Hilaire Belloc is lauded as a prophet of our times by Father C. John McCloskey at ZENIT in an excellent interview here. Remember Belloc's immortal words:"One thing in this world is different from all other. It has a personality and a force. It is recognized, and (when recognized) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the night."
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A comparable quote by Newman:
There is a religious communion claiming a divine commission, and holding all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel; it is a well–organized, well–disciplined body; it is a sort of secret society, binding together its members by influences and by engagements which it is difficult for strangers to ascertain. It is spread over the known world; it may be weak or insignificant locally, but is strong on the whole from its continuity; it may be smaller than other religious bodies together, but it is larger than each separately. It is a natural enemy to governments external to itself; it is intolerant and engrossing, and tends to a new modelling of society; it breaks laws, it divides families. It is a gross superstition; it is charged with the foulest crimes; it is despised by the intellect of the day; it is frightful to the imagination of many. And there is but one communion such. Place this description before Pliny or Julian; place it before Frederick the Second or Guiznot. ‘Apparent diræ facies’. Each knows at once, without asking a question, who is meant by it. One object, and only one, absorbs each item of the detail of the delineation.
-An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, pt. II, ch. VI, p. 208.
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