Today is the birthday of author Christina Bjork (b. 1938), author of the beautiful book, Linnea in Monet’s Garden. In the book, Linnea, a young girl, and her neighbor, Mr. Blom, get to visit Paris and Giverny and see the places where Monet created his paintings. The book is a wonderful introduction to impressionist art and to the work and life of Claude Monet.

Also, Joseph Hilaire Pierre Ren Belloc was born July 27, 1870. (I love these long names I sometimes find for familiar authors. Why do most people nowadays only have three, or even just two, names?) Belloc was a devout Catholic and for a while, a Fabian, friend to both G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton. As the three men debated Fabianism and socialism and Distributism in the press, GBS wrote a famous essay in which he called his two friends “the Chesterbelloc,” implying that Belloc did the thinking for the pair and led Chesterton astray. Later in their lives, Belloc and Shaw had little to do with each other, but Shaw and Chesterton remained “friendly enemies” all their lives. I missed Shaw’s birthday yesterday on the 26th.

Belloc on parental authority:

As between the Family and the State, Catholic doctrine is fixed. The family is the unit. The parent is the natural authority (auctoritas auctoris). The State is secondary to the family, and especially in the matter of forming a child’s character by education. Now here the State of today flatly contradicts Catholic doctrine. It says to the parent, “What you will for your child must yield to what I will. If our wills are coincident, well and good. If not, yours must suffer. I am master.” At least, so the State speaks to the poorer parent; to the richer it is more polite.

This quotation is directly applicable to the controversy over Abraham Cherrix and his and his parents’ decisions about Abraham’s cancer treatment. I wonder if the Cherrix family has money and that’s why they’ve managed to buck the government so far, or if they’re relatively poor and that’s why the state is giving them such a hard time. Either way, the government judges and social workers are wrong to intervene in what is essentially a family decision.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, b.1872. Here’s a favorite poem by Dunbar that my mom used to read to me.