Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement - an evening at The Keys
Yesterday I spent an enjoyable evening with The Keys, the Guild of Catholic Writers which meets at the Jesuit Church of Farm Street in Mayfair. There is Mass, then dinner, then the meeting; this seems to me a good way of arranging things. Last night, Paul Shrimpton gave an excellent talk on how the writings of Blessed John Henry Newman influenced Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement in Nazi Germany. It was moving for me to hear Paul speak, since our paths last crossed in about 1979 when we were both undergraduates at Oxford. I wrote about Sophie Scholl ten years ago in the post White Rose - White Flower , highlighting John Smeaton's appeal for us to see the movement as a parallel to the pro-life movement today. Then in 2012 I found out about a Moving film of Sophie Scholl . (You can find the full version of the film free on YouTube at this link .) The inspiring courage of these young people is especially important for us today. They faced an authoritarian attack on free