Gilbert Magazine with Lunch

I love Gilbert Magazine. Today I was reading as I ate my stew and was thrilled to see that Chesterton's cause for canonization is being investigated by Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, England. Well, what a gift that would be the Church: the "apostle of common sense" raised to the honors of the altar! Certainly our age needs common sense more than almost anything else. Nonsense and madness have taken over most of our institutions as a few illustrations demonstrate:

• Government protects snail darters, kangaroo rats, and bird eggs while promoting the murder of babies;
• Schools ban even the mention of the Christian God, but teach children to dress as Muslims and kneel on prayer rugs;
• Promoting common core one-size-fits-all education while paying lip service to diversity and individual performance;
• Men and boys can decide whatever gender they feel like and use bathrooms and locker rooms accordingly despite exposing their man parts to little girls (Remember when dirty old men in trenchcoats were arrested for exposing themselves? Now they can do it with the law's blessing.);
• Criticizing the policies of a black president or the violent acts of a black thug proves you are a racist even if you are black. (Just ask the black conservatives.)

Well, you get the idea. An apostle of common sense, especially one who was so joyfully cheerful, despite observing and predicting the collapse of western civilization, is exactly what our world needs. So raise a mug to the hope that we will soon add St. Gilbert to the calendar of holy men and women. And here's a quote from Dale Alquist's editorial in the July/August issue of Gilbert to demonstrate a little of Chesterton's common sense on education:

If we really believe in freedom, we must take education out of the hands of the State. Chesterton says that government means coercion. It has a very limited but necessary role in a free society. But controlling education is the most important thing that we do not want the State to control. It gives the government far too much power and influence. Chesterton observes that the desire to control becomes uncontrollable. It leads, ironically, to infinite liberty: "Only it is an infinite liberty for the rulers and an infinite slavery for the people. It is a loss of the whole sane social instinct which limited the scope and the subject matter of laws. It is a new freedom for the ruler to control buttons as he controls bullets and to forbid anchovy sauce as much as prussic acid. It is the intemperance of interference."