GENE ATTACKED BY SNARLING NOBODY!

GENE ATTACKED BY SNARLING NOBODY!






Detterling when you can write with such searing honesty about yourself as I do then come back and attack me.


In the meantime stay in your place as a nobody.

Detterling aged fifteen trainspotting in 1959

REMORSE

REMORSE







I'm feeling so bad with myself. Friday night was going to be like any other Friday night in my new regime. A day's writing followed by a convivial evening with the lads in the Good Yarn at the Friday Night Club. But that's not how it turned out.


Every Lent I give up alcohol. Maybe just the one if a special occasion arises. All was going well and we talked about that legendary night of 16th December 2016. This night has, as I thought it would, fast become Uxbridge legend. Then 'Faraday' said, "I propose a toast to Uxbridge." I thought: "I can't toast Uxbridge in Diet Coke. Maybe just the one Tuborg will do no harm."


At closing time, after six Tuborgs and God knows how many vodkas, I'm totally pissed. How did this happen? I'm such a prat.


Yesterday I felt awful. I have let myself down so badly. Today I feel a little better - but so full of remorse.


GENE

The end of the ‘Hitler’s Pope’ myth

by Fr Leo Chamberlain OSB

posted Thursday, 9 Mar 2017

Pius XII: Nazis called him ‘Jew loving’

For 50 years, the truth about Pius XII’s battle against Nazism has been suppressed. But new evidence makes his heroism undeniable

It has scarcely been noticed in Britain, but a remarkable development has recently taken place in Holocaust studies. Nearly two years ago, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a historical research institute, set out on “a modest project”. It wanted to mark “Houses of Life” – places where Jews were sheltered during the war – with memorial plaques. It found more than 500 such houses in Italy, France, Hungary, Belgium and Poland. Eduardo Eurnekian, chairman of the foundation, wrote that “to our surprise, we have learned that the overwhelming majority of Houses of Life were institutions related to the Catholic Church, including convents, monasteries, boarding schools, hospitals, etc”.
In Rome alone, some 4,500 people found refuge in churches, convents, monasteries and boarding schools. In Warsaw, All Saints Church sheltered Jews. This was remarkable, because the penalty for Poles for rescuing Jews was the death camp or, more likely, instant execution.
It is appropriate that a foundation named after Raoul Wallenberg should find such an extensive Catholic contribution to saving Jewish lives. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat in Budapest during the war. He and Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio, saved 120,000 out of the city’s 150,000 Jews. Wallenberg was arrested by the Red Army and never seen again.
The news about the Houses of Life is only surprising because the truth about the Church and the Jewish people in the Second World War has been suppressed. Several aides of the wartime pope, Pius XII, acknowledged that they had worked to rescue Jews on his direct instructions. They included two future popes – Mgr Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII) and Mgr Giovanni Battista Montini (Paul VI). Pius XII himself sheltered Jews both in the Vatican itself and at Castel Gandolfo.
This is a good moment to mark the Church’s witness against Nazism. Eighty years ago, on March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI issued Mit Brennender Sorge (“With Burning Anxiety”), an encyclical, pointedly written in German, condemning Nazism. “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, and divinises them to an idolatrous level, perverts an order of the world created by God,” the pope wrote.
Pius XI’s secretary of state was Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII. He distributed the text, which he had helped to draft, secretly within Germany. Four years earlier, in 1933, he had negotiated a concordat between the Holy See and Germany, not to appease Nazism but to have some means of holding the Nazis to account through an international treaty. The regime referred to him as “Jew loving”: he had made more than 50 protests against Nazi policy, the earliest coming just days after the passing of the Enabling Act, which granted Hitler the power to enact laws without Reichstag approval. Pacelli was regarded as so anti-Nazi that the Third Reich attempted to prevent his election as pope in 1939.
Pacelli’s personal story is important. He was a Germanophile – and, equally, a philosemite – from his youth. As nuncio in Bavaria during the brief 1919 communist republic he showed high personal courage, remaining at his post. His sympathy and friendship with Jews, including the great conductor Bruno Walter, was well known, and he gave discreet help to many. At Walter’s request, he gained the freedom of a musician, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, arrested in a pogrom while Bavaria was under communist rule. Safe in America, Gabrilowitsch became the founding musical director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Walter himself later became a Catholic.
Before the war, Pacelli took extraordinary risks to help the German opposition. He knew which generals were preparing to act against Hitler, and made sure news of their intentions reached the British government.
In a situation of huge difficulty, Pius XII did what no one else did to save Jewish lives during the war. He knew quite early on what was really happening to the Jewish people. At the time, too many were in denial, including a British diplomat who wrote of “these whining Jews”. Neither Britain nor America made it easy for Jews to escape into exile – the Kindertransport was a blessed exception.
In the war years, Pius XII acted directly in Italy and through papal diplomats in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and elsewhere. Unsurprisingly given the circumstances, there is no firm number for those saved by the pope and the Church in one way or another. It was perhaps between 500,000 and 860,000.
Pius XII’s statements both before and during the war were unmistakably hostile to Nazism. The Allies may have wanted more, but the price would have been the ending of all the good the pope could do. The Nazis understood his meaning very well. A plan to kidnap Pius in 1944 was only averted by the unlikely intervention of SS General Karl Wolff.
The pope was also utterly clear about the evils of communism and vicious Stalinist religious persecution. But he said nothing about it during the war. Allied diplomats in the Vatican understood this, realising that it was only the pope’s preservation of the Holy See’s neutrality which enabled him to give refuge to thousands of Jews in religious houses in Italy and the Vatican itself. It also allowed him to provide contacts so that information about prisoners of war and the Holocaust could reach the Allied powers.
All this was acknowledged during and after the war, not least by Jews. Albert Einstein, who had escaped Nazi Germany, said in 1940: “Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth … I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”
Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, and Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Israel, paid similarly generous tributes. Israel Zolli, Rome’s chief rabbi, became a Catholic and took the pope’s Christian name, Eugenio, in tribute to him. After Pius’s death in 1958, Golda Meir, then Israeli foreign minister, wrote: “We mourn a great servant of peace.”
The Nazis hated the Church. Thousands of Catholic priests were imprisoned, especially in Dachau, the “priests’ camp”. It is true that some bishops followed a policy of appeasement: Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau supposedly ordered a Requiem Mass for Hitler in 1945. Some Catholics betrayed Jews and even, as in Jedwabne in 1941, massacred them. But others, notably Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Münster and Bishop Konrad von Preysing of Berlin, did all they could to resist Nazism. Preysing’s agent, Bernhard Lichtenberg, the provost of Berlin cathedral, was judicially murdered and is now recognised as a martyr.
Yet in the nearly 60 years since Pius XII’s death, his reputation has been traduced. One recent example was the BBC’s report that the silent prayer of Pope Francis at Auschwitz was in reparation for the silence of the Catholic Church. The corporation was simply repeating what had become the received view of Pius XII and of the Church’s record during the war.
Lord Alton of Liverpool immediately protested, and together he and I made a formal complaint to the BBC. A considerable correspondence ensued. In early December, the complaint was upheld. Fraser Steel, head of the editorial complaints unit, wrote: “This did not give due weight to public statements by successive popes or the efforts made on the instructions of Pius XII to rescue Jews from Nazi persecution, and perpetuated a view which is at odds with the balance of evidence.”
The negative view of Pius marked an astonishing reversal of reputation. In 1963, a previously unknown German, Rolf Hochhuth, published a play called The Deputy which blamed Pius XII for the Holocaust. Hochhuth claimed it was historically accurate. The play was premiered in West Berlin and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England and America.
The provenance of Hochhuth’s play, and the degree of communist support, aroused suspicion. The USSR had a strong interest in destroying the moral authority of the pope and the Catholic Church. As Khrushchev, a mass murderer in his own right, said at the time, dead men cannot defend themselves.
Confirmation of these suspicions came only in 1998, with the publication of the memoirs of Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian three-star general in the Securitate who defected in 1978. According to Pacepa, the project, known as Seat 12, originated in Moscow with Khrushchev. From 1959, Pacepa had directed his spies, posing as priests, to pilfer Vatican archives. They found nothing they could use, but Ivan Agayants, the KGB’s disinformation chief, had been able to feed Hochhuth with false information, which he was only too ready to use. The Soviets’ aim was to discredit Pope Pius and wreck the growing understanding between the Church and Judaism.
The American writer Ronald Rychlak, who has done the most detailed work on the story, concludes that Hochhuth was heavily dependent on such Soviet disinformation. Not that Hochhuth was the only author: his play was rewritten and heavily abridged by Erwin Piscator, a famous producer and communist agent of influence.
In 1964, Blessed Paul VI commissioned detailed research, eventually published in 1981, which showed the degree of papal and Catholic support for the Jewish people during the war. This should have been the end of the matter. It was not. A number of Jewish scholars, such as Daniel Goldhagen, publishing in the 1990s, endorsed the accusations. This had its effect. The distinguished historian Sir Martin Gilbert wrote that he repeatedly received applications for support for PhD study which usually included a reference to the “silent” or even “anti-Semitic” Pius XII.
John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, published in 1999, was seriously misleading. He implied that Pacelli held “stereotypical” anti-Semitic views. This was based on, among other things, mistranslating, misconstruing and selectively quoting a long letter written by Pacelli in 1919, reporting on a meeting with the chairman of the Bolshevik administration in Munich. Cornwell’s book was overdependent on the understandably embittered recollections of Heinrich Brüning, the exiled former German Chancellor. Hitler’s Pope was really part of a campaign against St John Paul II. But that is a different argument and has no business in an evaluation of Pius XII.
Cornwell’s book had wide circulation and favourable reviews from the liberal media. It and others in a similar vein have been savaged by knowledgeable critics, such as Rychlak, Gilbert and Rabbi David Dalin. Together they provide detailed evidence of misquotation, misrepresentation and even malice in these books. The media have found little space for these corrections. So the lie remains the received story. But the example of the BBC suggests that this may be changing.
Three steps would do much to right the wrongs against Pius.
First, the BBC should prepare a major documentary on the pope who was responsible for saving thousands of Jewish lives. I am advised that the corporation will consider this. The BBC has acknowledged that there should be closer scrutiny. Which of course there already has been: the question is whether minds are open.
Secondly, the critical statements about Pope Pius at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, should be substantially revised. Many of the pope’s helpers have now been named Righteous among the Nations. It is time that Pius was recognised himself as among the Righteous. He needs not a tree, but a whole forest planted in his memory. The story of the Houses of Life adds further weight to the evidence for his bravery.
Thirdly, Pius’s beatification should proceed without delay. Rome has already recognised his heroic virtue, paving the way for him to be declared Blessed.
Let the last word be with Pius himself. In 1943, he wrote: “The time will come when unpublished documents about this terrible war will be made public. Then the foolishness of all accusations will become obvious in clear daylight. Their origin is not ignorance but contempt of the Church.” At that time he was referring to Nazi propaganda. His words apply equally to the malicious libels of the past 60 years.


The Very Rev Fr Leo Chamberlain osb is a former headmaster of Ampleforth College. He is parish priest of St John the Evangelist, Easingwold in North Yorkshire
This article first appeared in the March 10 2017 issue of the Catholic Herald.

I see Orgreave is in the news again.

Was Orgreave Mrs Thatcher's finest hour?







I see Orgreave is in the news again.  Was Orgreave Mrs Thatcher's finest hour? Me? I couldn't possibly comment. I must remain neutral on this one.

THE WRITER'S LIFE

THE WRITER'S LIFE

Well, as always I'll start with honesty. The writer's life is tough. This is no an occupation for any namby-pamby boy. Hemingway always said writing was about the most demanding life one could choose. I have not found things easy over the past two weeks. To be honest I have developed writer's block. But quit? NEVER! Throwing in the towel and Gene could never be part of the same sentence.

One of the things I have been very concerned about is that I have a routine for the day and that I don't get under Marianne's feet. She's a busy girl: she is on call as a translator for hospital duty with the NHS, she does part-time work for a translation agency and she also volunteers in her spare time for the Passage Homeless Centre in Westminster. Yes, I know, I know. I just don't deserve a wife like Marianne.

So in the mornings I get out of the house. Originally I was considering becoming a Soho character and spending my days in the French pub, Wheelers, The Pillars of Hercules and the Coach & Horses. However I abandoned that idea and am sticking to Uxbridge. I'm told the Soho scene is just not the same since the passing of Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard.

Luckily some great coffee bars in Uxbridge:  Hoole  & Harris in the High Street, Giardino in the Intu Centre and even Marks & Spencers café in the Pavilions centre.

Francis Bacon

Jeffrey Bernard

Anyhow spring is just around the corner and I look forward writing at outdoor café tables - I will probably be seen at cafes as far out as Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross.

Hemingway used to find writing at pavement café tables in Paris so stimulating. Clive James has wonderfully evoked the atmosphere of writing alfresco at cafes in Florence and in Rome. Albert Camus was another who wrote in this way.

So hard work ahead but it will all be worth it. And I'm too honest not to admit that there is some vanity here. Imagine the thrill of typing Gene Vincent into the Amazon website and seeing my book cover appear on the screen. And walking through Fassnidge Park or the Intu centre and hear whispered as I go by: "There goes Gene the writer. I just love his latest novel." Or strolling into Waterstone's and casually picking up a copy of HEARTBREAK AT HILLINGDON HIGH and reading the blurb on the back of the dust jacket:

Gene Vincent is a novelist, diarist and humorist. His writing has drawn comparisons with the work of James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh and Aristophanes.

Mr Vincent was educated at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in London and St John's College Oxford. He is married and lives in Uxbridge in west London. 

Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus and Clive James all liked writing alfresco.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s confession of belief – and other surprises in a fine new book

by Francis Phillips

posted Friday, 3 Mar 2017

Jean-Paul Sartre: 'a being whom only a Creator could put here' (Wikimedia)

   

Underneath Fr Rutler's wit and erudition is a deep orthodoxy and Christian hope

What a feast it is to read Fr George William Rutler’s recent collection of essays, He Spoke to Us (Ignatius), first aired in on-line Catholic journals. Fr Rutler, a parish priest in Manhattan, is a writer and preacher well-known beyond the confines of his parish. The trademark of his essays is to assemble a seemingly quixotic mixture of people and events in order to show the divine hand at work behind our human follies and fancies.

Underneath his wit, erudition and ironic style lies a deeply orthodox pastor who reads the often dismal signs of the times but, as in the Gospel story of the travellers to Emmaus which he relates, lives with Christian hope burning within him. Writing in Crisis magazine in 2012, Fr Rutler states: “We are not a Christian nation now… We can dance to Caesar’s intolerable music, but he will call the tune. We can feast with Caesar, but he will soon feast on us. We can laugh with Caesar, but he will soon laugh at us… There is abundant laughter in the mouth of the foolish.”

On every page I was startled, shocked and stimulated. I also learned much that I did not know, such as that on his deathbed Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous atheist French philosopher, confessed that “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”

We learn in these pages that Fr Rutler doesn’t own a mobile phone; that he avoids taking holidays because he loves his parish work; that he relaxes by painting landscapes and practising his violin; that he takes regular boxing lessons, ever since he was once knocked unconscious by a man he caught breaking into his church’s Poor Box. He maintains that when Jesus told us “to turn the other cheek” he didn’t mean us to be cowards.

One essay, “Hanging Concentrates the Mind”, particularly caught my attention. Fr Rutler is not of the view that capital punishment is always wrong. Indeed, he quotes Cardinal Avery Dulles: “If the pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millennia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture.”

He describes an occasion when Charles Dickens watched an execution in Rome and in which “the execution was delayed until the murderer’s wife was brought to him and he at last received absolution.” He also cites the example of St Vincent Pallotti who “frequently assisted the condemned to the scaffold” and who was “edified by the many holy deaths he saw…”

Fr Rutler is not so much endorsing the death penalty as recognising that having been banished from Eden, we live in an imperfect world. Meanwhile, what matters above all is our eternal salvation.

It isn’t possible to summarise these piquant and insightful essays; I can only give a glimpse of their worth and Fr Rutler’s wisdom. I urge readers to savour them for themselves.

Why are addicts and outcasts so often strongly religious?

by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

posted Monday, 27 Feb 2017

A former drug addict, with tattoos depicting Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, holding a rosary at a rehabilitation centre in Beirut (Getty) 

   

Many people on the streets are holding fast to God when every other social tie has failed them

What role does religion play in the lives of the outcast and the desperate among us? Sadly, it can be difficult for such people to find their way into the Church, because there are so many obstacles to their socialisation. But they are often strongly religious, as Chris Arnade has observed in the Guardian. Arnade writes, of one of the many people he met on the streets of New York:

The first addict I met was Takeesha. She was standing near the high wall of the Corpus Christi Monastery. We talked for close to an hour before I took her picture. When we finished, I asked her how she wanted to be described. She said without any pause, ‘As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.’

The words of Takeesha express the paradox that we all live: we are in this world, which can often leads us into terrible places; but we are the children of God. Indeed, one of the conclusions that Arnade draws is that we are all sinners, though the rich and comfortable can sometimes manage to smother this realisation. That means, of course, those living on the streets are perhaps wiser than those of us living sheltered lives.

Arnade uses his article to criticise his earlier teenage self, and also to criticise the position of Professor Richard Dawkins. That is the way his experience has led him, and he has clearly been moved by his encounters with people who believe, and for whom religion is part of their survival strategy. I suppose any atheist worth their salt would reply that religion is in fact a comfort for the desperate, but once we take away the poverty and the social issues that have reduced them to such desperation, people will soon slough off their religious allegiances too.

That may be the case: the more we live our lives in the bubble, insulated by wealth, the less we will need God. I think I can go along with that. But the flipside of that that argument is of course this: a society fixated on wealth and success is not often a happy society, particularly when it loses sight of God. The desperation on the streets did not arise by accident; it was created by the phenomenon of sin, individual sins, but also the structures of sin that are endemic in a highly worldly successful society like modern America. Religion is not a sticking plaster for those left behind; religion, or the lack of it, is at the heart of the crisis in social care. There are desperate people on the streets, holding fast to faith, because every other social tie has failed them.
It would be a mistake to see the decline of social ties as unrelated to the decline of religious observance. One of the reasons we need religion is because it reminds us of our duty to the stranger; indeed Christianity tells us that we are our brother’s keeper, and that each of us is called to be a Good Samaritan. Because we are so lazy, selfish and deaf to the needs of others, we need the constant divine reminder that we are in fact all called to be responsible for others.

I have met a few drug addicts myself – if you sit in Church, they will often come in, and if you talk to them, they will engage in conversation. Most seem to suffer from multiple addictions, including addiction to alcohol. Most are people with strong faith, either because they have come to faith in prison thanks to the Alpha Course, or because they retain a strong love of their childhood Catholicism, a reminder of happier and carefree days.

It is interesting to note that the people Arnade describes are deeply attached to the externals of Catholicism, the sacramentals such as rosaries, crosses and pictures of the Last Supper. These things speak louder than words. I always give a set of rosary beads to the people I talk to, of the inexpensive plastic variety. I gave one set of blue beads to a young lady the other day. “Don’t you have the type that glow in the dark?” she asked. As it happened, I did. Perhaps she was remembering the days of her childhood when a plastic Madonna glowed in the dark of her bedroom to comfort her at night. The Refuge of Sinners and the Comforter of the Afflicted is there for us all, and she never gives up on us!