The Beast Awakens

Posted on Saturday, 2 July, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

There are several films dealing with this ungodly fascination with a subject that is both taboo and a part of the way things seem to be going. The above clip is from The Boys from Brazil starring Gregory Peck as the notorious “angel of death” of Auschwitz Dr Joseph Mengele and Laurence Olivier as Esra Liebermann, a fictitious character based on Simon Weisenthal. In this clip, Mengele confronts his former victim and gives his diatribe about having created clones of Hitler and how the Nazi ideology would rise again with a new Führer.

Another film is The Odessa File from 1974, based on the novel written two years before by Frederick Forsyth. A journalist happens upon the suicide of an elderly Jewish man and is given his diary by the local police. The story turns to the hunt for a former SS captain who commanded a concentration camp during WWII and murdered the journalist’s father. A more recent film is Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (The People vs. Fritz Bauer in English), which I recently saw at the cinema with my wife reflects a similar theme: de-nazification in Germany after 1945 was not complete (nor could it be). Many SS men escaped justice for their crimes against humanity and settled in the police force or civil service of the Bundesrepublik among other respectable posts in post-war German society.

Faithful to my family on my father’s side, I have always admired the Romantic soul of Germany, its philosophy and music, the inspiring sound of the language (I only learned a little German when I was in Switzerland). At the same time, when Germans become fanatical, it for me reflects some of what I have been seeing in the news about England these last few days. Hitler once claimed that England was a natural ally, until Churchill was elected and fought him to the death. How could such a great country sink to the depths of the concentration camps and the mass killing (don’t anyone tell me it didn’t happen, because I believe the blood curdling photos and films). The Germans have lived with their shame ever since.

I refuse to go to the extremes of some conspiracy theorists who claim that Hitler survived and died in his 90’s in South America. However, it is true that many Nazis went to Argentina, Paraguay and other South American countries where the local dictator welcomed them, especially when they brought a lot of gold and money with them. In the end, it makes little difference. The present resurgence of nationalism in Europe is frightening. The recent election in Austria that narrowly elected a Green has been declared illegal, and there is to be a new election. The far-right candidate Norbert Hofer might win the election this time.

We cannot exaggerate the situation in England. There have been some revolting examples of racial hatred since the referendum. Some have been claimed by a group calling itself Combat 18. The first and eighth letters of the alphabet are A and H, the initials of Adolf Hitler. Other such unsavoury groups are less “obvious” but the ideology bears similarities, mainly against immigration, non-white races and Jewish and Islamic people. Here is a balanced description of Neo-Nazism. This movement is fortunately very marginal, but is something to be watched carefully by security services, police forces and governments.

Some of us have expressed concern that the ideology might be brewing within the institutions of the EU, but such allegations call upon evidence. There are many conspiracy theories about how Nazism was so successful in the 1930’s and how the “beast” metamorphoses in our times. An Austrian corporal with a loud voice and Charlie Chaplin moustache ranting in German might frighten too many people off these days. But the same ideology in a different package…

One of the best books on original Nazism is William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – A history of Nazi Germany. This adventurous American journalist survived in Germany during the period and lived to write his book. I have been fascinated with this subject since getting a very good course of history lessons at school, from World War I and the Treaty of Versailles to the fall of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s campaign that brought him to absolute power. Some think that the condemnation of Nazism has been exaggerated, but I stick to the mainstream view formed by the photos and films of piles of rotting corpses at Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka and elsewhere. For me, the judgement of Nuremburg and civilisation is firm and final.

Was the lesson of Nuremburg really learned. The slogan runs Never Again! My tears flowed as I visited Oradour sur Glâne and the Normandy beaches – as if I had lived through the horror of that time when my parents were teenagers. I have seen the films of the tragedy of war, and the scars are still here in Normandy with the hurriedly rebuilt towns of the 1950’s. The concrete blockhouses still watch over the seas of Normandy and the Mur de l’Atlantique. The submarine pens of St Nazaire are indestructible and will still be there in a hundred years time. It is almost a testimony of the persistence of the Beast that lurks within each of us.

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins. One out of four houses was destroyed. A whole population was rendered homeless and destitute. Germany, already humiliated by Clemenceau in 1919, was destined never to wage war ever again. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill vowed in February 1945 that Germany would be utterly demilitarised and Nazism extirpated. Others were proclaiming that Germany would rise again. Mainstream historical studies admit that Nazism survived through the Odessa and other organisations. Fritz Bauer was threatened and obstructed by the old Nazis working peacefully in the German civil service, intelligence services and the police.The three films mentioned above illustrate just how clever those men were in going underground. Many were caught and brought to justice, but actually very few.

The recovery of Germany after World War II was incredible. It was a true miracle in the 1950’s. Help came from the USA, as both the USA and the Soviet Union made use of Nazi technicians and scientists. The denazification programme imposed by the Americans only lasted for two years, and was handed back to the Germans as early as 1947. From then on, nearly half of the civil service were former Nazis. Eleven thousand dismissed teachers were quietly reinstated. Sixty percent of the finance ministry employees were Nazis, and a greater percentage ran the Ministry of Justice, hence Fritz Bauer’s difficulties when he decided to go for Bormann. As early as 1951, the German government officially declared that denazification was complete. It was not! In those years, racism and anti-Semitism lingered on. A majority of Germans still thought that Nazism was a good thing even though Hitler had made such a mess of it.

Pope Pius XII has been accused of running ratlines to help former SS men get to South America in exchange for large sums of money for the Istituto delle Opere della Religione and that blasphemously named Banco di Spiritu Santo. David Yallop’s In God’s Name was sensationalist, but it made fascinating reading when it came out in the early 1980’s. The involvement of the Church in this festering evil is one of the most damning indictments of the twentieth century. I prefer not to know too much about Argentinian Jesuits!

When the Nazis saw that they were losing the war, we can be sure that they would not take it lying down and commit suicide with cyanide pills. They approached the top industrial elite. One would think that they are all dead by now, so the question remains – did they pass down the ideology to younger people who were convinced by it? The economic miracle from a defeated ruin to the richest country of Europe makes the mind boggle.

What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? Some of the old Nazi goons were still alive then even if they were getting ancient. Within two years, the number of far right-wing activists increased by at least a quarter. There were thousands of violent racialist incidents. It is alleged that more than half of the police force in Germany sympathised with the ideology. By 1991, many immigrants began to leave Germany for safer countries.

In 1991, the Bundestag moved from Bonn back to Berlin and restored the Reichstag. Was this symbolic? Germany recognised Slovenia and Croatia, which evoked many memories of Nazi atrocities. Finally, the EU recognised these two countries. Only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany was rising fast. Today, Germany is the third richest arms producer and is the leading country of the EU.

Lessons do not seem to have been learned from the period between the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 to Hitler becoming Chancellor and Führer in 1933. Mrs Thatcher was very concerned in 1995 that Europe was following Germany, not the other way round. Was the whole show being run by Nazis? That is a very difficult one to answer or even guess.

Is Germany still Nazi? That would be an extremely serious accusation. It is clear that the government and high-profile politicians are not Nazis or far-right wing in their ideas. I have had many German friends at university and they repudiated their country’s Nazi past. The father of one of my German friends was a Werhmacht soldier. He did his job and obeyed orders, but did not commit atrocities. He was deeply ashamed of those who commanded his superior officers. Multiply that elderly man living in Arnsberg by millions and you have a national spirit seeking forgiveness and desiring a new future. In spite of this horrible scar, I admire Germany and find inspiration in its culture and the Romantic philosophy of Schelling, Hegel and Schliermacher among others. The music of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and so many others is inimitable.

The Beast is not Germany but is latent within each of us. I have seen the example of this in my native country whose heart is very black if you go back to the days of Empire and the worst abuses of the nineteenth century in India and Australia. The same black heart is also found in France, in each of us and all of us. It is our capacity for evil and our lack of empathy.

We now lie at a watershed. The EU is a vast anonymous and self-serving bureaucracy, yet the same evil can influence those who want to leave it and re-establish other bases of wealth and power. England looks like bringing in the right-wing of the Conservative Party. Austria is redoing its election. France has had enough of Champagne Socialism and sleazy Sarkozy and Madame Le Pen waits in the wings having moderated some of the questionable sayings of her feisty father. It really seems that nationalism is the only way, perhaps inevitable like I described yesterday about determinism. Greece and Italy have very right-wing parties clamouring for power. What are we going to get if these right-wing parties all over Europe get in and rule? Like with Hitler, we will get new motorways and technology, housing and jobs for all and plenty of freebies. Then it will all have to be paid for…

The temptation is there for us all. We have had enough of the establishment, just like the Weimar Republic in the 1930 which “did nothing in particular but did it very well” as Gilbert and Sullivan satirised the British government during the Napoleonic wars. We move to a new class war of the have-nots who have been left on the beach as the establishment destroyed industry and manufacturing, and the intellectuals and service-providers. We are divided between the historically aware and humanly sensitive – and raw bigotry and hatred of “the other”. What is now the alternative to the nationalist demagogues? Not very much.

They will kill us or ignore us. There is not a lot anyone can do except not vote for them. Many have given up voting, and therefore any notion of democracy. But, who do we vote for? I consider also the USA with the rising billionaire Donald Trump, but the alternative is Hillary Clinton or another term of Obama. I don’t relate to American politics. It’s bad enough here in Europe. I didn’t vote in the British referendum because I have lost the vote by being an expatriate for more than fifteen years. How would I have voted? I have sympathies both ways, as long as we push through the overgrowth and seek to address the real moral and social issues. The EU is a mess and seems to want to bring us all to a totalitarian dystopia. Would a band of brawling thugs like Hitler’s henchmen be any better? Let us remember that the virus does not affect only Germany, but all our countries we love and revere as our mothers and fathers.

We need to find our spiritual and Christian roots, the true spiritual humanism and basis for a future. We pray God, not to punish our enemies and other bad people – but for guidance and light for ourselves to see the way in the darkness. At the end of Charlie Chaplin’s Dictator film, we hear another message which seems as relevant for us today as it was in 1940.

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Arts and Crafts Revisited

Posted on Thursday, 30 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

If any of you are on Pinterest, there is a lovely page on the Arts & Crafts style. This style (dating from about 1890 to 1914, surviving to some extent in the 1920’s and in some examples of Art Deco) was mostly used for private houses and furnishings, but a few churches too. I notice the occasional Chinese or Japanese influence, but it is not invariable. You might be able to see the page without signing up for anything. It is worth the visit.

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Romanticism takes off!

Posted on Thursday, 30 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I was doing my daily rounds today and found Brexit: Hell No? This little article reflects a comment from yesterday in my previous posting in the theme of inevitability. A light bulb moment happened. I remembered my old philosophy classes at the Angelicum thirty years ago. The Dominican professors droned on in Italian, which I could hardly understand, especially with a thick southern accent – but something rubbed off on me. The word that came into my mind is determinism. Open up a new tab on your browser, read the Wikipedia article and then come back here…

* * *

I have to admit that the word determinism hit me subliminally as I read Rad Trad’s article. He describes the so-called “liberal” establishment as being characterised by teleological determinism. The acceptance of the “new orthodoxy” becomes inevitable. This was an aspect of Marxist and Leninist teaching, that everything was the inevitable result of brute forces shaping man’s destiny to which he must submit.

All of a sudden, something comes out of the woodwork to challenge the inevitability of “growth” and “closer integration”. Brexit put a spanner in the works, and many of us will suffer. Unless the British government fails to implement Article 50, many of the perks we Europeans have had (visa-free travel and residence) for the last twenty years will be over. Fine for myself, I fulfil all the requirements for getting French nationality (though I would hope to keep my British passport too). But for others who are younger than I am and who have a culturally European outlook and would not be satisfied workin’ down ‘t’ pit in Barnsley (sorry I forgot that Maggie Thatcher shut down the entire coal mining industry in the 1980’s).

I suspect that the EU will collapse from its own weight and go the way of the Soviet monolith in November 1989. I remember it when I was a student at Fribourg. A friend came to my room to tell me that the Berlin Wall had fallen. How was it possible for something so eternal and indestructible? It happened – and to Russia itself. I thought of all those sad faces of Czech seminarians at the Nepomuceno College in Rome who had left home with such heroism. Marxist inevitability was over, and left-wing politics is still in tatters, discredited and as dead as the dinosaurs.

The Industrial Revolution thought it had everything in the bag, and along came William Blake and the dark satanic mills of his poem Jerusalem (set to music by Parry and sung as something ultra-nationalistic). Then along came the Romantics protesting that there was more to humanity than rationalism and the Machine. Grass roots movements? Here’s our chance for anyone who can write books, poetry, paint beautiful images, compose music, advance the cause of human thought. As the French Revolution guillotined the old order before guillotining itself, a chink has appeared in the black opaque curtain. Man is free and soars like an eagle in the heights of the imagination and his life of the spirit.

You, my dear reader, and I can do nothing about the political and financial movements in the world, but we can put our imaginations to work – just two hundred years after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816. We look on the prospects of post-humanism and trans-humanism with horror – but for the first time, the Thing is no longer inevitable. In the words of Wordsworth:

“O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!” (The Prelude, x, 690-4.)

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A Tale of Two Englands

Posted on Monday, 27 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The referendum seems to have revealed a similar kind of dialectic as between the North and South of the United States. After Brexit? The Referendum and Its Discontents by Scott Stephens offers some acute analyses of the referendum of last week. I have been brought to believe that the referendum should never have taken place – and that the EU needs profound reforms or to be destroyed and replaced with something new.

One such opinion is from John Milbank of the Radical Orthodoxy school:

Christians are duty bound for theological and historical reasons to support the ever closer union of Europe (which does not imply a superstate) and to deny the value of absolute sovereignty or the lone nation-state. Tragically, the Reformation, Roundhead, nonconformist, puritan, whig, capitalist, liberal version of Britishness last night triumphed over our deep ancient character which is Catholic or Anglican, Cavalier, Jacobite, High Tory or Socialist. The spirit of both Burke and Cobbett has been denied by the small-minded, bitter, puritanical, greedy and Unitarian element in our modern legacy. Unfortunately it has duped the working classes, once again to their further ruination.

One commenter on this article expressed surprise that someone of the intellectual calibre of John Milbank should equate the Brussels dinosaur (my expression) with the “high” view. That question is debatable. We would need to ask him. Apart from that, Milbank seems to have come up with an idea of two Englands that has always fuelled my own pilgrimage in life.

I was born in Kendal at the south end of the Lake District, a small market town where my parents settled in the late 1950’s when my father found his opportunity to join the local veterinary surgeon in partnership. As I grew up, I had the impression of stick-in-the-mud conservatism in attitudes. Older people kept the young at a distance with the old idea that age brought privilege. Kendal is a predominantly Protestant town with I don’t know how many denominations: one RC parish dating from the early nineteenth century, the main parish church with an excellent musical tradition and a “Prayer Book Catholic” ethos. I was in the choir there from 1975 to 1976. St George’s is quite high with its fine Edwardian chancel and St Thomas’ (where I was baptised) is rock-bottom low. They still had north-end celebration in the 1970’s but now it just has the big screen and the place for the “praise band”. There are many pentecostal and independent evangelical communities. High church worship has never been of much appeal to Kendal people. As the years went by, young Kendal folk modernised and followed the trends of fashion, consumption, smartphones and all the rest. The Lake District voted for staying in the EU, in spite of the conservatism I knew as a child.

I went to school in York and worked there for a few years before going to London in 1978. Yorkshire seemed to be less “closed” than Westmorland and Lancashire. Older people saw young people as the future, and there were more opportunities for things that interested me like church music. There was also the difference between a cathedral city and the smaller and industrial towns producing coal or mint cake.

What now remains of the revolution of the mid seventeenth century? Milbank opposes the two sides he finds implicit in our attitudes today. The USA still has its Yankees and Red-necks reflecting the two sides of the Civil War. I meet people occasionally who seem to come from another planet. No thought is shared in common. Having lived in France for so long, I see the same dividing lines between the revolutionary republican and those who look to the old medieval order as survived until 1789. It is the dividing line between the Classicist and the Romantic. Surely we all have both head and heart!

Perhaps this is one reason why there needs to be cooperation at a cultural level, not merely economical, financial and business. These splits need to be understood and worked on from the point of view of diversity and tolerance. This fundamental divide is everywhere, not least Russia or any country that had experienced a violent reformation or revolution. The cracks have certainly appeared in England as people voted more with the guts than with their heads.

England has been a very stable country since about the eighteenth century, and shone in contrast to the upheavals in France and much of Europe in the nineteenth century. The Empire was at its height in the Victorian era, and was finally destroyed after World War II, the 1960’s and the return of Hong Kong to China. Our industrial production is only a shadow of what it was until the 1960’s. Perhaps it is England’s turn to know such upheavals and accounts to be settled between lying and treacherous politicians, “ordinary” people and those more motivated by culture and humanism than brute money.

In spite of the differences, I see a common trunk of culture in the whole of Europe. England’s music in the eighteenth century was deeply influenced by Italy. England was not all puritanical but assimilated Latinitas as a part of its quiet and reserved Renaissance. France was never far away. My own family was very Germanophile before World War I. The damage done by those two wars is incalculable quite apart from the massive loss of human life and the destruction of our culture. Europe is something real and desperately needed to reconcile the two Englands and the two Europes, the two Russias and the north and south of the United States. I hardly see this with the present EU which is all about collecting and wasting gigantic amounts of money, the scandalous waste of foodstuffs on a huge scale and dictating over us in the tiniest details of safety standards and piffling details.

Certainly, in the same way as I sought something beyond 1970’s Kendal, the heart needs to be open and eager to soar with inspiration and imagination. Wordsworth leapt with joy with the changes in France – until he saw the stinking carts of headless corpses. We truly need philosopher kings – not bankers and billionaire grippes-sous. We need a completely new constitution of principles, a new social and human contract.

Perhaps we are at the brink of something great, or the greatest catastrophe to befall humanity. Sometimes, a good shake-up can bring a lot of good.

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A new Europe?

Posted on Sunday, 26 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Since the vote for Brexit on 23rd June, even my wife has joked with me about what would happen if I had to return to England or whether that troublesome country shouldn’t have the plug pulled out so that it sinks into the North Atlantic. The French have been going on at us Brits for centuries over the Hundred Years War, St Joan of Arc and the way the Perfide Albion thrashed Napoleon in 1815.

Humour apart, I have been reading different ideas about the profile of those who voted for Brexit, and I tried to see through the caricatures of the butcher selling meat in pounds and ounces and the Romantic Ladies. The thing about England in the past is that we had an Empire, but the reality of that empire involved cruelty and atrocities that sometimes rivalled those of the Axis during World War II. Englishmen hunted aborigines for sport and blew Indian rebels away from cannon. The reality of the arrogance of our forebears is quite sickening.

I have been very mixed up about this whole thing, and I am glad that I didn’t have the vote having been an expatriate for more than fifteen years. In the early 2000’s I still had to have a Carte de Séjour, quickly abolished when Europeans acquired the right to live and work anywhere in Europe without visas or residence permits with restrictions on work. That is about to come to an end if the referendum result is ever implemented. I will have to apply for dual nationality (French-British) or a succession of residence permits. Of the two, it would be better to be naturalised in order to participate in the country’s political life at the level of the State, the region and the local municipality. If we have rights, we also have duties!

I have few ideas of what will happen. There has been a lot of hype and hot air on Facebook over the past few days, about how England can go back to the glorious days of Victorian Empire to the strains of Elgar or how the reign of hatred has won. I have even seen a video of a “Remain” woman crying and getting emotionally upset about how the extreme right was coming. Such extreme outcomes are rare in history, in spite of our “conspiracy” thinking and desire for an explanation and an end to incertitude, a conclusion that marks the end of history.

I have Union Jack mugs and enjoy the music of Elgar. I wax nostalgic during my visits to England, seeing the graceful Georgian town houses with their six-over-six sash windows. An Englishman’s home is his castle. English is my language, and speaking French is simply an expedient to live with those people in whose country I reside. I am writing it now in my blog – plutôt qu’écrire en français pour des gens qui n’ont rien à foutre. I abhor the French revolutionary ideology and its republican “religion”, but I am also sickened by French nationalism and the dominant Cartesian philosophy. French religion is à vomir! I am as uprooted here as I was in England in the elitist system I knew in the 1970’s (I came to France in 1982, during the Thatcher era). I warm to the idea of belonging to something greater than my native country or the parochial and small-minded culture I left years ago. Since my teens, I felt I needed something new, new air to breathe and give a wider view of human life and a better world. I found Europe exciting and my visits to the USA between 1998 and 2003 confirmed this high and flying view of life in the United States of Europe. I saw the possibility of an American notion of religious freedom and a spiritual vision in the EU flag in spite of those who said that Christianity had no place now, in the past or ever, in the EU.

My attention has been drawn to the site of Europa Nova. I haven’t gone into this very much, and we are all concerned about the Islamisation of Europe, the death of humanism and Christian culture and the integration of countries like Turkey. We have seen the way Greece was treated, though it can be said that the problem of socialism is running out of other people’s money as Mrs Thatcher said in an inspired moment. We read about croneyism, the corruption of the European ideal and institutions by big business and vested interests. Is there not an exaggeration with regulation and standards down to the size and shape of carrots?

Could Europe be reinvented to allow us to keep our traditional national and cultural identities? Can the idea of a federation adapt to the differences between we “stuffy” English and the flamboyant Italians and Spanish? Can there not be more transparency about how the Islam question will be dealt with, since those people are coming in from outside? The Europa Nova bunch seems to be endeavouring for an innovative point of view. Reforms are needed in Brussels and Strasbourg, in Berlin and Paris. It needs to integrate the great achievements of Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment and the way that Christianity can assimilate these values of human rights and the dignity of the person. If there is a movement for that and not yet more money for the plutocrats and the billionaires of this world, there is hope and something we should support for the sake of our species and the planet that gives us life.

Democracy can often be a mere slogan, and rights are often given to those who do not have the education or rational thought needed to exercise them. I have often said it. Genius resides in individual persons, not in the vox populi. Plato spoke of rule by the wise, by philosopher-kings known for their prudence. We need to rediscover the heritage of humanism and our local cultures, rather than be stifled by them.

The immigration and Islamisation questions need to be addressed. For the question of religion and non-humanist ideology, the original French and American notions of secularism would serve as a guarantee of peace and respect for all. There’s nothing wrong with Muslims having mosques and practising their religion, as long as they respect us and our laws founded on justice and humanism. If I seek to immigrate into a country like the USA, I have to prove that I won’t be a burden on their social system – that I have an income and am able to live independently. Not so with millions of economic migrants who are not refugees fleeing for their lives from war zones. There need to be clear policies for helping genuine refugees and getting back to their own countries and cultures after the end of what drove them to England in the first place.

The gut reaction of England is understandable: the grottiest houses are too expensive for ordinary people to buy or rent with the money they earn from their jobs. The NHS is cash-strapped and the waiting lists are endless. The American system is cruel and cynical making sick people wonder if they would be better off dead!

There seems to be no problem with Europeanising the police and the armed forces, like in Switzerland and the USA. We need security and civil protection. Equally, the social security and health systems need to be streamlined, made cheaper to favour employment of local people and their being paid what they need to live in the financial reality of our time. The present tendency is to roll back workers’ rights as were conquered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Trade Union movement.

I know just about zilch about economics, but something needs to be done about the banks and the criminal elements in them.

Again, the essential is the spiritual and cultural elements of those of us living in or near our native lands. Certainly, we need the achievements of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but also the wealth of art and culture fostered by the Christian Church over centuries of influence and usage. The role of Christianity has been deliberately marginalised for ideological reasons, yet radical Islam goes uncriticised for the very abuses for which blame is heaped upon Christianity.

European institutions need to be accountable as surely the Swiss and American federations are in regard to their member States. We need a sense of proximity and the human touch, not being faced with anonymity, the Infernal Machine and Promethean arrogance. We won’t find those qualities in our nation states either, nor even in our towns and villages.

Yes, we need a new Europe, one that is spiritual, human and made for humanity.

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Shiver me timbers!

Posted on Saturday, 25 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

shiver-me-timbersThree-cornered hats cause not a little amusement at sailing gatherings. No, I haven’t had a haircut! It’s all tied up. The lifejacket and mobile phone are anachronistic! The photo was taken in the lock of Guilly Glas between the tidal part of the Aulne and the canal that eventually reaches Nantes.

Priests and sailors can both have fun. Here’s a couple of photos I have just received. In the first, I was helping a boat that had capsized by grabbing things that had fallen into the water. The boat itself was helped back up by one of the accompanying motor boats. The lesson is that you never retract your centreboard completely!

close-hauling

Here I was paddling my boat into the second lock (Chateaulin).

paddling

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Bishop Cantor

Posted on Friday, 24 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just received news of the death of Bishop Maurice Cantor of the Eglise Sainte-Marie near Rouen. He was born in 1921 near Dieppe and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest at the Abbey of Saint Wandrille. He served for a time in the Archdiocese of Rouen and left in the 1960’s to found an independent community. He was consecrated a bishop in the Eglise Gallicane, and received a sub conditione consecration from Bishop Cornejo-Radavero, a former Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop from Peru.

I met Bishop Cantor several times, and he was always very kind and pastoral, whilst making his policies of keeping his ministry in one place clear. It all seemed to be founded on popular RC devotions, which one would expect in France. The church he founded is well attended by local families, and will long survive its founder. Other bishops were consecrated years ago to ensure the Succession for this community.

I do not think that it would be appropriate for me to attend his funeral, but I will say Mass for Bishop Cantor with prayers for peace and unity between all Christians transcending differences of doctrine and culture. I have always admired this little Church from a distance, but never with hostility.

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Triumphalism?

Posted on Friday, 24 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This morning, I received an e-mail from a friend. He writes from a conservative point of view, one that historians would qualify as isolationist. Will this latest move bring about a dissolution of the present political establishment built on masculine power, money and lies? Will we see the radiant dawn of principled politics with the Common Good in view? Would we see the end of cultural Marxism and “political correctness” founded on the principles of Frankfurt critical theory?

Will we see a resurgence of nationalism like at the end of World War II or in the heyday of the Empire under Queen Victoria or during the period preceding World War I? I have the impression that we are reading too much into things. Do we really want Donald Trump, Mme Le Pen or Farange? Is that really what we want? We are warned about the succession of Scotland and Northern Ireland, the breakup of the United Kingdom. The first thing parents ask a teenager who wants to leave home is whether he has a job, something to live on and decent digs. It is said that the Empire subsists in the form of London’s City banks, but is that true? The era of top hats, moustaches and snuff boxes seems to be over!

We are buffeted and swayed by politicians and medias who don’t seem to know more about it than we do. I have felt for many years that the hitherto quagmire needed to be broken. What will we get under nationalism? Perhaps a good dose of Trump, Le Pen, UKIP, etc. – and then chop their heads off to find something new. All most Frenchmen have to say is how odd the English are for things like eating Marmite and for having beaten Napoleon! Not very helpful!

Most serious analysis attributed the success of Brexit to nationalism and the ham-fisted way the waves of immigrants are being handled. No one can afford them, and Europeans in need are pushed further to the back of the queue as Syrians, Afghans, Turks, etc. get first service and rich pickings. I am definitively “exiled” because I could never afford a house in England, not even something grotty in the north-east. One problem I see if how the UK can afford independence without the old Empire plundered from everyone who now wants to come and colonise England.

I look to the first major cracks in the EU monolith. Perhaps we will live our very own 1989 (I was 30 when it all happened in Germany and eastern Europe). It is an Orwellian monster, and would eventually become a dystopia if left unchecked. We are losing money over the plunge of the pound Sterling.

Will this cause mainstream British politics to go back to the 1930’s and Winston’s bulldogs and Department of Dirty Tricks under the pavements of Whitehall? I doubt it. We can’t expect too much unless we are truly at the gates of a revolution. Usually, when revolutions happen, heads roll, and we have to be careful that those heads in the baskets won’t be ours!

In brief, I am not triumphalistic. We have to wait and see what happens. The political elite might just ignore the result of the referendum and it would be business as usual with Brussels. There could be a big backlash against the right-wing Conservatives and nationalists and we go back to the 1970’s and everything on strike like with Callaghan and Wilson (when I was in my early teens). All over Europe, it is up and down, mostly chickening out at the last moment from bringing back right-wing nationalism. Indeed, where is it all going?

These are momentous times or one big boring anti-climax.

Let’s just keep our eyes and ears open.

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Brexit

Posted on Wednesday, 22 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

It would seem strange if I said nothing on this subject a day before the referendum. I can’t vote because expatriates who have not lived in the UK for more than fifteen years lose the right to vote. The matter seems to be one of debate – but that’s how it is at present. I don’t have the vote!

I have already expressed ideas, in the sense of the UK leaving the EU, mostly influenced by nationalistic ideas and a notion that the EU was becoming a kind of Orwellian Big Brother. We are being told different things on the media, and I am so confused about the issues. Some are lying to protect their self-interest. Others are saying what they believe to be the truth, but may be confused as most of us ordinary folk are.

As I understand it, the EU was intended to put an end to European wars as well as rationalise trade and the use of money. I have heard it said that it was intended to be a kind of “United States of Europe”. America has been the land of opportunity and freedom to make one’s living through work and practice any religion according to one’s conscience. On reading some sources, the USA now frightens me. To what extent is the EU the vassal of the USA and the various power elites?

If England leaves the EU, we might face a break-up of the United Kingdom. Our old Empire has not existed outside a few token islands here and there since World War II. We would have to live on what we can sell on the world’s market, with industry being but a shadow of what it was. Politics may go back to the rhetoric of Churchill and Thatcher – maybe that of Trump! Maybe that would be a good thing, perhaps a dangerous illusion of British triumph. Housing would become no more affordable. The NHS might go the way of private American health insurance. Those with all the money will have a free hand, and life might become very difficult for workers and poor people. I am afraid as many others are.

I am no longer sure of anything. Nationalism showed many ugly fruits in the twentieth century, and the world said “never again” as the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945. I could see small federations of even smaller states like the Swiss cantons. I like the idea of breaking up the gigantic bureaucracies to make life more human and democratic. Is that only a vain dream?

Perhaps dissident elements need to work for the destruction of the present EU structures before they become something like the old Soviet Union. That rather than individual countries leaving and leaving the rest intact. That is the anarchist in me speaking…

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First days back home

Posted on Tuesday, 21 June, 2016 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

moulin-mer01It always takes a while to get back into the routine of being back home after these days of messing about in boats. There was a progression between my three days alone on the Rade de Brest, the Friday passage with five other boats to the river Aulne and finally the gathering of seventy-two boats, there, more for the “Woodstock” of boats and baby boomer skippers than the long and hard sailing I had been doing.

I fired up the computer yesterday morning and found hundreds of e-mails, mostly spam and e-mail lists. I had to look firstly for translating orders and the prospect of getting back to work. I now have two orders under way, to continue my nautical thinking. Sarum lies on hard standing in my back yard on her trailer. It rained continuously yesterday and this morning, and I hope tomorrow to have the courage to remove the tarpaulin and take the stuff out. My three-cornered hat is still in the forward compartment with my little toolbox. I’ll do it tomorrow.

I was struck by a series of e-mails about a blog posting of someone who had lost his Christian faith. I don’t know who this is, but he appears to have some intellectual baggage and is / was an American Lutheran. Americans approach these questions so differently from Europeans. Here, people just don’t care. Americans feel they have to justify themselves and announce their position to the world, whilst protesting that they don’t want to influence others. The article is poignant and interesting. He has a point that biblical Christianity is hard to defend and when you start pulling threads, the whole lot becomes unravelled. He lives through the same drama as Bultmann and Harnack at the end of the nineteenth century. This is why I have always had an interest in Modernism as a way a “saving” Christianity from those who unravel everything and against whom one can do precious little other than entrench oneself in a Fundamentalist position. I have lost confidence in apologetics and attempts to prove anything to anyone – but I continue with knowledge of what separates us from materialism and having to face ourselves in the absence of transcendence and the immanent spirit. I wonder if God wants to be proven to anyone, and those without the capability of inner knowledge and introversion will never see much evidence of anything, let alone a “truth” with which they can bash others over the head.

This morning, I saw a clever slogan on Facebook: “If your religion causes you to hate other people, it is time to change your religion“. Either that or ask oneself many questions about the role of religions and take up sailing…

Perhaps my experience of last week gives me some insight. My real sailing was alone. I had nothing to prove to anyone. I went out in quite demanding conditions without taking any real risks. Friday was like a “small church” of our informal group of six boats. I felt I was always waiting for the “inertia of other people” and took it all in good humour. My boat should have more sail area, and I tend to be on the slow side – and they took it all in good humour. Things can be discussed light-heartedly in a small community. For the Saturday and Sunday, up went the colourful flags of Normandy, England and Brittany, and it was more about showing off than real sailing. It was a larger and more “mainstream” expression and we all went along with what had been organised. There was a lot of noise as we all got together on Saturday evening for food, folk music and dance. The extroverted side of me greatly appreciates Breton culture with its similarities to the Irish and the Cornish. The introverted side drew me to my memories of sailing the Rade de Brest and being at one with the sea and the weather, going beyond previous limits. We need both in our life: other people with common interests and sympathy – and the solitary life when real achievements become possible. So it is with religion and spiritual life.

The longer I live, the more I see that it is pointless to want to influence the masses. Man is at his most creative and inventive when he is alone and literally honest to God. Maybe I will be judged for being a “hidden” priest, living my vocation with something of the inspiration of the monk. We live in a world where Christianity is back in the catacombs, and only a caricature remains in the mainstream churches. Holiness is hidden and cannot be seen with vulgar eyes. Christ hid his divinity before Ciaphas, the Sanhedrin and Pilate. Biblical scholars talk of the Messianic Secret. It has to be the way of many of us too. Some of us might be tempted to “encourage” ourselves with apocalyptic prophecies that all fail. We are simply up against a world that doesn’t care. Our treasure is their trash. Why bother rowing against the wind? Drop anchor and wait for better conditions!

I think about the article. I wonder how that fellow will come to terms with himself once he has shed Christianity with the intention of not becoming a “New Atheist”. Will the blank emptiness bring relief from the cognitive dissonance he says he suffers? On the other hand, he did have a lot of junk to discard. The sea does a wonderful job of bringing us to the essential. It isn’t emptiness or futility but something that is alive and spiritual, an element of incertitude to humble our human pride. Certainly we all need a “reboot” and new beginnings, but as incarnate spirits – not as materialist beasts.

I had better get back to work…

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