On a chilly night early in December, I attended a wonderful charity dinner at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire which raised money for WellChild, the national charity for very ill children with complex medical needs.
The festive evening, hosted by Sudeley’s chatelaine, Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, included a walk through the “Spectacle of Light” gardens, where St Mary’s Church was open for prayer, a performance from The Nutcracker by the Royal Ballet and a memorable reading of John Betjeman’s poem “Christmas” by Jeremy Irons. He arrived wearing a dashing red paisley smoking jacket, which he first wore while playing Claus von Bülow in his unforgettable Best Actor Oscar-winning role in Reversal of Fortune.
As I walked behind Irons and his Irish actress wife Sinead Cusack, my eyes enviously fixed on the debonair von Bülow jacket (with black satin lapels and cuffs) – later generously offered up for auction – I thought about von Bülow, whom I had known in London after he had been cleared (on appeal) of murdering his wife in 1985.
After his acquittal, von Bülow became theatre critic for the Catholic Herald. In our obituary, we wrote: “After his acquittal von Bülow moved to Knightsbridge. A convert to Catholicism, he tended pilgrims at Lourdes, though this aspect of his life was little publicised.”
I bring this up because von Bülow’s high-society criminal case was inevitably described in the media as the “trial of the century”. As, for that matter, was the next “trial of the century” a decade later, when former NFL star OJ Simpson was sensationally acquitted by a Los Angeles jury in 1995 of murdering his wife, Nicole. I covered the trial in LA for the Daily Telegraph.
So, as John L Allen Jr rightly notes in his perceptive article on the trial of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and others in Rome – which has now drawn to a close – we should be wary of using hyperbolic rhetoric to describe the Vatican’s highest-profile trial in living memory.
The case is important as the result will surely be a defining moment of the current papacy. “The trial raises an unavoidable question about the legacy of Pope Francis,” John writes. Is he “guiding the Church into a more synodal and participatory style of governance?” Or is he “taking the Church back to a concept of the pope as a temporal sovereign with essentially unlimited power?”
Summing up, John adds frankly: “If you were being judged by a tribunal in which the alleged injured party also happened to hire and fire the judges, and could change the rules on the fly, how confident would you feel in justice being blind?”
Meanwhile, I have also been to Amsterdam, where I reviewed a brilliantly original new immersive art show, Da Vinci: Genius (see page 68). Leonardo’s multi-disciplinary achievements – as artist, scientist, court party organiser, botanist, sculptor and military engineer – led art historian Kenneth Clark to concluded that he was not really a Renaissance artist, but belonged more to the late 17th century.
What I liked about the show is how the producers made no attempt to claim him as a non-religious postmodernist. When the 500th anniversary of his death was celebrated back in 2019, a biography by Walter Isaacson suggested he was both vegan and an atheist. Others claimed him as a gay- and animal-rights activist, and a “green prophet”.
Yet one only has to read Giorgio Vasari – his first biographer – to know that as he was ending his life, in 1519, living as a guest of the King of France, uppermost in his mind was to have a priest present. “He asked of the good way and holy Christian religion; and then, with many moans, he confessed and was penitent… He was pleased to take devoutly the Most Holy Sacrament, out of his bed.”
This show gives us new insights into how Leonardo painted several of the most notable sacred pictures ever created. His clients were Catholic dukes, popes, kings and religious orders. Such sublime religious works as The Last Supper, commissioned for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, remind us that it was the sacred world, as well as the secular, that brought out the genius in Leonardo.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers many blessings for a very happy New Year. As our leader reminds us, Christmastide properly lasts from Christmas Day to Candlemas on 2 February – so let us keep the feast.
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