Diocese of Down & Dromore

The Archbishop's sermon in full

Almost everyone here this evening will have had parents or grandparents or other relatives who fought in, or at least lived through, the Second World War. But the sense of the war being a lived experience was not, of course, confined to that generation. For about twenty years after VE Day, boys of my generation enjoyed a weekly diet of little magazines dedicated to the exploits of the war. Then there were the films: Mrs Miniver, In which we Serve, Colditz, and many, many more. It is interesting that possibly one of the most evocative books and TV series about the war’s indirect impact on society – Brideshead Revisited – showed this impact in part through the lens of an individual’s religious consciousness. It is a very accomplished book and a very beautiful television series, but the nostalgia it evokes is highly rarefied and bears little resemblance to the social realities of the time.

To mark this 80th anniversary of VE Day, the Imperial War Museum republished a number of novels, most of them by forgotten authors long out of print. They are not such accomplished works of art as those by Evelyn Waugh but they bring to the surface experiences and themes which the more artful books don’t really deal with.

For instance in a novel called The Human Kind, by a man called Alexander Baron, some young men who have joined up are in a cinema in England in 1940. One of them compares watching the film to the strange sense of being onlookers to the war: “in fascinated incredulity… everybody was waiting to see how the film was going to end”.  Isn’t that a very vivid image of what it must have been like during what has been called “the phoney war”? But then when the fighting begins, the same narrator talks about another sort of incredulity, reflecting on what he calls “the incredible disappearance of the future”.

One war can be very different from another, not only in how it is fought but in how it begins and ends. The Great War began in a jamboree of patriotic fervour and ended in disillusionment and utter exhaustion. We say simply “the guns fell silent”. The Second World War began with that almost apologetic statement broadcast by the Prime Minister of the time, Neville Chamberlain, in the whispered words “…and as a result, this country is at war with Germany”. It ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany, her cities in ruins, her armed forces prostrated, and her defeat celebrated by street parties all over the United Kingdom.

At the end of the Great War, “revenge and “punishment” were the dominant themes of what was (unironically) known as the Peace Conference. After the Second World War there was no single peace conference but the dominant aim was for the rebuilding of the world economy and the laying out of a rules-based international order. The politicians of that war and those soldiers who fought in it and who later became politicians, officials and diplomats also went on to create the Welfare State, the Bretton Woods Agreement (which was designed to stabilise financial markets), and of course the United Nations.

At the end of the Great War, it wasn’t long before suspicion began to fall on its senior military leaders. After the Second World War politicians and military figures were cheered to the rafters as heroes, although some were more likeable than others. As Churchill said of Montgomery: “In defeat indomitable; in advance invincible; in victory insufferable.” The grammar school that I attended, which was built just after the war, had as the names of its Houses, Alexander, Alanbrooke, Montgomery and Dill – the four Irish field marshals who played so prominent a part in the Allied victory in different theatres of the war.

Before the First World War, there was a debased diplomacy, with imperial powers sending their representatives out into the world with the message that theirs was the greatest nation and all the others had to make do with being second best. And to do this they were happy to exploit God in order to elevate the nation. In their public statements they were forever reminding God whose side he was on: theirs. They had forgotten that God was not their patron and ally; forgotten that he was their Judge and their Redeemer. But they learned, at great cost to many millions of Europeans, God will not be exploited.

The bishops and the theologians in Britain and Germany must take their share of the blame for making Christianity into something simply aesthetic, sentimental and mystical. A thing with a divine atmosphere but not with a divine foundation. Too easy for judgement, too feeble to have any authority in public life, and fit only to become a branch of culture. Such a notion is evident in Evelyn Waugh’s depiction of religious conviction, as poignant as it is. 

After the war, after VE Day, the German Churches took recognition of such a grave misuse and misrepresentation of Christianity to heart. Believe it or not, that would prove to have consequences for Northern Ireland thirty years later. 

It is a very uncomfortable political fact that, despite its early associations with Nuremberg, it was in the Lutheran (that is, the Protestant) parts of Germany that Nazism was most influential. Even before the war, or the talk of war, in 1932 the greatest electoral expert in Germany, the equivalent of Professor Sir John Curtice today, wrote this:

“It is clear that the key predictor of the Nazi vote in Weimar Germany (that is Germany after the First World War) is the Protestant ratio of the local population. Hitler’s strongholds were clearly in the Lutheran countryside”.

After the War, the German Protestant Churches did not shy away from acknowledging and facing what this means. This is one of the reasons why, when sectarian violence broke out in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the German Churches were the first to support peace movements and places of courageous togetherness, such as Corrymeela. In fact, it was the Protestant Churches of Nord Rhine-Westphalia who bought a large building in Elmwood Avenue in Belfast and gave it as a gift to the Irish Council of Churches to use as its headquarters.

It is also worth noting that at the original VE Day Service held in Northern Ireland in 1946, a collection towards helping refugees in Europe who had been made homeless during the war. It was given to a fund called Christian Reconstruction for Europe which later became Christian Aid.

So, above all else on this day, we give thanks for those men and women, believers and unbelievers alike, who during and after the Second World War were not prepared to let the future disappear, and most certainly not to allow it to descend down the same catastrophic path of revenge and reparations. 

It may seem like a strange thing to us – who too often, like Tam O’Shanter, tend to keep our hatreds warm – that despite what they had suffered during the war, that mid-century generation wanted now to build. They had seen time and again how easy it is to destroy a house – and to end a life – and they knew how much effort it takes to build and to create. Notably, they were determined to rebuild not just their own cities and countries, but all of Europe at the very least.

And to do that, the victors in war needed to put Germany, their enemy, not ‘back in its place’ but back on its feet. Apart from anything else, they couldn’t afford to keep Germany poor. 

One of the strange things at the end of the war was that German households had a lot of savings in the bank. There had been nothing to spend money on during those years of destruction. So after the unconditional surrender of Germany, the head of the Bundesbank, in cooperation with the British, the French and the American authorities but against the wishes of the Soviet Union (it would seem that the current neo-imperialist regime in the Kremlin have learned just as little about maintaining the peace of Europe as their Soviet predecessors) devised a plan to stop those savings from bringing Germany back to the hyper-inflationary years of the Weimar Republic.

They abolished the German currency, the Reichmark, and printed a strictly limited number of notes of a new currency, the Deutschemark, secretly in the United States. Then they told German households with savings in the bank that they could exchange their Reichmarks for Deutschemarks at a ratio of 15:1. Most German households lost most of the value of their savings overnight, but they were glad to be alive and to be able to contribute to the creation of a stable currency, so they accepted it.

The British, the Americans and the French then told German businesses that they could exchange their Reichmark cash reserves at a ratio just short of 1:1, thereby providing businesses with the necessary capital to rebuild. And that was the basis of the so-called German Miracle. Thus, the cause of that ‘miracle’ was the willingness of the Allies to see Germany soon prosper again and of the German population to accept the far from favourable terms on which that prosperity could begin.

It is an historical truth that leaders and citizens across Europe accepted that reconciliation was needed in order to build – in order to secure the future that they were determined would never again ‘disappear’. It was not a universal feeling, of course, and there were many who suffered greatly during the war who found the post-war rapprochement very difficult. Like the original damage caused, the process of reconciliation is gruelling and painful.

I remember visiting a man in his house one day when I was a parish clergyman. He had been sick and was in his pyjamas and dressing gown as he sat watching an England v Germany football match. He was also wearing his RAF Flight Lieutenant’s cap. He was a motor mechanic by trade and when anyone brought a BMW to his garage to be fixed he would mutter, “It’s like a Panzer, they’ve just taken the tracks off and stuck on four wheels”.

It is odd that, despite the enormous suffering of the Great War and the bitterness of many servicemen returning home, very little social progress was made in the inter-war years, and a fairly rudimentary form of protest was crushed in the General Strike of 1926. The servicemen and women dancing in the streets on 8th May 1945 were not going to make the same mistake. They changed the Government, and they would go on in future years changing governments if they didn’t live up to honest expectations. 

We heard earlier the prophetic oracle of Micah about the peace and justice which will reign on God’s holy mountain. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, Old Testament prophets were not soothsayers. They were seers, people with the task of calling Israel,  the nation, back to its original vocation and its original foundations. Perhaps their guiding principle was a little half verse from Deuteronomy: “There shall be no poor among you”.  So they called on Israel to be a society based on social justice. The prophets called on Israel to be a society which could worship God in the sanctuary with clean hands because they were faithful to his demand for fairness and generosity in their social dealings and in their international affairs. More often than not Israel ignored or persecuted her prophets.

As that generation who suffered so much during the war years knew, peace, prosperity and justice do not just happen. They have to be made and they have to be maintained. And they cannot maintained if they are made as though a country consisted of just one community or a world of just one nation; as though no one else other than they lived on the planet. Belonging to a national community involves a sort of a daily referendum of choices which can produce fruitfulness and vibrancy, or it can lead to damage and desolation. 

Jesus told his disciples:

“…all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you… you have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should last.”

I have never understood why the teaching of the one who is Redeemer of the whole world and the Eternal Word of the Father should be thought only to apply to religious matters. Political and diplomatic decisions are also fruitful or desolate depending on how closely they conform to, or diverge, from the things that God’s Christ has made known to us. Material decisions have spiritual consequences for individuals and nations and continents.

So, today we thank God for the men and women who fought or who endured what was without doubt a morally-justifiable war. And we thank God, too, that when victory was secured they set about the reconciliation of an entire continent and the making of a peace that would last.