among wheat.
The Fig Tree.
The 99 sheep.
The Prodigal Son.
Sheep and goats separated.
So farming was on Our Lord’s mind, he used the farm to teach and most importantly he likened the sowing of seeds to the Kingdom of Heaven. But here’s the most important point, what does the farm ultimately represent?
LIFE. Remember....
“I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved: and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures. [10] The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly.”
The life of the agrarian is to put it figuratively, an embarrassment of riches or abundances and because it requires those things we began with in Genesis, it tracks perfectly with and I think even enhances the practice of the faith. It requires cooperation with the Cardinal Virtues as catholics pursuing catholic virtue. This is the solution to what ails the family and I’ll talk more about this at the end.
THE SOUTHERN WAY
When most people think of the ‘Murican south they think of these guys…
When they should be thinking of this guy…
Look at the ‘Murican South and you will see ‘Muricah’s Catholic footprint.
Louisiana - ad lib remarks
Florida - ad lib remarks
Texas - is filled with catholicism. Corpus Christi. San Antonio. Austin.
The heart of the Southern Way & the Southern catholic was the farm.
The Southern Catholic Agrarian Method
I would like to quote Allen Tate from I’ll Take My Stand.
“They looked at history as the concrete and temporal series-a series at all only because they required a straight line back into the past, for the series, such as it was, was very capricious, and could hardly boast of a natural logic. It could entertain the biblical mythology along with the Greek, and it could add to these a lively medievalism from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. They saw themselves as human beings living by a humane principle, from which they were unwilling to subtract the human so as to set the principle free to operate on an unlimited program of practicality. For that is what a principle is-the way things will work. But the Southerner, or more generally the die-hard agrarian, was not willing to let the principle proceed alone, uncontrolled; for all that he values in the working of principle is the capacity that he retains of enjoying the work it does. The old Southerners were highly critical of the kinds of work to be done. They planted no corn that they could not enjoy; they grew no cotton that did not directly contribute to the upkeep of a rich private life; and they knew no history for the sake of knowing it, but simply for the sake of contemplating it and seeing in it an image of themselves. And aware of the treachery of nature, as all agrarians are, they tended to like stories, very simple stories with a moral.”
We catholics find a most unlikely ally in Thomas Jefferson. TJ was one of those southerners who knew that a people separated from living FROM the land were soon to be a people no more.
“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers.”
And what is the one thing that the catholic farm requires that Jefferson knew well?
LAND i.e. private property. No land...NO Farm
(ad lib on private property)
What is LAND? What does it mean to OWN land and why is it important?
NO CENTRAL GOVERNMENT UNDER THE FARM- BASED SYSTEM OF CHRISTENDOM.
Explain the Guild State [GUILD STATE PASSAGE]
CONCLUSION: WE NEED ACTION AND REAL MEN TO TAKE IT
I founded a Guild
I have named my property
I am learning to farm-homestead by doing it.
Final Chesterton Quote
“The old pagan world was far too personal, with its personal government, its personal and almost simple greed, and its only too personal gods. Therefore it was often necessary to protest against it by the renunciation of personal property. The modern paganism is far too impersonal with its impersonal bureaucracies, its impersonal fantasy of finance and usury, its impersonal and therefore more than imbecile god. Therefore it is often necessary to protest against it by the assertion of personal property. But both are modes of the assertion of personal dignity; and you will note that it is the same spiritual philosophy, stretched across the ages, that has made possible these two contrary forms of protest against these two contrary forms of pride.There is one aspect of the heroic venture, made by the working Distributist, of which I feel free to speak, because it is quite unheroic; and I am not a hero. I hope everybody understands that the Land Movement of the Distributists does not mean that men are to sell turnips as other people sell top-hats; or to manufacture cabbages in a cabbage machine like sausages in a sausage-machine. Distributism dies when men sell their land; but it is rather off colour, even when people sell most of the produce of their land. And the obvious inference is that men living by grubbing roots out of the ground are not living at all.”
Thank you, God bless and Mary keep you.