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Book Review Priests de la Resistance by Fergus Butler-Gallie

Timely reminder of religious figures who took a stand against ‘first-wave’ fascism

THE ANTIPATHY or bewilderment of some socialists and communists to people of faith may mean that the recent publication of Priests de la Resistance has probably passed them by.

That would be a shame.

As racism and fascism once again menace many societies in Britain and beyond, the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie has written a timely reminder about the requisite Christian response to such evils.

The author recounts the lives of 15 Christian men and women who utterly understood the necessary response to an idolatrous and murdering ideology.

Some of them, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe, are likely to be well-known even to the most anti-religious reader.

Others are far less well-known, ranging from quiet Protestant Scot Jane Haining who suffered death at Auschwitz rather than abandon the Jewish girls in her care through to the chain-smoking socialist Hungarian nun Sara Salkahazi and on to post-1945 heroes of the US civil rights movement, pastor Fred Shuttlesworth and seminarian Jonathan Daniels, the last taking a fatal bullet from a Klu Klux Klan member intended for a young African-American woman.

But the most interesting is the man who guilefully saved Dijon’s synagogue from destruction, helped 5,000 prisoners escape from incarceration and generally caused havoc among nazi and Vichy officialdom during WWII.

Canon Felix Kir, of Kir Royale fame, worked closely with the communist resistance. They admired him tremendously but, being orthodox party members, queried his belief in a non-material deity. His response was typically earthy: “You can’t see my arse, but we know it exists!”

Imprisoned on numerous occasions, the mayor of Dijon also survived an assassination attempt at the hands of what he described as “fascist fuckers.”

He was so admired by his leftist allies that, the war over, they refused to put candidates up against him in all subsequent mayoral elections.

Yet overall the response of the Christian churches to the first fascist wave was shameful acquiescence — and sometimes outright support. The same remains true today during the emerging second wave.

Relying on questionable interpretations of stray Gospel references, too many Christians excuse themselves from politics and so have acquiesced in all sorts of state violence in order, seemingly, to save their own souls.

This is not a perfect book. The failure to account for the witness of Christians outside of Europe and  the US is a profoundly disappointing omission.

Even within his tight self-imposed geographical restrictions, Butler-Gaillie ignores many, usually Protestant, martyrs, including Sophie Scholl and the White Rose gang. Hopefully, this was because of space constraints not denominational point-scoring.

His style — at once both profound and moving, but also full of knowing and somewhat dry, campy asides — is sometimes an irritant that might have been diluted.

Yet Priests de la Resistance, by exemplifying some of those who opposed fascism in their time, asks those of us in today’s faith communities to be prepared to work with others and resist its contemporary re-emergence.

Priests de la Resistance is published by OneWorld, £12.99.

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