Venite Prandete

  INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY 27th JANUARY      Bishop Kazimierz Majdanski with Pope John Paul II. The word ‘Holocaust’ is, at best, an inaccurate description for the mass murder by a totalitarian regime of innocent people: it connotes ‘sacrifice’ in propitiation to God, reminiscent of the holocausts offered by the Jewish people in the Temple and carried through to the Sacrifice of the Mass. The extermination of millions of people, however, was not an act of God, but of man; man who had turned his back on God and was, in many instances, demonic in his hatred of God and all who stood for Him. The Jewish people call the genocide committed on their people the “Shoah”. However, today, in remembering that time as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemorate this terrible time of human history, a time when the ability to kill presented itself on an industrial scale; when the absence of God from men’s hearts enabled them to rationalize the perpetrat...

  “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 ...

POPE PIUS XII - and the character assassination by those who really were Hitler’s allies:- DIED this day - 9th OCTOBER 1958 At the close of the war, and up to and after his death in 1958, Pope Pius XII was revered throughout the world as the leader who had faced down the evils of Nazism. Jewish leaders who had witnessed the suffering of their people at first hand praised Pope Pius XII as the person who, in the face of the ruthless elimination of any opposition by the Nazis, had mobilised the members of the Church and the Catholic faithful to act, at the risk of their lives and the lives of their families and communities, in a massive rescue. The result of the concerted action by the network of the Catholic faithful was estimated by the Israeli diplomat and historian, Pinchas Lapide, who personally interviewed Holocaust survivors, to be the saving of 700,000 to 860,000 Jews “from certain death at Nazi hands”. Testimony as to the courageous stance taken by Pius XII was given by the Chi...