Summary
Title: A Rebel to His Last Breath: Joseph McCabe and Rationalism
Author: Bill Cooke
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 157392878X
Pro:
• Easy to read, engaging style
• Discusses both Joseph McCabe and the freethought movement
• Not afraid to critique McCabe
Con:
• Slightly specialized topic
Description:
• Life of Joseph McCabe
• Freethought movement in England examined
• Personal and Intellectual Biography
Book Review
This is the first real biography which has ever been written about McCabe. Not too long after he died, his housekeeper burned all of his papers, destroying a potential goldmine of information about him and perhaps undeveloped ideas he had been working on. Because of this, even the current biography has to be primarily intellectual, tracing the course of his ideas and thoughts as expressed in his works.
So who was he, exactly? Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was a Franciscan priest who left the priesthood after his doubts became too much for him to bear. Becoming a militant atheist and freethinker, he spent many years writing about the problems of religion and the misery it has caused.
But who cares - was he influential at all? Actually, it is hard to tell exactly what sort of influence he did have, but his impact could not have been insignificant. He wrote around 200 books, and just those which were printed in Haldemann-Julius' Big Blue Books imprint sold over 1,892,000 copies. He was a popularizer of academic topics like history and science, which meant that he was widely read among the working class and those with little education. Yet he was informative enough that even college undergraduates were eager for his writings.
He wrote on a tremendous number of topics: evolution, general science, history, the Bible, economics, spiritualism, immortality, women's rights, and more. This is probably one of the reasons no general study of him has been performed - no one feels competent enough to handle such a diversity of issues.
But other reasons for his being ignored are probably stronger. One is that many of his works were "time sensitive" - they spoke to the needs and issues of society at the time, and so aren't quite as relevant today. Yet that is often the case with popularizers of science or history, and why many of them aren't read long into the future.
Another possible reason is that he has often been associated with the awful anti-Catholic bigotry which emanated from Protesant writers of the time. But the Protestants themselves were not too sure about McCabe, and were very reluctant to cite an atheist in their complaints about the Catholic Church. By and large, Cooke is able to show that McCabe was *not an anti-Catholic bigot:
A Rebel to His Last Breath: Joseph McCabe and Rationalism, by Bill Cooke
- "For the vast majority of McCabe's writing career, he directed his attention to the *papacy, and to leading Catholic apologists, not to the main body of Catholic believers. While, to state an obvious point, McCabe rejected Catholic doctrines, his main objection was to the political nature of the Catholic *institutions, and the lengths they were prepared to go in order to maintain power, and hinder what McCabe considered to be progress. To this extent, McCabe can be considered to be anticlerical. By anticlerical, I am following Hugh McLeod's understanding of the term as "suspicion of the power and pretensions of priests and especially their association with reactionary politics.""
McCabe displayed a relatively even hand when critiquing the Catholich Church, aiming his critical eye towards the Vatican and church hierarchy, but not at individual believers themselves. On the other hand, Catholic apologists were quite willing to demonize and attack him personally. He was harrassed with petty criminal charges and was the target of slader and vitriolic rumors.
