(8 July 1868 – 17 June 1943) was an Irish Catholic scholar and Dominican priest based in London, active in evangelisation and apologetics.

Joseph McNabb was born in Portaferry, County Down, Ireland, the tenth of eleven children.

McNabb was a frequent contributor to Blackfriars, the Dominican literary monthly published in Oxford.

[4] Tens of thousands of people heard him preach in Hyde Park for the Catholic Evidence Guild, where he took on challengers—Protestants, atheists, and freethinkers—before vast crowds every Sunday, or heard him debate intellectuals including George Bernard Shaw in the city's theaters and conference halls on the social issues of the day.

"[5][6] As a young priest, he came under the influence of the convert-bishop William Robert Brownlow,[a] who, after his reception into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman, not only kept many Anglican friendships but made others among Nonconformists.

Brownlow was the author of a work breathing a strong apologetic spirit titled Catholics and Nonconformists: or Dialogues on Conversion (1898).

Spencer Jones,[8] rector of Moreton-in-Marsh, leading Anglo-Catholic and author of England and the Holy See: An Essay Towards Reunion (1902).

McNabb sought also to promote a vision of social justice inspired by St. Thomas and by Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, which called upon "every minister of holy religion... to bring to the struggle [for broad distribution of property] the full energy of his mind and all his powers of endurance",[2] as well as to shore up both faith and reason against the threat of modernism.