Hillaire Belloc (July 27, 1870-July 16, 1953) was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. His style and personality during later life complemented the nickname he received in childhood, "Old Thunder." One of Belloc's most famous statements was "Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe"; this sums up his strongly-held, orthodox Roman Catholic views, and the cultural conclusions he drew from them, which were expressed at length in many of his works from the period 1920-1940. These are still cited as exemplary of Catholic apologetics. They have also been criticised, for instance by comparison with the work of Christopher Dawson during the same period.
With men such as G.K. Chesterton, Belloc envisioned the socioeconomic system of Distributism, based on the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII.
Recent lives of Belloc have been written by A. N. Wilson and Joseph Pearce.
