Sinners and Saints--The Irreverent Diaries of Britain's Most Controversial Saint by Father Michael Seed

Author:Father Michael Seed [Michael Seed and Noel Botham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782195924
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

THE WHISKY-DRINKING PRIEST – MILLION POUND CONVERSION – MILITARY MANOEUVRES IN THE GARDEN – BRING BACK THE BLESSED MARGARET – TEA WITH SINN FÉIN – A BUDGET TEA PARTY

Being a friend of the late Alan Clark was unpredictable, stimulating and often intriguing –but not always comfortable. He frequently thought in stereotypes and unthinkingly would replace the real person with his mental perception.

Unfortunately for me, he was a great admirer of the works of the novelist Graham Greene, who had always favoured Irish whisky-drinking priests in his works. Alan loved this image and tried to make me fit it. When we first knew one another, he would invite me to meet him in the Pugin Room at the Palace of Westminster at 11am and order very large whiskies, which I did not want at that time in the morning. In Parliamentary bars, they serve double measures as a matter of course, which meant he was ordering quadruple whiskies each time. I was to be his own, Irish whisky-drinking priest, and despite my constant refusals and opposition, he persevered with this notion until he died.

He was a man full of surprises. The first time I went to Saltwood, the thousand-year-old Norman castle his father had bought back in 1955, and from which the knights had set out to murder St Thomas Beckett, it was once again being overrun by military types. We were seated in the main, ancient medieval hall and he sat about twenty feet away from me. It wasn’t exactly my idea of an intimate conversation, despite his wanting to discuss something close to his heart.

‘I understand I have to give a lot of money to the Catholic Church in order to become a Catholic,’ he said.

‘Who told you that?’ I asked. ‘Whoever it was, they were teasing. You don’t have to pay a penny!’

‘Well I thought I had to, and I was thinking of doing it,’ Alan continued, ‘though I’m not really worthy of your interest. I’m a very bad person.’

‘Good,’ I told him. ‘The Catholic Church is full of sinners and saints. You have to remember that both Hitler and Mother Theresa were baptized as Catholics.’

I must have said the right thing for he brightened up considerably: I hadn’t reckoned on his interest in Adolf Hitler to be quite so strong. It was only later that I noticed there was Nazi memorabilia scattered all over the castle – SS and Gestapo daggers and symbols and armbands in the most unlikely of places. He even told me he had named his dog after Hitler’s dog.

He obviously took my remark as a compliment and muttered, ‘Wonderful.’

I then tried to explain to him some of the different aspects of theology.

However, while I was talking I spotted, through the window, men in combat gear and with blacked-out faces, dropping past on ropes. There was also the noise of guns firing and men shouting. Alan sat there intently listening to my exposition of faith, totally ignoring the makings of a coup d’état and offered no explanation of what was going on.

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