In Belfast in the mid-1980s I watched a fully armed British soldier, shouldering a rifle, inspecting a coach for weapons.  The coach was full of primary school children waiting to go to the Servite priory in Benburb for a weekend retreat away from home, a poor and rough part of the city.   At mass, there was a prayer in thanksgiving for ‘new shoes’ and, somewhat competitively,  for deceased grannies, first one who had died ‘a year ago’, followed by one who had died ‘a month ago’ and finally a granny who had shuffled off this mortal coil ‘a day ago’.  The celebrant wisely wound up the bidding prayers.   It was sweet and funny but, of course, apart from the first prayed for granny, many people actually were dying violently in the Troubles.

A month of so ago I went back to give a lecture in Queen’s College.  The Good Friday Agreement had come and felt long gone.   It was sad to see, after the great achievement ending sectarian killing and the creation of a new political dispensation, how little had changed.  Miles of walls separating working class unionist and nationalist communities, Catholic from Protestant, with gates shut early in the evening to separate them.  Only 10% of schools integrated.  Everything still fed into the sacred binary.  I was lecturing about Gaza, Palestine and Israel.  The Catholic students supported the Palestinians.  The Protestants far less. 

There are so many deaths still left uninvestigated.  So many families with no real idea what happened to their loved ones.   Their seeking answers after all this time, in a divided society with pockets of worrying residual thuggery, is an act both of courage and proof of how important is ‘closure’ for moving beyond grief.

Investigative journalism, finding out what others want to hide, is more dangerous: a great way to make powerful and/or dangerous enemies and for lawyers to guarantee investigations will need big budgets.   Even without punishing legal proceedings, the work takes time and time costs money.   With an impressive portfolio of articles, books and TV productions dating back to the 1970s,  John Ware is a notable survivor of a rare breed of journalist.

Ware’s Neither Confirm Nor Deny: British Intelligence, Lawless Agent Running and the Suppression of Truth, Merrion Press 2026, was published a few weeks ago.  It exposes and sifts the dirt in the dirty war known in Ireland as The Troubles.  It is a gift of truth for the many families of innocent victims whose deaths have been left uninvestigated, allegedly for national security reasons.

‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ is the refrain dear to the British Intelligence Services, used repeatedly by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC,  MI5 and the FRU, the Army’s Force Research [agent running] Unit, and then by the British government.  It served to hide the crimes of the extraordinary number of covert agents who had penetrated rival loyalist and nationalist organisations and their armed wings notably the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Ulster Defense Association (UDA) and Freedom Fighters (UFF).   To survive and to harvest the hoped-for, high quality, intelligence highly placed agents were complicit in extreme violence.  Ware struggles with this moral dilemma throughout the book. 

The story focuses on the actions of two figures, Brian Nelson and Freddie Scappaticci (known as Stakeknife) and their handlers,  chronicling how they engaged or colluded in abductions, torture and killings of IRA targets.  Nelson was embedded in the UDA.   Scappaticci  worked his way up to a critical senior position in the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU), and was in charge of compiling their assassination lists, participating in the commission of murders.  Stakeknife was too often in the habit of being in proximity to killings or abductions to absolve him from responsibility for them.  He led a charmed, reckless life. Even his wife did not know he was working for the British.

Evidence, meticulously compiled by Ware from FRU contact forms (CFs), recording meetings with the two agents, indicates that even when Nelson and Scappaticci warned in good time of a planned  assassination, no action appears to have been taken to protect the targets.  

Ware’s account suggests that senior officers in the different intelligence agencies valued their agents and potential intelligence ‘take’ more than the lives of potential and actual targets, however slim the evidence that they were active IRA members.  To name an agent was in all senses beyond the pale.    That their actions should not be totally outside the remit of criminal justice apparently less so.  Britain is not, of course, the only State responding to what is declared a national security threat to have condoned assassinations.

It was in September 1989, in response to great pressure and very late in the day, that Nelson and Scappaticci became enough of a concern for the Chief Constable of the RUC, Hugh Annesley (later Sir Hugh), to initiate an independent investigation.   In an attempt to show the UDA exclusively assassinated IRA gunmen, the UDA had been leaking documents demonstrating collusion between  loyalist paramilitaries and the security forces.  Chief Constable Annesley asked John Stevens (later Sir), a future Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, to undertake the investigation.  Laurie Sherwood, a CID inspector, Stevens’ special senior assistant, were the only heroes in this ugly saga.  They faced intractable systemic obstruction from the different intelligence services including the withholding of key documents and information as the highest authorities in the different agencies clung to what they hoped was ‘plausible deniability’.

The principal front-line handlers who failed to stop the killings and their agents who were complicit in them were working for a British army  military intelligence unit.  For some time even the existence of this unit was kept from Stevens.  From the Military’s point of view, this was war.  Most of the dead named in the cases against Nelson and Stakeknife were the enemy, active members of the IRA.  Around the world in warfare,  the consequence of treachery is often death. 

But several of those killed both by the IRA and UDA/UDF, with assistance from British agents, were innocent Catholics and not, as alleged, informers.   The irony is that Prime Minister Thatcher always insisted The Troubles weren’t a war between the  IRA and Britain.   So the IRA were not belligerents.  They were criminals and it followed they should be treated as criminals.  This included not  being given special treatment even if this meant making martyrs out of the hunger strikers.

The Irish Bishops remained steadfastly opposed to armed struggle as a way of solving unjust social conditions, Northern Ireland’s problem of clashing identities, and were supported by Pope John Paul II in a passionate promotion of human rights and rejection of violence in an historic sermon in Drogheda during his October 1979 visit.   “What Christianity does forbid is to seek solutions to these situations by the ways of hatred, by the murdering of defenceless people, by the methods of terrorism”, he said.  His appeal to “the moral sense and Christian conviction of Irish men and women”…. “that nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder” was anathema to both warring sides in the Troubles and those who spied on them .  
 
 
 
 

The growth of secularism in the last century has resulted in the role of the Christian Churches in television coverage of history often being written out of the script.  This is noticeable in otherwise well-made TV and radio documentaries,  much less so thankfully in historical scholarship.

The three episodes of James Rogan’s  Free Nelson Mandela, screened on Channel 4 in mid-June, provide a study of this failing in a TV documentary.   Crafted to engage an English-speaking and young audience the series has excellent South Africa library footage,  including of Nelson and Winnie Mandela,  and contemporary interviews with his 1980s fellow Robben Island prisoner, James Mange, and also of Albie Sachs,  badly damaged physically by car bomb in 1988, spiritually more intact than most of us.  There are also plenty of chances to hear from decrepit late 20th century musicians and the music from their  solidarity concerts, and to learn about Peter Hain and sports boycotts.   President P.W. Botha along with Reagan and Thatcher star as the villains.  Rogan neglects key players in resistance to apartheid; Communist Parties do not feature even as noises off, nor explored internally as part of the African National Congress (ANC), yet their role was crucial.  Zero on the role of the Churches.  Zero footage of Archbishop Tutu.

Most Gen Z have barely heard of the 1948-1994 apartheid regime,  know what it was, or how the ANC finally came to power.  So the series should be welcomed.  But it shows what happens when a sequence of compelling images is substituted for history.   Because the history of the end of apartheid, like all good history, is a quest for understanding, how one event leads to another, what precipitates change and why.
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Rev. Frank Chikane, a pastor in the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), general-secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC),  1987-1994, trusted by Mandela, surviving poisoning by the regime in 1989, is captioned as ‘United Democratic Front’, at the time a huge coalition  of civil society organisations supportive of the ANC.   He was indeed Vice-President of the UDF Transvaal Branch for two  years whilst working in the radical Institute for Contextual Theology.   His impact as a Christian leader irrelevant?

You might also conclude from the evidence provided that, when it comes to significant international interventions,  viewers only need  know about the American and British anti-apartheid movements. Though both were gathering large crowds and had been promoting sanctions against South Africa for many years, it wasn’t until  August 1986, after the South African government initiated meetings with Mandela while in hospital in November 1985, that the US Senate passed a weak Bill implementing sanctions. 

Either Rogen doesn’t know, or doesn’t think it important, that inside South Africa the Free Nelson Mandela Campaign was a front for funding the expansion of the ANC within civil society.  In his first term as Social Democrat Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969-1976, Olaf Palme  began humanitarian funding of South African refugees in Central Africa.  He had concluded that the ending of apartheid must not remain another proxy arena for the Cold War, with the ANC solely supported by the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and East Germany.  So, in the 1980s, he began undercover funding to support the peaceful development of ANC organization within South Africa.  In the fourth year of his second term, 1982-1986, he was shot dead in a Stockholm street next to his wife, almost certainly as a result of this intervention.

Swedish money passed into the country clandestinely through a number of channels: two of the most important were the trades unions and the Churches.   A small group of Christian leaders who were either members of, or supportive of, the ANC included Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, secretary-general of the South African Catholic Bishops Conference, Father Albert Nolan, undercover ANC member and Dominican Provincial, and Rev. Beyers Naudé, renegade ordained Minister in the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church), and Frank Chikane himself. 

Thanks to wide consultations and deliberation, the group was able to direct Swedish money to where it was most needed in the internal movement.  For example, at the height of resistance, 1985-1986, the apartheid regime was decapitating by repeated arrests the Congress of South African Students, COSAS, the main ANC-front youth organization,.   Anarchy threatened: young people began ‘necklacing’ individuals suspected of being government informants and collaborators,  putting burning tyres around their necks.  The imperative was to fund training for youth leaders to instill discipline.  So via the Christian network COSAS became a funding priority.

Oliver Tambo the exiled ANC leader (1967-1991), made it clear the ANC rejected such violence.   He had founded the ANC Youth League in 1944.  Tambo was himself a devout Anglican Christian.  I remember him meeting Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban in the then Paddington Railway Hotel in 1983.  Choreographed to enter the hotel by different doors, they met out of sight.    Old friends, big hugs, beer and sandwiches ordered from room service.

The apartheid regime indicted Archbishop Hurley in 1984, not for his support for resistance to apartheid but under the Police Act for exposing - with the help of the Justice and Peace Commission - torture and atrocities committed by  "Koevoet" the apartheid paramilitary police unit in Namibia.    They dropped the case in the upheavals of 1985, then, in October 1988, badly burned Khanya House, the Bishops’ Conference headquarters, in an arson attack.   Two people, a nun and lay worker in the building narrowly escaped death.

As South Africa became ungovernable in the second half of the 1980s, with sanctions biting, the Rand plummeting, Anglo-American knocking on the door of  President P.W. Botha saying the game was up, Christians were playing a significant, if small, role in resistance.  Cricket boycotts, the great solidarity concerts, black protest in the USA and by our UK anti-apartheid movement, built the impetus of the campaign for sanctions.  And sanctions hurt those benefitting from apartheid.  Archbishop Hurley was never convinced it wouldn’t hurt ordinary Africans more.  When we visited Mama and Walter Sisulu (Deputy ANC President, 1991-1994, imprisoned for over 25 years with Mandela) in Soweto, just after his release, they both thanked him for all that he had done. He was much loved.

It was the resistance of those living with fear and the likelihood of arrest and torture, knowing they qualified for a bullet or bomb, building up overwhelming civic resistance and mass organization inside South Africa, who ended a regime which the world - apart from Israel, parts of the Tory Party and Reagan’s Republicans - had turned against. 

James Rogan is right: the massacre of students in 1976 protesting against making Afrikaans the language of instruction in schools was a turning point.  The State’s brutal response drew many into exile and guerilla training while the ANC took off internally  The underground Church focused on youth then - as Pope Leo does today.

History is a pandora’s box of stories left untold.  Rogan’s peg was the 50th anniversary of the Soweto massacres on 16 June.  Our own school children should know why we commemorate this anniversary and, to that end, Rogan does a good job.  It is a shame he 'disappeared' the Christians, and Communists, in the process.  Compelling visuals.  Poor history.
 
 
 
  

A week this Thursday, on 18th June, the Makerfield by-election takes place.  When the exit poll comes out that night it should be launch time for Andy Burnham.  He could burn up on the ramp with a bang or head towards Downing Street.  One poll gives him a ten point lead.  But maybe Reform-inclined voters are hiding from pollsters how they will vote; Burnham may not be a shoo-in.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister is not going to bow out quietly.  He persevered and survived the Corbynistas to  re-shape the Labour Party and win a spectacular general election victory in 2024.  Still holding over 400 of the 650 parliamentary seats, and after only two years in office, his response is legitimate and understandable – if not in the eyes of all beholders. Some 100 Labour MPs have come out in his support.

But it only takes 81 nominating a challenger to trigger a selection process that would most likely bring Andy Burnham in to land at 10 Downing Street.  And, after the evidence from the recent debacle  in the May local elections, there are at least that number who do not believe Starmer could win the next general election.  Ministers have personally asked him to go and junior Ministers have resigned. 

What is rarely calibrated in all this is future public support for Reform during the next three years whoever is Prime Minister; it may decline.  This becomes more likely as Reform Party leadership gains more exposure.  And such a decline would remove a major reason, but not every one, for removing Keir Starmer.

Two factors are at play: hard evidence of votes cast in the May local elections and the response to these results in the Parliamentary and wider Labour Party.  Public disenchantment with the two main Parties has become such that instant, radical change is now seen by many as needed, demanded and expected of a Prime Minister.  For a variety of reasons, it has not been forthcoming.

It is something of a cliché so say the Conservative Party lost the 2024 election rather than the Labour Party winning it.  The focus of Labour’s election strategy was ruthless, but its percentage of votes  was low, and the right wing vote was divided.   As two years have gone by, the shocking degree of disrepair left by successive Tory governments has emerged: for example in the parlous state of prisons, huge backlogs in the courts, HS2 and defense.  Starmer dwelt on this negligence long enough for the question to be asked what was he doing to remedy it?  He has not presented his answer convincingly.

There are three ways of finding the money to keep the show on the road: printing money, borrowing and taxation.  Printing money leads to inflation.  Inflation raises the cost of living as many people are barely coping.  Desperation leads to civil disorder and instability.

Borrowing is part of the problem not the solution.  Rachel Reeves chose to borrow £10 billion in her first year as Chancellor, and in subsequent years £20 billion.  When Labour took over, national debt stood at 101.3% of GDP, £2.7 trillion.  It rose to £2.9 trillion by the end of 2025 (that equals 3.37 trillion Euros compared to France’s 3.46 trillion, and Spain’s 1.7 trillion).  This enormous sum costs  the UK over £10 billion a month in interest payments.

We are paying investors in 10-year UK bonds 4.88% interest compared with France’s 3.68% and Spain’s 3.5%.  And the bond markets would further punish the UK if  borrowing increased to any degree.  The difference with other countries is a measure of the financial sector’s estimation of  relative stability.  When it comes to perceptions of stability, four Tory Prime Ministers since July 2016 doesn’t help, least of all when this includes a - mercifully brief  -exposure to Lizz Truss’ kamikaze economic policy.

So to pump some money into depressed public services there was mainly taxation, already high.  Notably, Reeves first budget raised capital gains tax from 10% to 18% for lower rate payers and from 20% to 24% for higher.  But it was a 1.2% increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions that generated the fiercest and most sustained reaction.  Investors went on strike, as much ‘holding the State to ransom’ - to use the hallowed phrase - as the junior doctors’ strikes .  No investment, no hiring new staff, no increase in GDP.
These are intractable problems and will remain so whoever is Prime Minister.  Under such constrained circumstances incremental gains across a wide front are the only safe way forward.  

The independent Institute for Government’s verdict on Rachel Reeves first budget in October 2024 was to “welcome signs of a coherent strategy” in it.   But it did not take long for the word ‘Plan’ to take on salvific significance amongst the mass media and opposition Parties.  The Labour Party had, and has, a plan for ‘reconstruction’ but it will take at least a decade to achieve results able to garner electoral advantage in an understandably impatient electorate.  Everyone conveniently forgets Field Marshall Moltke’s adage: “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy”.  And there are several enemies not least the bond markets, the Hormuz straits, and Trump’s obsession with tariffs. 

The widespread perception in Party and public became that a  cautious, legal minded Prime Minister, indecisive in a job  primarily about taking key decisions, hadn’t got a Plan, and was not the right person to carry it out if he had.  Scrapping the two-child limit on universal credit in 2024,  not popular nationally, was an obvious signal to the Party of his true Labour values, and he muffed it. 
  
Keir Starmer has neither demonstrated Gordon Brown’s economic acumen nor does he have Tony Blair’s political touch, “the hand of history” on his shoulder, the ability to engage people in Party and public alike.   You can no more imagine Starmer speaking of ‘a people’s princess’ than using an expletive in public to describe the  interference from Trump and his courtiers in the UK’s domestic policy.

Starmer’s initial support for Israel’s wars, now wavering, has cost him and the Labour Party dear politically.  But in other respects he has shown a firm hand in international relations at a time when international law is collapsing, Trump is a menace and Putin a clear and present danger.  He is respected as our representative, particularly in Europe where he will get the best deal available for the UK’s future relationships with the EU.  He is widely recognized as a decent man, a talented lawyer, and will fight a civilized campaign to stay in power.

If Burnham pulls off Makerfield and then, as expected, beats Keir Starmer in a Labour leadership contest, it would be a dramatic return to national politics for him.  He will re-enter the “Westminster bubble” that  he set in opposition to his Northern identity and successful role as Mayor of Greater Manchester to define himself.  And he will need “a Plan”.
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The bottom line, though, for Labour members is who best can keep the Trump-lite Reform Party out of Downing Street.  On Thursday 18 June some light will be shed on that question.  On it will hinge who is Prime Minister by the next Labour Party Conference.
 
 

Perhaps we have underestimated the importance of the Pope being  an American speaking a language which well over a billion globally understand.   Many young people around the world learn English as a second language.  And there is something immediate and arresting when Pope Leo writes or makes speeches in our own language about matters of great importance.

There is also the sense that, with Trump and his courtiers in the White House, having the best of America in the Vatican is providential,  essential rather than incidental.  Trump manages to personify much that is worst in the USA.  Leo’s authoritative counter to Trump’s words and policies provides today’s youth with hope for the future and in the possibility of change.

It is not that the Pope and Vatican News have suddenly become demotic, reducing their vocabulary to the popular English cultivated by The Sun – sometimes Oxbridge -  journalists.  There is no fear of long words and sentences and they clearly and accurately express important ideas. There is no talking down to youth or diluting the Christian message for take-away consumption.  The language and embeddedness in previous papal teaching found in Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is both traditional and typical of the broad expansive themes in the encyclicals of recent Popes.

In the three weeks following its publication we have had much learned commentary on AI and Catholic Social Teaching.  But what stands out in this encyclical?   There is a clear acknowledgement of recent historical humanism that shares many of the Church’s values,  with a willingness to name names and be concrete and specific.    “Certain events make it clear that history can also change when individuals truly take the dignity of everyone seriously: the civil rights movement in the United States of America, closely associated with the testimony of Martin Luther King Jr., or the end of apartheid in South Africa following the release of Nelson Mandela and his decision not to surrender the future to hatred.  In different contexts, many courageous and generous women have also stood out, including Saint Laura Montoya, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Maria Montessori, Elisabeth Elliot, Wangari Maathai, Benazir Bhutto and countless others from every continent whose commitment has contributed to making history more humane”. 

This embrace of those who have struggled against injustice extends to what Leo calls “authentic culture and art” which  “preserve this spark, resisting the normalization of evil”.  As a result, he suggests certain works have taken on an almost prophetic significance: “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler’s List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion”.  This is not someone who thinks a global Church needs to deny its European past.

Citing Beethoven and Nelson Mandela presents an insurmountable criterion for both artistic and moral excellence.  But Leo partially lets us off.  “The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien….”, he writes – [approvingly] -  “described our responsibility in this way:  ‘It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.’   The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.’  This feels comforting and reassuring, fresh, relevant, addressing us and our potential rather than a consistory of cardinals. 

Most importantly, Magnifica Humanitas shows a clear understanding of the preoccupations and anxiety of youth in the UK simply expressed.  It is not only that Gen Z (born 1997-2012) today look unlikely to have “a clean earth to till” and a climate to foster food security in the future. “For young people, job insecurity is particularly devastating.  As the Bishops of the United States of America have recalled, work is not merely a source of income but a crucial sphere in which identity is formed, friendships and relationships are forged, practical responsibilities are learned and one’s vocation is discerned. When access to work is hindered by high levels of unemployment, inadequate systems of training or structural barriers, many young people find the path to their human and professional fulfilment blocked”. 

Older Catholics find themselves in the unusual position of discovering their Gen Z grandchildren looking to Popes for leadership, direction and hope but rarely darkening the door of a church.  Francis gained their respect putting his weight behind countering climate change, manifesting in different ways his concern for the Palestinians, and, overall,  for his spontaneity and  accessibility.  Leo has also won many hearts by following Francis’ lead on these issues dear to youth,  notably by his condemnation of the Israeli and American wars in the Middle East.  Very few are likely to tackle a 42,000 word encyclical but very many are likely to appreciate Leo sharing their concern for their future. 

Magnifica Humanitas ends with the sub-title The Song of Hope: The Magnificat.  Perhaps the Peruvian side of the Pope coming to the fore, the Latin American theme of liberation having the last word?     It took me back to vespers with the Dominicans at their Mayfair priory, Johannesburg in the midst of the anti-apartheid struggle in the mid-1980s: one of the rare times when some of the mighty were being pulled down from their thrones.   Leo provides encouragement  today,  particularly pertinent for the older generation in this threatening time: “ With the same faith as Mary, let us become ‘weavers of hope’ in our world, sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape”. 

True, becoming ‘tessitori di speranza’ rolls off the tongue better than ‘weavers of hope’.   But the reality is that there are a lot more potential weavers who are English-speaking than Italian. 
 
 
 
 
 

You bump into the past quite often in Berlin.  There’s the  curated remains of the Wall, the vast architectural hymn to militarism of the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, and the disorientating claustrophobia of Daniel Libeskind’s building housing the Jewish museum.   To contemplate the confession of the Nazi horrors and the sufferings of war, spend time in the Kaiser Wilhem Memorial Church, near the Zoological Garden. 

Few tourists visit the Bonhoeffer-Haus in the western suburbs of the city.  Just an ordinary, prosperous-looking detached, house but full of the memory of an extraordinary German pastor.   Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with Christian ethics  finally giving his life in their pursuit.  

Bonhoeffer encountered Black theology’s biblical themes of liberation while at Union Theological College in New York, 1930-1931, worshipping at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.  He lived his own words: “silence in the face of evil is itself evil”; two days after Hitler came to power in 1933 he broadcast a warning against the idolatry of a Fuhrer cult – and was cut off.  His condemnation of the Nazi euthanasia programme and persecution of the Jews was no less vocal.  He later wrote most of his classic book, “The Cost of Discipleship” (Nachfolge), in an underground Lutheran seminary at Finkenwalde in North Germany. 
 
In one of several attempts to assassinate Hitler, a group of German  officers in the Wehrmacht High Command Centre (by the Tiergarten) hid a time-bomb in the cellar of Bonhoeffer-Haus.  An unsuspecting officer not party to the plot carried it on board a plane carrying Hitler back to Germany from his forward military headquarters in Smolensk on 13 March 1943.  The Bonhoeffer family had friends round celebrating their father’s 75th birthday.  They nervously awaited the coded phone call indicating all was well.   A difficult evening.  No phone call came.

There was a sadness about Bonhoeffer’s frugal attic bedroom and study with his little desk by the window, and the books around the walls of his friend and confidant, pastor and theologian, Eberhard Bethge,.  After publication of Nachfolge in 1937, Bonhoeffer had scant time left at home.  By 1938 he had a sizeable Gestapo file and on 11 January was banned from Berlin. He was arrested in April 1943 and executed in Flossenberg concentration camp two years later, a few weeks before the end of the War.  His study felt like a memorial to him.

 “Lest we Forget” is easier said at the Cenotaph than in the partly bomb-damaged Kaiser Wilhem Gedachtniskirche with, today, its cross of nails from Coventry Cathedral.  Yet, the church provides a deliberate, and remarkable, contrast between its former worship of power, illustrated by the mosaics on the roof and walls showing a procession of Hohenzollen princes, the Kaiser in glory with his first wife, the Empress Augusta Victoria,  and the church’s contents, display cases and peace message.  Under the same roof triumphalism versus an informed contrition and a memorial for the millions who died. 

Next door is the new Evangelical church (the EKD was formed in 1948 by a federation of Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches) which presents a counter, Christian, understanding of power.  In memory of   Protestant martyrs killed between 1933 and 1945, there is a beautiful 12th  century crucifix with a plaque quoting John 1:5.4: “unser glaube ist der sieg der die welt uberwunden hat” (And the victory that conquers the world is our faith”).  Alongside is a 1942 charcoal sketch of Madonna and Child drawn at Stalingrad by the Protestant Pastor and military surgeon, Kurt Reuber, a friend of Albert Schweitzer, with on one side the defiant “Licht , Leben, Liebe” (Light, Life, Love), against the darkness, death and hatred of war.  A man literally drawing support from his faith in extreme adversity .

Berlin remembers martyrs executed locally in Charlottenberg at Plotzenzee prison where 3,000 were killed. They include those sadistically hanged for complicity in the famous 20 July 1944  plot to assassinate Hitler at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in the Polish woods using plastic explosive in a briefcase.  In subsequent purges some 5,000 were murdered.  The bombed remains of Plotzensee prison were converted into a memorial centre attached to the site of the executions.  Not far away is the Protestant Church of Atonement, inaugurated in 1964, with its wall in the forecourt inscribed with Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Plotzensee leading into the church’s atrium with its inscription Golgotha. 
Ecumenical memorial services take place every January.  Further west, built in white brutalist style and consecrated in 1963, is the Catholic memorial church, Maria-Regina Martyrum. The crypt contains an inscription to Blessed Bernard Lichtenberg.  Like Bonhoeffer, he was outspoken in his condemnation of the Nazi killing of the disabled and mentally ill.  “I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest, and a German”, he wrote to the Minister of Health, “demand of you, Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding, and with your consent, and which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people”.   Rector of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral from 1938 – from Unter den Linden behind the State Opera House - he prayed daily for  persecuted Jews at Vespers, and was arrested on 23 October 1941 dying on 5 November 1943 after falling ill in Gestapo custody.  He had just been committed to Dachau.  In 2004, he was honoured in the Righteous Amongst Nations at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem for his unyielding opposition to the Nazi regime and support for fleeing Jews. 

Berlin raises a question: for how many generations, should guilt and shame about the past be encouraged?  It is understandable if German youth do not want to be burdened by a past they did not make.  For the younger generation the best comparison in the UK might be how distant slavery seems in our own past and in the making of Britain’s wealth.  Perhaps an answer lies in the difference between guilt and shame: guilt created by a sense of responsibility for wrongdoing, how we see ourself; shame created by belonging to a community, more a painful sense of how others see us as a result of our wrongdoing.   Psychologists seem to approve of guilt and disapprove of shame.  But there is crippling survivor guilt.  And fear of shame and blame can be a powerful restraint.  German young people should not feel guilt about the Holocaust.  Though there is something healthy and salutary in a communal sense of shame, at being reminded of the unspeakable events in Europe eighty to ninety years ago.

What better approach to the past than spending time in the Bonhoeffer-Haus with its excellent pastor and guide, and absorbing the message in the Kaiser Wilhelm Church in Berlin ?  But these are merely the limited experiences of a British bystander who barely remembers the sounds of the sirens and being evacuated from London. 

The past is another country.  Irrespective of nationality, we cross several countries into our present one.   And a little history, painful and shocking as it is, should –  with emphasis on should - make it easier not to repeat the enormity of the horrors in the years 1933-1945.
 
 
 
 
 

 
The Pope is back safely from his visit to four African countries.  Little was said about the danger to him when in Bamenda in Cameroon in the midst of a civil war, or Equatorial Guinea where Putin’s Africa Corps (the old Wagner Group) look after its murderous President.  During his visit to Nigeria in 2003, President George W. Bush travelled protected in his heavily armoured Cadillac, The Beast. The airport café might have been mistaken for a Secret Service refectory at the Department of Homeland Security there were so many protection officers waiting.   The popemobile looks very vulnerable on visits by comparison.

In five visits, Pope Francis visited ten African countries before his death, and Leo will probably do much the same.   Accompanying journalists  know that 20% of the world’s Catholics live in Africa and the inequality and poverty in their different countries, hence papal attention, but few of them have much idea of what Church life is like when huge crowds aren’t attending huge stadiums for masses or thronging the streets as the popemobile drives past.   Though Leo’s emphasis of his Augustinian heritage in his Algeria visit to Annaba (Hippo) where St. Augustine had been bishop, was distinctive.  His focus on Christian-Muslim dialogue was more expected.  There was no public mention of Algiers great missionary bishop, Cardinal Charles Lavigerie – probably because of his anti-Muslim statements in the late 19th century.  It was a  missed  opportunity to praise the work of the Society of the Missionaries of Africa, the White Fathers, while at the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa.  They surely deserved it.

Having lived in Malawi and Nigeria, done research in Rwanda and spent  1978- 1989 in and out of southern Africa, I can say with some confidence that ‘Africa’ names the continent but describes little else.  The Sahara might as well be a vast sand ocean dividing two continents.   In sub-Saharan Africa, cultures in different States are just as different as those between Germany and Spain and Norway.  More so when Islam is considered.  Politics similarly,  from tyranny and military dictatorships to struggling democracies.  Yet there is something recognizable as the ‘African Church’.  What is it exactly?

The first thing that comes to mind is liturgy.  A significant number of African Catholics express joy and hope in their worship - in a very attractive way.  Unlike Europeans, but like Muslims in prayer, they are at ease expressing worship with their bodies rather than just standing, kneeling and sitting down.  We seem to have got rid of prostration on Good Friday, or it may just be the clergy are too old to get up again unaided.

At midnight mass in Lome in the mid-1970s, I sat next to a Togolese lady wearing a fabulous Kente dress and spectacular headgear.  In the heat, and after what seemed a very long time before we were through the sermon and intercessions, I heard considerable noise outside the cathedral.  Tuning in with my Nigerian antenna,  it sounded to me like a protest.  I quietly asked her if it was a riot.  No, she said, it’s the offertory procession.  And it was.  Drums and dancing, a swaying line of women appeared.  Then there is the blessing of the fire at the Easter Vigil.  In the UK, it is usually an anxious scene with the priest trying to light a few bits of wood in a bucket while the congregation freezes, and the lighting of the paschal candle seems temporarily in jeopardy.  I remember going to Limbe Cathedral, Blantyre, Malawi  one Easter Saturday evening and seeing a huge bonfire from about three miles distant.  And the Poor Clares down the road used to celebrate a danced mass.

In Zimbabwe, there was considerable thought given to christianising traditional transition rights, for puberty and ceremonies for the dead.  In the 1970s there was full expectation in parts of central Africa that ordination of viri probati, men of proven Christian virtue, would soon take place.  Missionaries were training them and their wives with this in mind in Likulesi, Malawi.   This, of course, proved an inculturation too far.

In the 1980s. this openness carried over into politics.  During the struggle against apartheid for example,  there was something very moving in seeing the Red Flag go up behind Archbishop Denis Hurley during a funeral for a prominent ANC member.   He would have preferred not but his presence said something about where the local Church’s heart lay culturally.  Christians and Communists were at the heart of resistance.  The Bishops Conference was open to everyone from the Grail to black miners.   I remember a lively but respectful debate at one of them over Marxism between Cardinal Owen McCann of Cape Town with two miners in full underground gear. 

Since the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in early 17th century China dialogued and adapted to Confucianism, politics and culture has remained a bone of contention in evangelisation.  Even some modest  forms of inculturation to African cultures did not have universal approval.  Some bishops, a little too Romanised, banned drums in church as a pagan atrocity. 

Such attitudes could knock on to the African diaspora.  The Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments from 2002 to 2008, now 93, used be a popular invitee of the Nigerian community at St. Ignatius’, Stamford Hill, London.  There was one snag though, in full Prefectoral dudgeon, he let it be known that he would not come if there were girls on the altar during his mass.  The young Jesuit dealing with the visit was having none of it and boldly negotiated.  Like all good negotiations a compromise was reached: the girls could be on the altar as long as they didn’t move.  Although I knew Arinze, travelled with him and enjoyed his company, I never told him this was the ruling for women in the Strip-Clubs of the 1950s.

Treatment of, and attitudes towards, women, Sisters, homosexuals, in several African countries has remained a disturbing bone of contention.  Though bishops holding views contrary to the dominant European values have remained on the whole loyal to the papacy.  The Anglican Church has not experienced the same loyalty to Canterbury.  Popes are luckier.

Popes must find it very difficult having to go through formal receptions by brutal dictators.  Yet they seem to enjoy visits to African countries. It is perhaps because they encounter there an infectious joy and hope, reflecting their own, expressed in the liturgies over which they preside, as well as the sense of a Church perhaps not often dramatically militant these days but still vibrant and growing.
 
 
 
 
 
 

                                   
 
“[Leo] wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.  If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican….Leo should get his act together as Pope, use common sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a politician”. 
Donald Trump 12 April 2026.  

As neither a cardinal nor a catholic, someone believing a fantasy of this kind that you are personally responsible for the appointment of a particular Pope would normally suggest a level of narcissism indicating mental illness.  That is unless you are deliberately trying to create such an impression.  Which of these applies to Donald Trump is a dilemma posed for those who have to deal with the the President of the United States.  The celebrated  American political scientist Timothy Synder, now wisely a professor in Toronto, believes we should think more in the direction of Trump performing, rather than being, a full-blown uncontrolled narcissistic sociopath.  You ask yourself is the accompanying mocked-up picture of Trump dressed as a Christ-like figure lighting the world and healing a sick man 'only' intended as some kind of  blasphemous joke?  After this ramble against Pope Leo, I’m not so sure.  

Trump’s other persona, the foul-mouthed Mafia boss, perhaps came in useful for property dealing in New York’s school of knocks.  It is increasingly the role adopted in what passes for Trump’s diplomacy.  Fall into line, pay your protection money or we burn down your restaurant.  Quite persuasive when taking over territory - at least in movies.

Trump’s Truth Social ramble last Sunday,  was something of an outburst foretold.  But had the Pope been Filipino, he would also have been reacting to the wars around the world, criticizing warmongers and calling for peace.  An American Pope could not ignore an American war thwarting diplomatic negotiations that were making progress, chosen and justified with the misuse of Christian scriptures, and prayer.   And it is hardly news that the Holy Land is in the Middle East and Christians are suffering alongside everyone else.

In one way, this is a comforting sign that the regime thinks American Catholics may heed the Pope’s words.  Also, whilst the Trump minions are playing at their version of Christian Nationalism, Vice-President Vance cannot handle his relations with the Church in the same way as JFK, strict separation of State and Church.  As the number one contender for the 2028 Presidential elections perhaps Vance and his Catholicism is deliberately being put on the line by Trump.  Vance has to do two incompatible things things.  Pretend Trump has a reasonable position, appealing to at least some element of the Maga masses, and not further alienate a Catholic constituency that might vote for him at some point for President.  In the event he took the chance to demonstrate before the Maga masses in Georgia his ignorance of just war theory and to lecture the Augustinian Pope on being careful with his theology.  St. Augustine, of course, elaborated the evaluation of the conditions for a just war.   

These developments pose the Pope and the American hierarchy a growing problem.  US Catholics are not immune to MAGA mythology.  There is the question of the balance between the imperatives of truth and the quest for a healthy unity.  The Pope is, of course, simply making timely theological interventions marked by his Augustinian formation.  And by comparison, he is far less American in his pastoral experience than John Paul II was Polish in his.
 
Pope Leo has no intention of engaging in dialogue with Trump though he ‘doubled-down’ in his response to journalists’ questions on the plane to Algeria on Monday.  “I do not think the message of the Gospel should be abused in the way some people are doing”, he told them. “I will continue to speak out loudly against war, to try to promote peace, multilateral dialogue between states in order to seek the right solutions to problems....  The message of the Gospel is the message of the Church, blessed are the peacemakers.  I do not see my role as that of a politician”, a point he made several times.  It is some commentary on the life of a modern Pope when a visit to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea, with their multiple problems, coincides with verbal abuse from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.  May be return safely. 

A speech last Thursday in Bamenda , a war zone in Cameroon, gave Pope Leo another opportunity to 'double down' on his message. ""Blessed are the peacemakers!" he said. "But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth."  President Biya would not have liked his equally pointed further comment: "The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters."  If there had been suspicions Leo was the soft, more diplomatic option after Francis, here was a fearless voice saying what had to be said. The gloves have come off.

In response, Trump hasn’t changed his tune but his language.  He told journalists on Thursday he was “all about the Gospel”. He wants the Pope to speak out.  But remarkably for the man who pulled out of the 2015 international agreement, being honoured by the Iranian government, that had ended any pursuit they might have had of developing a nuclear bomb, he claimed that the Pope said Iran can have a nuclear weapon.  As usual a completely false claim as the CNN anchor interviewing him pointed out.  He had a right to disagree with him. Indeed he does but some conception of truth might help too.

Maybe the message will get through to the White House that the successor to Peter preaches the Gospel and speaks to a global Church, not only to a particular country.   It's in the job description and scarcely  esoteric knowledge.  But there is one thing for which we should be grateful to Trump this week: with some 20% of the American population identifying as Catholics (some 75 million), and with even only 1% of these voting in the midterm elections  reacting angrily to Sunday’s outburst with traditional loyalty to the papacy, changing their vote from Republican to Democrat as a result, he has just handed over the Senate and Congress to the Democrats.