“This spiritual suffering is a thousand times worse …

 

[This is over half-way through the memoirs, and earlier the author has described in detail what "tidying up" and "sport" involve - beatings for the least imperfection in bed making or an imaginary spot of dirt - and in the latter, being beaten, tripped, stamped on, ...]

In front of the barracks lie the beaten and unconscious, carried in from the yard … In the barracks literally hell … The Ox [nickname of the prisoner in charge of the barrack] and the room supervisors do everything to prevent us clearing up in time …  As a result, we go to bed without supper, carrying the cauldrons of food to the barracks of the “greens” [criminals] and “blacks” [so-called "antisocials", gypsies, travelling performers, etc].

Only when we are all lying on our bunks does our precentor, leading the evening prayers, explain that a regrettable incident had come to pass, namely, that a dollar bill had been found on one of the priests, and  …

“A dollar bill? How on earth?”

“Well. When we were given privileges, it was permitted to give out the breviaries that were laid up in the store room. This priest had a bank note glued into the cover of his breviary. When the privileges were revoked, and all prayer books had to be given back, he kept the bank note and …

Exclamations of outrage! A terrible outrage! In the dark the dormitory seethes.

“Fratres! Fratres!” The precentor tried to calm us down. “Please be quiet. The room supervisor will come in any moment, or the Ox himself, and things will be even worse. Fratres! Oremus … Let us pray for our colleague W., who has been tortured to death.”

“For dollars” hisses someone in the dark.

“Oremus …”

That one died. That is, in truth, tortured to death. He was already rid of everything, but both barracks of priests? Two thousand exhausted colleagues? … And the poor elderly among us, who had survived from the October transport? … And the ailing bishop…

“Ten days of non-stop sport!” – the punishment was decided.  Ten days? Dear God. Who can survive?

So they “exercise” us mercilessly from morning to night. On top of this, Kapp lets  a pack of “greens” and “blacks”  into our blocks twice a day for revels! Three times a day we put the interior back in order! They take away our food on the slightest pretext. They beat us, pound us, murder. On the muster yard, the weaker collapse.

What is worse, Baecher, the Ox, the room and block supervisors of the other barracks sow rumours in the camp of the dollars found, the quantities of foreign currency, …

The camp seethes! A torrent of abuse, calumnies, insults, names, and curses falls on the abused priests.

“Serves them right! Their whole lives they chased after money, skinned the poor for it, gave no spiritual good without payment, their graspingness has come out even in the camp! Serves them right!”

This spiritual suffering is a thousand times worse and more painful than the murder of “sport” in the yard. Even those most attached to us and best-intentioned begin to change.

Rev. Henryk Malak, Klechy (2nd ed, London, 1961)

Fr Malak spent the entire war, from September 1939, in concentration camps. There are several passages where, having described things so horrible that after the first few pages of the book I stopped trying to imagine them, and which it seems impossible that anyone could have borne for more than a few days, Fr Malak says that the spiritual suffering was worse than the physical. If he says so, I am entirely convinced this is possible, and all the pious texts saying that Our Lord’s spiritual sufferings were greater than his physical are now easy to accept.

 

Fr Hugh Thwaites, SJ: “War Memoirs of an Amateur”

I have been chopping and cooking pots of vegetables to this soundtrack today. Fr Hugh Thwaites (a holy Jesuit) talks about his war experiences, from discounts on tickets to the Paris opera to slave labour in the Burmese jungle.

Part 1

Part 2

A remarkable man. Not many people now speak as clearly and somehow normally as he does: I think the language and delivery do almost as much good as the content of the words.

(I downloaded these talks from this website, which has Fr Thwaites giving other talks and reading the gospels and some encyclicals. There’s other stuff as well.)

http://www.4shared.com/account/audio/RnCA6qej/FrThwaites_talk_HTWarMem1.html

 

Someone’s summarised my parish

Fr John Boyle is visiting a few parishes away (staying with a young chap I used to ruhtlessly exploit for lifts when we had the same lectures a couple of years ago) – what he describes is pretty much my parish. Our sisters are Saleisan sisters, not whatever they have in Ursus. Sadly our adoration chapel is more of a random corner, and we’re stuck with the crappy mitteleuropa allthecandlesononesideofthealtar arrangement, but then we have a lovely organ and a great bookshop (ask Tepidus). Also we’re not in a remote former industrial suburb of Warsaw , but in a green leafy one on the metro line . So if after all those French religious congregations you’d like an idea of standard Polish urban parishes,  mosey over to Fr Boyle’s. (He has us on his “good blogs list”, so he must be a good thing.)

 

My new hero Bishop Rey says …

… a propos one community :

« on peut critiquer tel ou tel aspect, mais quand on voit de tels fruits il n’y a pas à hésiter ».”

(from this article of which I translated a bit a couple of posts down)

 

Fr Ronald Walls, RIP

Post swiped in its entirety from the Orkney Schola blog. The picture is, I am sure, the Italian chapel in Orkney. This text would be more in the mood of the Appriestiate apostolate if he hadn’t died before it was written, I suppose:

Rev. Fr Ronald Walls, 1920-2010
Great-grandfather – Scholar – Musician
Priest of God

In the early hours of this morning, the Orkney parish lost its priest-in-residence, Fr Ronald Walls, who died after a short illness. Ronald Walls at one time considered a career in the Opera, but chose instead the Presbyterian ministry. Challenged by a parishioner to cite the authority for his preaching, he thought long and hard about the question of theological authority. Like many others who have been forced to confront the question, he concluded that the Catholic Church alone could claim to be the voice of God on earth. The young minister and his wife entered that Church as layfolk in 1948; only after his wife’s tragic death did Ronald seek ordination to the priesthood. He trained at the Beda College in Rome.

When he was already in his mid 80s, and still carrying an injury from the car crash that had killed his wife thirty years before, Fr Walls – known to us all as Father Ronnie – volunteered to live out what remained of his retirement in Orkney, where some of his ancestors had come from. Some ‘retirement’! Orkney is not a populous parish, but it includes a dozen or so inhabited islands, many of them with a Catholic presence, and until his final months Father Ronnie was zealous in visiting Rousay, Sanday and Stronsay to celebrate Mass. He kept up his daily public Masses until the day before he went into hospital; almost every day he would preach, sharing some insight from his wide knowledge and profound understanding of Holy Scripture. During his time in Orkney, he dealt with a church that was flooded out and required major refurbishment as a result. He leaves a parish bursting with young life (was it eight or nine infant baptisms last year?); two boys made their debut as altar servers at the last major Mass that Father Ronnie offered – on Christmas Day. He gave great encouragement to the Orkney Schola, and only a few weeks or so, he asked me to arrange a chant Mass for the feast of St Magnus in April.

Much more could be said about this extraordinary priest. We already miss him.

‘The just man will never be forgotten; no sentence of doom will he hear to daunt him.’ – from the Gradual of the Requiem Mass.

 

Innocents accused

One priest of my acquaintance had hilarious stories of the passes made at him by women – I am not sure if his witty brush-offs really happened, or were just what he wishes he’d thought of at the time and he’d in fact just looked mildly horrified and legged it. Less amusingly, I know one  priest who was convicted of sexual assualt on the grounds of the testimony of one woman with wobbly mental health, known to lie and to have a strong motive to lie in this matter, in a trial held in secret where no defence witnesses were called, though the defence lawyer had letter and phonecalls and visits from people with strong evidence to entirely discredit the accusation. I know another priest suspended by his bishop from ministry on the  strength of one accusation. The accuser refused to go to court, and the bishop refused the priest the canonical trial he asked for to clear his name: the chap could do nothing, except “sit in his hut and fish”, as a priest friend put it.

The sad thing is that the news reports say “Priest accused of x”, the reader carries away  “priest did x”, and “priest entirely exonerated, accuser lied” never entirely takes away the impression Madame Evangelista described.  Of course, news reports deal like this with everyone, and the lives of teachers and others are also ruined by false accusations of abuse. But for some reason, people don’t think “teacher=perv”. Or indeed, “LGBT Youth Worker = Paedophile“.

 

pater Rupert Mayer, OP

I think he joined the Dominicans as an act of rebellion – the comments from fond aunties and so on must have gotten very tedious. I recall the impact made by the single sentence “There is no excuse for being lazy” in one of his weekday sermonettes. It was sharper than a two-edged sword etc, because behind it was Pater Rupert. An engineer by profession, if I recall correctly, he had to be sent on holiday on doctor’s orders (the Dominicans have not drawn conclusions from the unfortunate effects of overwork on a neurotic German Augustinian in the early modern period) . You have never seen anyone so disciplined and working so hard, and in being so, so focussed on the things of God. This is a Real Dominican – speak to God or of God, and that only when you’re not studying.  I fell in love with metaphysics in Pater Rupert’s class on the virtue of faith.  As I wrote to someone, it was two sessions a week of peering into the abyss of non-being. (Poor Pater Rupert felt that he was peering into the abyss of student igronance and sloth.) And if I’d taken his gentle advice about a decision I was making, that would have been a very good thing to have done.

Picture taken without permission from here.

 

Fr John Reid, OSA

I’d started at the local Poly-as-was, just round the corner from my school. As far as God went, I had two things – a sense of the presence of God, and that the faith was very real. The latter was born of the enthusiasm with which our RE teacher spoke to us about social justice and the passages of the Old Testament and Gospels she had us read on the subject. Injustice cries out to heaven, and hell very much exists.

That was about it, really. Fr John was PP of the parish where my department was, an area of grey pebbledash and supermarkets that sell apples priced not by the pound or kilo, but per piece. He gave me his time – we went for lunch, or just tea. A real person whose Christianity was not some private add-on – when we talked, about people and life and interests, God was part of that life. From Fr John, not school, I first became aware of books that were serious and not fiction. Not that I hadn’t seen or read any, but somehow I hadn’t noticed them. Fr John is thus indirectly responsible for My Religious Opinions, if I were to write a Newman-style history of these.  First, he lent me The Stripping of the Altars, and though I had yet to learn the phrase, sentire cum Ecclesia became a new principle.  Second, this new interest in Serious Books took me to God’s Own University, whose Catholic community quickly evanglised me with vast quantities of respectable red wine and the Old Testament types of the Assumption. If Fr John hadn’t nursed that little Christian life after it left school, it might well have been washed away in a tide of righteous opinionating.

When I hear religious talking about poverty, the picture that comes to mind every time is of Fr John microwaving the contents of a tin of beans for his dinner.  And on the meaning or witness of priestly celibacy (though of course he is in any case a religious) , his comment “If there’s no God, your parents still have each other”.

Fr John is also one of the warmest people I have met.  It’s an example I haven’t always borne in mind, and we haven’t seen each other in, um, thirteen years, but he remains a model of Christian kindliness and warmth in manner and in action. Now I write this, I realise how much I have forgotten of our conversations – the impression remains, but the details are lost.

 

Appriestiate

Madame Evangelista wrote a post about the kindness of a priest at St Mary’s Cathedral in Newcastle.  James Preece wrote a post praising his parish priest and saying something about their friendship. I wonder if we could get a thing going here for this priestly year? I remember listening to a PP years ago thanking the congregation for their support in the weeks after some scandal or other involving a priest had come out. It hadn’t occurred to me that the scandal would affect other priests. Now, as ME says,

To put it bluntly, the common stereotype of a catholic priest is of a paedophile. At best, when they are not thought of as actual criminals, the view is of a stern and forbidding man who promulgates hate or at least, makes people feel like complete shit about themselves.

Whereas I think my experience, if broader than that of most people, is probably typical: a couple of well-meaning careerites, (and a friend knew one real manipulative shit) and many many kind, generous, sensible, hard-working and prayerful men of all kinds, from thug to aesthete, from monk to bon viveur. I have received so many kindnesses and so many graces from these men.  It would be good if the cesspit of the internet had more Posts In Praise of Priests. Appreciations of individuals, by name, if it would not cause them embarassment or difficulty.