A Message to Garcia

For several years I taught at a private Christian school. The school was run by a branch of the Plymouth Brethren that separated themselves as much as possible from the world, hence they created their own school to avoid their children being tainted by worldly education.

There are many tales I could tell about teaching there, but I'll stick to one that involves my sarcastic sense of humor and my big mouth.

The board overseeing the school consisted largely of businessmen. For a teacher conference one year they gave all the teachers in advance copies of A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard. The book consisted of an 1899 essay that promoted initiative and conscientiousness in work. The essay is about the mission of Lieutenant Andrew Rowan to General Calixto Garcia in Cuba just before the Spanish-American War broke out.

Rowan was supposed just to make contact with Garcia and to serve as an observer, and there was actually no letter or message. Hubbard took extensive liberties with the actual story, using it as a means to show determination on the part of Rowan. He supposedly single-mindedly pursued his mission, overcoming obstacles, and never complaining. The essay became a best seller much loved by businessmen like those running our school.

On the day of the teacher conference the head of the board asked what we thought the message of the book was. Being a sarcastic sort, I replied, "Shut up and do your job."

They were not amused. Indeed, the principal chewed me out during a break.

After that incident, I did create one of my slugku (a humorous series of haiku that all begin with the line " a slug among weeds") about Hubbard's version of the story, and even added it to a picture of Rowan and Garcia.



I recently did a little more reading about the event, and about General Garcia. One thing I discovered was he was married, but had a series of mistresses and illegitimate children. I got inspired and wrote a clerihew.

Calixto Garcia
was writing a love note to a pretty senorita
when Andrew Rowan burst into his life
with a message Garcia feared might be from his jealous wife.

Sometimes imagination is more amusing than just the facts. Hubbard certainly seemed to think that!

Two Gettysburg Clerihews - With Connections

 

Last week was the 166th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. 

Okay, an oddly numbered anniversary, but my wife and I had once visited the site of the battle and have fond memories of that trip, and every year we rewatch the movie Gettysburg,

I have two other connections to Gettysburg, including a family one.

We live in Rochester, New York, and one of the heroes of the battle was from Rochester, Colonel Patrick O'Rorke. 

An Irish immigrant, O'Rorke grew up in Rochester, where he encountered anti-Irish prejudice. He went to West Point, and after the Civil War saw action in multiple engagements. He rose through the ranks and by 1863 was the Colonel in command of the 140th New York Infantry Regiment, which consisted largely of Rochester-area volunteers and was mainly Irish.

When the Confederates were attacking Little Round Top on July 2, and after the heroics of Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine on the Union left flank, O'Rorke was ordered to take his regiment to the top of the hill to stop the continued the Rebel advance. He did so, and succeeded in repulsing them, but got shot and killed while urging his troop on. Although Chamberlain was later lauded as a hero of that phase of the three-day battle, historians view O'Rorke's actions as just as heroic and important.

Here in Rochester we have a bridge named after O Rorke.

His widow, Clara Bishop O'Rorke, later became a religious sister, a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart.

About him I wrote:

Heroic Colonel Patrick O'Rorke
and his wife had dreams about a visit from the stork.
Alas, at Gettysburg he was undone,
and his widow later became a nun.

My family connection to the battle is through Brigadier General Strong Vincent. His mother was Sarah Ann (Strong) Vincent, a granddaughter of Timothy Strong, who is my fourth-great-grandfather.

Strong Vincent was born in Waterford Pennsylvania. He had just begun a law practice when the Civil War began. He enlisted with the Pennsylvania Militia. He saw action in various battles and rose through the ranks, becoming by the time of the Battle of Gettysburg the Colonel commanding the 3rd Brigade - Chamberlain's 20th Maine was one of his regiments.

At the top of the hill, Vincent climbed on a boulder to urge his men on and was shot in the thigh. He died of his wound five days later, but in the interim in recognition of his heroism was promoted to Brigadier General.

Like O'Rorke, he left a young widow, Elizabeth Carter Vincent, though, in her case, she was pregnant. A daughter, Blanche, was born two months after the battle, but died before reaching the age of one. Elizabeth never married again.

In the movie, Gettysburg, Strong Vincent is portrayed by Maxwell Caulfield.

About Strong Vincent I wrote:

Brigadier General Strong Vincent
tended to stand out whatever he did and wherever he went.
At Gettysburg he bid the world goodbye
when he stood out on a boulder and got shot in the thigh

On the Library New Books Shelf

 

I stopped by our local library and, as I always do, I checked the New Books shelves. The name G. K. Chesterton jumped out at me.

A new book about Chesterton?!

G. K. Chesterton on Life by Kevin Belmonte is new in that it was published in 2026. But it's old in the sense that it is basically a large collection of quotations from Chesterton.

Indeed, Belmonte had somewhat mined the same field with two previous works featuring quotations from Chesterton, The Quotable Chesterton, and Chesterton's Tavern. He also wrote a biography of Chesterton, Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G. K. Chesterton. 

As for this collection, a blub on the back describes it as "a perfect gift for any occasion." It has that feel of a gift book. It's nicely laid out, with some page decorations at the start of each chapter. But that is not a criticism of it; it is a book that might introduce people who don't know him to Chesterton.

The book includes some quotations from others about Chesterton, some pictures of Chesterton from various sources, ads and news reports, and other images from the time Chesterton's time, and, of course, page after page of excerpts and quotations from Chesterton's works. Those quotations are organized under such chapters as "Things of Faith," "Nature, and the World Around Us," "Dash and Wit," and "Trappings of Modernity." 

There is also one chapter - "G.K.C. and the Eve of Orthodoxy" - dedicated to excerpts from an article about Chesterton written by George Holbrook Jackson in 1908, " I was not familiar with the article, and found the excerpts interesting. 

I had previously encountered a number of the quotations and excerpts, but I discovered many others new to me. 

I was amused to read one account of Chesterton meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, with Roosevelt observing, "What a supreme genius Chesterton is! I never met a man who could talk so brilliantly and interestingly."

This book can serve as an introduction to Chesterton, and indeed might make "a perfect gift" for those not too familiar with him.  

At the very least, it's great to see Chesterton's name featured on a library bookshelf where it might help to draw attention to him.

Another Reading Goal Met

 

I begin every year by setting reading goals. Those goals include the total number of works read, the total number of pages, and specific book/genre/author goals. This year, one of those goals was to read a book about G. K. Chesterton. I met that goal last Sunday by finishing The Gift of Wonder: The Many Sides of G. K. Chesterton edited (of course) by Dale Ahlquist. 

The book is a collection of papers presented at the June 2000 Chesterton Conference.

There are a number of delightful papers in the collection. As a Secular Franciscan, one that stood out for me was Frances Farrell's "Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi." I also really enjoyed Aidan Mackey's "Chesterton and the Moral Imagination" and Ekaterina Volokhonskaia's "A Russian Perspective of G. K. Chesteron." And though I'm not a fan of Belloc (Heresy!), I also found James Reidy's "The Four Bellocs" interesting. (Yes, they snuck in a paper about Belloc in a book about Chesterton!)

Though I singled out a few of the papers, I enjoyed them all. Which is a nice way to meet one of my reading goals.

I had several other goals related to this blog. 

I earlier in the year met one of them, reading The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I have two other blog-related goals to meet yet: A book by Chesterton, and a book by C. S. Lewis. 

Chesterton and Fantasy/Science Fiction

 

Every Thursday at dinner time - except with it is preempted - we watch Chesterton Station on EWTN. The premise of the show is that Chesterton (wonderfully played by John Walker), after his death, is at a railway station where he meets up with others on their way to their eternal destinations. Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Georger Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, Dorothy Sayers, and George McDonald are among the travelers with whom he meets. They talk, act out scenes, interact with characters from their works, and enjoy some beverages. It's an amusing show, well worth watching.

Last night's episode featured Father Robert Hugh Benson, a convert who, in addition to being a priest, wrote works of fantasy and science fiction, the most famous of them being the dystopian novel Lord of the World. 

Confession: I was in a play version of one of his novels, Come Rack! Come Rope!, about the persecution of Catholics in England under Queen Elizabeth. 

In the episode, Father Benson is being harassed by forces of the "Lord of the World" - prompting Chesterton to fire off his pistol in their direction.

The episode got me to wondering what would have happened had Chesterton turned more of his energies to speculative fiction. He certainly wrote some fantastic tales, and two of his novels, The Man Who Was Thursday, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, certainly seem to straddle the realms of fantasy and science fiction. And there are fantasy elements in the collection The Coloured Lands.  

He might have produced more of such works, but I suspect his conversion changed his focus. He continued to write mysteries and essays - to help pay the bills - but seemed to focus more and more on religious writings. 

I have not read all of his short fiction - yet - so perhaps there are some fantasy/science fiction gems among them. Perhaps some folks who have read him more widely have already looked into this. 

St. Clare Clerihew

St. Clare

was shorn of her hair.
Her symbolic rejection of worldly vanities
inspired some of her father's choicest profanities.

Pope Leo Knows ...

 

In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV, in talking about artificial intelligence and technology, cited J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings: 

213. The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”  The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. For this reason, it is worthwhile pausing to reflect on some aspects of how we, each in our own way, can cooperate in building the civilization of love. Without presuming to exhaust this theme, I would like to propose five paths toward daily and public responsibility: the need to disarm words, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.

The quotation is from The Return of the King. 

I've seen some comments that he supposedly also cites Chesterton, but in a quick scan of the encyclical I could not find any direct quotations from Gilbert. Perhaps the Holy Father used some of his Chesterton's ideas but internalized them and put it in his own words. I have to read the whole document to be sure.

So we'll stick with a quotation from Chesterton in one of the Pope's addresses.

In a February 28, 2026 address to four Spanish seminaries he said: 

There is a quote from the author Chesterton that can serve as a key to understanding everything I would like to share with you: “Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural” (cf. Heretics, VI). Man is not made to live closed in on himself, but in a living relationship with God. When that relationship is obscured or weakened, life begins to fall into disorder from within. The unnatural is not only the scandalous; it is enough to live without God in daily life, leaving him out of the criteria and decisions with which we face existence.

The Pope apparently know two of our favorites. Good sign!  
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