God has no country

Donal Courtney in "God has no country"

Last Friday we went the Smock Alley theatre to see a dramatisation of Hugh O'Flaherty and the one-man performance was superb. To quote: The drama tells the story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish cleric in German-occupied Rome who used his Vatican connections to harbour Jews and escaped prisoners of war during World War II. Ultimately, he saved more than 6,500 lives.

The true story has also been dramatised so well in the 1983 film The Scarlet and the Black.

In the play Hugh explains how he knows injustice when he sees it, and hates it whether coming from the British oppressors earlier in his life, or from Germans or the Allies in the war. He says "what else could I do but save these people who came to me?".

But there is one other and a much easier and safer thing Hugh could have done - nothing! And I wonder which I would have done, coward that I am.