SIR – I venture to suggest that 2016 will prove to be a date as important in the history of Britain as 410 AD (the withdrawal of Roman imperial governance from Britain) and 1066.
No one should underestimate the importance of the referendum on June 23. Whether we vote to stay in or to leave the European Union, it will be the most decisive turning point in British history for a thousand years, as it would have been if we had been conquered in 1914-18 or 1939-45.
A vote to remain in the European Union on June 23 is a vote to remain embedded in a United States of Europe, and the democratic deficit and bureaucratic tyranny which that entails. It is clearly foreseeable that the European Union is intended to become, and will become, a permanent and unbreakable union like that of the United States of America, and I fear that, if it has not already, the European Union will soon tire of member states seeking to renegotiate their relationship with, or membership of, the EU, and that within a few short years it will be as impossible for any member state to leave the EU as it was for the southern states to break away from the United States of America in 1860.
In these coming months prior to June 23 we are entering the most momentous and decisive period in British history since those turbulent months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Our future now, as then, hangs in the balance. Nothing else in our post-war history compares with it. We stand, as previous generations have stood, at a crossroads in our island history. Suddenly, or so it seems, Divine Providence has been pleased to place the future in our hands. The baton has been passed to us. May we not fail the generations which have gone before us.
Yours faithfully,
Fr Neil Evans
St Joseph’s, Neath
SIR – I was interested to read Francis Phillips’s article (cover story, February 19) on leading Nazis. But perhaps the notoriety and evil glamour of these figures distracts us from asking more searching questions.
The late David Cesarani’s Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 stresses how, in Hitler’s pre-war heyday, it was often the Catholic population of Germany who most resisted Nazi anti-Semitism. However, only a little later, the vast majority of the population, Catholics included, supported and gave a sort of tacit assent to mass murder.
As the leading historian Ian Kershaw writes, “there is incontrovertible evidence that knowledge of atrocities and mass shootings of Jews in the East
was fairly widespread” and that knowledge “of the systematic extermination of the Jews in the camps was more widely circulating than is apparent from surviving documentation”.
Understanding the mechanics of this shift in the general, ordinary population during “the darkest period in history” might teach us more – and unsettle us more – than studies of high-up committed fascists, thugs and criminals.
Yours faithfully,
Robert Eaglestone (Professor)
Deputy director
Holocaust Research Centre
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey
SIR – The cover story “Seduced by ‘the devil’ Hitler” demonstrates how when the moral compass of the Judaeo-Christian ethic is deliberately rejected by a nation there is a moral decline which can be catastrophic.
Interestingly, both Nazism and communism saw themselves as the pinnacle of the evolutionary process but both showed their ideologies to be ultimately a fatal deception. One has only to see the adoring look in the eyes of the crowds saluting Hitler to see that he had become for them a messiah who would renew the nation and cure all their ills.
But as St Paul warns in 2 Thess 2:9-12, whenever God’s revealed truth is rejected the result is that people are more easily persuaded to believe “what is false”, and in both of the above cases not only false but also calamitous. It is perhaps salutary in this context to re-evaluate the current ideology of political correctness which has in large measure rejected the Judaeo-Christian ethic in Western civilisation and replaced it with values that are often false and even anti-Christian.
This means that Christians may find themselves in court, as some have, for following their conscience. We are beginning to see, however, the seams of this latest ideology starting to pull apart and sag under the enormous strains imposed by mass migration on the shores of Europe. Perhaps the days of political correctness too are numbered.
Yours faithfully,
John Lovett
Aiskew, North Yorkshire
SIR – In last week’s cover story Jon Anderson displayed the frequently occurring confusion between freely adopted celibacy as a gift from God, or its imposition as a necessary condition for ordination.
The current legislation is at variance with the ancient practice, inculcated by the New Testament, that parish priests (then called “presbyters”) should be married men with children (Titus 1:6 and 1 Timothy 3:2 and 22).
The author identifies the sexual revolution of the 1970s as the reason why large numbers of priests left the ministry to get married. Actually it was the revolutionary Second Vatican Council that provoked the exodus. This was because the Council cleared up the serious confusions about priesthood and marriage that had remained unresolved since the Middle Ages.
The Council made three simple clarifications. First, that there is no intrinsic connection between priesthood and celibacy (Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, 16). Secondly, that marriage is an inalienable human right. (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 87).
Thirdly, that sex in marriage is good and noble (Pastoral Constitution, 89). I trust that these considerations will make it clear that initiatives in many parts of the Church are not aimed at abolishing God’s gift of celibacy.
Yours faithfully,
Michael M Winter (Dr)
London N19
SIR – If any reader of the Herald is planning a family holiday in the West Country this summer, may I suggest a visit to Tintagel on Cornwall’s north coast? Amid sea, rocks, a castle and pastoral views, Tintagel’s Catholic church, St Paul the Apostle, houses a beautiful little shrine to the Holy Family: a statue made of Italian marble.
In keeping with the suggestion of Pope Francis to make a pilgrimage during the Holy Year, families could drop in for Mass (usually 10am on weekdays
and 5.30pm on Sundays) and venerate Jesus’s own family … a chance maybe to renew matrimonial vows (and have a picnic on a nearby beach)? Such families will be more than welcomed by priest-in-charge and inveterate letter-writer, Fr Bryan Storey. Take a look at the website.
Yours faithfully,
Stephen de la Bédoyère
By email
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