Priests de la Resistance! review – celebrating clerical wartime heroism

At a time when hateful, divisive and xenophobic politics are being pursued in parts of Europe in the name of defending “Christian culture”, this is a timely and uplifting book. Before the Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie embarks on a whistlestop tour of saints and martyrs who fought the good fight against Hitler and fascism, he recalls the words of St Paul: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female: all are one in Christ.” Take note, Viktor Orbán, Jarosław Kaczyński and Matteo Salvini.

What follows is an hugely enjoyable if slightly eccentric account of clerical heroism in the face of evil. One would be tempted to call it a romp, were it not for the depth of moral seriousness that motivated the priests and nuns whose stories are recounted. Butler-Gallie starts off with Canon Félix Kir in what is billed as a tale of “white wine and espionage”.

Kir, a priest and politician in the Burgundian town of Dijon, helped more than 5,000 PoWs to escape during the course of the war through a slave labour scam. He miraculously survived an assassination attempt, went on the run and reappeared atop an American tank as it rolled into his liberated home town. Apparently, this bit of showmanship infuriated General de Gaulle, who thought it stole some of his limelight.

As with the other heroes of his book, Butler-Gallie is keen to offset Kir’s moral courage by fondly chronicling his flaws, notably a love of alcohol. “Well into his late 80s,” he writes, “Kir would take several hours over lunch, almost always washed down by a blanc-cassis, a whole bottle of red and a slurp of sparkling white to finish, before – astonishingly – returning to his desk for an afternoon’s work.” After the war, producers of the national hero’s favourite drink successfully sought permission to name it after him.

Butler-Gallie’s humorous, rollicking approach works well with a character such as Canon Kir, but occasionally the jauntiness is a bit wearing. In a chapter on the great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged in Flossenbürg for his part in the plot to kill Hitler, he includes a slightly off-colour joke about the sexual voracity of the Lutheran minister’s father. The chain-smoking Sister Sára Salkaházi, who died at the hands of Hungarian fascists after hiding Jews and others at risk of deportation to the camps, is described as “the feisty nicotine nun”. Her life, the author tells us unhelpfully, proves that “unlikely nuns are not just figures of the fervid and lusty male imagination”.

This book is Butler-Gallie’s follow-up to the well-received A Field Guide to the English Clergy. Those who read that will recognise the jaunty joviality of this volume dedicated to “loose canons”. Sometimes it doesn’t work.

But occasional lapses in tone and a certain Boy’s Own quality to some of the prose (one priest’s resistance tale is described as “a story of daring escapes from stormtroopers, of late-night rendezvous and of cross-dressing clergy”) are forgivable in a book bursting with such generosity of spirit. Butler-Gallie necessarily races through the biographies in what is a slim paperback. But he achieves an inspiring effect through the sheer cumulative impact of so many brave decisions taken when it would have been easier to do otherwise. From the searing indictments of Nazism delivered from the pulpit by Clemens von Galen, the bishop of Munster, in wartime Germany, to the safe networks established by St Maximilian Kolbe, which successfully hid nearly 2,000 Polish Jews, individual acts of courage confounded Hitler’s expectation that he would one day “have the Church on the ropes”.

Wisely, Butler-Gallie explicitly excludes the complex and sometimes dark relationship between the institutional churches and fascism from his remit. This is a book about Christian individuals and their Pauline determination to protect fellow human beings from persecution, whatever their faith or race. When, at Pentecost in 1940, Salkaházi took lifelong orders with the Sisters of Social Service in Budapest, she adopted as a personal motto a line from the prophecy of Isaiah: “Here I am! Send me.” She and the other remarkable figures in this book were sent in the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances. They did not hesitate to go.

• Priests de la Resistance: The Loose Canons Who Fought Fascism in the Twentieth Century by The Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie is published by Oneworld (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99