SFC: Okay, point taken! But in all seriousness, there have been books written that have attacked Pius XII’s legacy, such as Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII and also The Deputy. So there are clearly forces that are trying to attack him and his legacy. Whereas from what I’ve heard he did more during the war than Oskar Schindler did to help the Jewish community, in terms of numbers of people saved. 

RS: Yeah he was universally acclaimed by the world Jewish community at the end of the war; people were saying what a hero he was. Albert Einstein actually said that it was the first thing that turned him towards the Catholic Church; that his (Pope Pius XII) was the only voice being raised against Nazi Germany and so forth. But that book (The Deputy) was all revisionist history that was planted by a Soviet agent, it turned out that the playwright that wrote The Deputy was a Soviet Agent, so no that’s just calumny.

SFC: On balance the media that comes out of America, is that a help or a hindrance? I mean one of the primary faces that foreigners see of the West is the movies, and especially the levels of violence that come out of them, and these are being produced by supposedly Christian countries.

RS: Well you see that for me is one of the primary sources of hope, in some kind of perverse sense. I mean the ultimate hope for peace has to come from conversion to Christ. But I think you have the (President) Bush strategy, which is some kind of remote possibility, which is to corrupt the Islamic world with Western culture and get them to not care about Jihad and just want swimming pools in the back yard, and starlets splashing around! You know I call it the kind of Dallas and Dynasty strategy, if you could get them to lust after that style of life, then you could get them to move down the path of the West and just want freedom, albeit licentiousness freedom. And that would go a long way towards world peace!

SFC: It has potential! How about these romantic-comedies etc? Are they a good thing?

RS: Well you know what I’m thinking, there was an incident in the United States recently where the Democratic candidate attacked Bush on the basis that exports to Iraq actually increased during the Bush administration and that he’s being a hypocrite etc. but it turned out that the increase in exports was due to cigarettes, so the Republican candidate said “that’s great – we’ll kill ‘em even faster!” So that’s kind of what I feel about those kinds of movies, they’re a bad influence, but I’m not sure if they’re bad to export.

RS: But I do know what you mean and these romantic-comedies they’re extremely upsetting to me because the essence of the relationships, basically the film-makers don’t know what love is, and so all of the relationships; the parent-child relationships, the courtship relationships and the spouse relationships, they’re extremely distorted and they’re actually… and when I talk about the violent images that affect me in prayer, I wasn’t talking about the shoot ‘em ups, I was actually talking about the emotional pain, the emotional violence. Did you see The Heartbreak Kid? which I certainly do not recommend, in which he (Ben Stiller) marries a beautiful girl, not having any idea of who she is, and she turns out to emotionally violate him, and he’s portrayed as a good guy, yet what he’s doing is totally conscious-less. And you see the filmmakers just have no clue, and it just makes a nightmare out of everything having to do with marriage and romance, without them knowing it. So no, I’m not such a big fan of that stuff!

SFC: I’d agree there, and in my journey into the faith one of the things that hindered me was the likes of the Annie Halls and the When Harry Met Sallys – they’re all packaged in a very saccharine way, but they’re not good things.

RS: Right, Annie Hall is extremely destructive, because of the non-relationship at the bottom of it all; a total non-relationship.

SFC: Something a little more wholesome though is The Song of Bernadette; I understand you’ve seen that film.

RS: I have seen that film, it’s based on the novel by Franz Werfel. And the story there is that Franz Werfel was Jewish, he was fleeing the Nazis and he found himself in Lourdes, France, he wanted to get over the Pyrenees and get into Spain and from there a boat to the United States. He was trapped in Lourdes, praying to be able to get over the Pyrenees to escape. He was with his wife, who was Alma Mahler, who was the widow of Gustav Mahler (a Bohemian-Austrian composer and conductor) – I don’t remember whether he was still alive at the time – but either way she was an extremely unfaithful wife to Gustav Mahler. And Gustav Mahler was Jewish and he converted and he became a fanatic Catholic, and so she was already a Catholic, whose first husband was a Jew and become a fanatic Catholic, and now she had run off and I guess re-married with another Jew who was trapped in Lourdes! So anyway, he (Franz Werfel) prayed while he was in Lourdes, to Our Lady of Lourdes that if he escaped with his wife, he would write a song of praise to her. And he did have a semi-miraculous escape, and he made it to the United States where he wrote The Song of Bernadette as a novel, which became a best-seller, and he also wrote the screenplay. And as far as I know, I don’t know this for a fact, but he knew the truth of the Catholic faith, but he was never baptised. But I hope I’m wrong about that.

SFC: And a final top recommendation?

RS: Well that would have to be Ushpizin. See with this film I have a friend who is hyper Catholic,  she’s from a Ukranian family, ten children, the most Catholic family you could imagine; father’s a Catholic philosophy professor, most of the kids daily communicants. She saw Ushpizin and she said it changed her relationship with God. The story takes place in a Hasidic community in Israel, the film was made by Hasids, and the leading couple in the film are actually married in real life because it’s against Jewish law to pretend someone is your wife if she isn’t. So it’s a real married couple. And it shows the good side of Judaism; a tremendously deep allegiance, and in essence consecration, to God and total reliance on God, which moves the story along; it’s the kind of plot-device along which the movie unfolds. And it’s kind of I don’t want to say a romantic-comedy, but an engaging character-study with love and suspense and so-forth, but it just so well shows whole-hearted devotion and reliance on God, in a very, very beautiful context. And really it communicates the sense, which is true, that God is absolutely at the centre of all of our lives, and is intimately involved with them as you could ever hope – so that’s my top film recommendation.

SFC: A good one to finish on – thanks for your time and your thoughts Roy.