From Joie de Vivre to Gaudium de Veritate

After recently reading a good contemporary satire by the ostensible (and irrepressible) “Father René Tiepolino,” entitled “Two Plus Two Makes Three: An After-Mass Debate in a Mixed-Use Sacristy,”1 I immediately thought of Hilaire Belloc’s own 1932 Cautionary Verse, entitled “The Example,” as well as Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Book X, Chapter 23). Thus, I have thought to counterpoint and interrelate these brief texts, especially upon this anniversary of Hilaire Belloc’s death.

What was it in Father Tiepolino’s Satirical Dialogue that first made me think of Hilaire Belloc and of his own effervescent irony and humor? It was, I blush to say, the mention and significant ecclesiastical implications of the word “parrot,” and even its impish additional suggestion of “parrot fever,” which is itself a clear and present, zoonotic danger. For, the Latin word for parrot is “psittacus,” and the Latin word for the infectious “parrot fever” is “psittacosis.” Let us, therefore, fittingly first consider how Hilaire Belloc himself has used the latter formidable word in his admonitory verse, called “The Example.”

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