Venite Prandete

  PERE JACQUES The Christ-like French priest - His Spiritual Battle in the Face of Evil So often we like to tell ourselves that, confronted by something so immoral and patently evil as the mass murder by the Nazi war machine, we would withstand the pressure to conform and would emerge with a morality unbowed. Perhaps we would join the Resistance. Perhaps we might not be so brave, but, in any event, we would never succumb to the brutal descent into the abyss of evil that the world witnessed in the Holocaust. The reality is never so sharp – of course ordinary people, confronted by an order to commit murder would not comply in normal circumstances. The situation that prevailed in the Nazi holocaust, however, as stated by Hannah Arendt, was not ‘normal circumstances.’ Hannah Arendt, in her study of Adolf Eichmann, (1) observed that the prevailing assumption is that a ‘normal person’ would not commit such atrocities as committed by Eichmann or those in the Nazi command - those who perf...

  PERE JACQUES ARRESTED 15TH JANUARY 1945 MARTYRED BY THE NAZIS We have characters presented to us as ‘heroes’ by our unfortunate popular culture – one-dimensional personalities, possessed of superficial bravery or worldly qualities that are socially esteemed, who grab our attention momentarily but whose stories fail to provide a standard of any depth or lasting value. And yet, right in front of us, we have real people in our Catholic history who provide to us an example by which we have profound and lasting guidance on how to live a rich and fulfilled life – how to strive to attain the best of ourselves. Pere Jacques is one such person, a man whose inspirational character and Christ-like love for his fellow man grew in adversity, in the horrors and evil of World War II, with all its attendant cruelty and human failures, a man possessed of incredible bravery - a courage that was founded, not on worldly qualities, but on an abandonment of self and a focus on the eternal, the presenc...

  “AUX REVOIR LES ENFANTS” – A FILM BY LOUIS MALLE OF PERE JACQUES, MARTYRED BY THE NAZIS ARRESTED 15th JANUARY 1944 The 1987 film, Aux Revoir les Enfants, a beautiful coming-of-age film directed by Louis Malle won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The movie holds a well-deserved place on the Vatican’s list of 45 of the most important films ever made. Below is a review by Mary Joseph for the Recordatio Project (2): The film tells true story of Julien Quentin, a 12 year old at a Carmelite boarding school in occupied France in World War II and his friendship with a mysterious new student, Jean Bonnet. The character of Julien Quentin is based upon Malle himself as a child. So deeply affected was Malle by his wartime experiences, it took more than 30 years for him to bring them to the screen. The famous critic Roger Ebert recalled Malle clasping his hands at the film’s premiere, weeping, saying: “This film is my story. Now it is told at last.” In the winter of 1943-44, with ...

  BLESSED FATHER RICHARD HENKES – THE SECRET PREACHER OF DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP 19th SEPTEMBER I have included this post as a memorial to the priests who died for their fellow man at the hands of the Nazis. Blessed Father Richard Henkes, a German Pallatine priest, was imprisoned at Dachau Concentration Camp for preaching against the Nazis. On this date, 19th September 2019, he was beatified. He was one of 18 priests who volunteered to go to the typhus block in Dachau, knowing that it was a sentence of death. He was called the ‘secret preacher of Block 17’, and he died while ministering to prisoners suffering from typhus. At his beatification, Cardinal Kurt Koch stated that "[t]he real reformers of the Church are the blessed and the saints, for we can only achieve the utmost externally, in structural terms, when we are also prepared to strive to achieve our utmost internally, in faith.” He continued, “Love is not without sacrifice. The Christian martyrdom is only real if it is ...