Some Folks Are Hollow

What a beautiful feelin' it is to be real
How do you feel ?
How the guilty will fall
'Cause they're guilty as sin
Let it begin

I heard it from on high
Heard it was a lie
Jesus died at crucifixion
Lies from Emperor Constantine
To control your mind
Lord there'll be some resurrection

The church had to apologize
For crimes in times
For all the profits
Overseeing slave plantations
So it comes as no surprise
The church has brutalised
After all, the first slave ship they named it Jesus

Some folks are hollow
Got no tomorrow
Happiness can neither
Beg, steal or borrow

Some folks are hollow
Got no tomorrow
Happiness can neither
Beg, steal or borrow

Where's all the art and gold
That the Nazis stole ?
In the Vatican with his holiness the
Pope of Rome
How the guilty will fall
'Cause they're guilty as sin
All this talk
Of who is and who isn't getting in

Some folks are hollow
Got no tomorrow
Can't smile faces
And the flock won't follow

Some folks are hollow
Got no tomorrow
Happiness can neither
Beg, steal or borrow

Lyrics by:
Brown

Available on:
The World Is Yours (3.49)

Details:

"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the case of truth; but no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom. But they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess, that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly."
(Albert Einstein, Time magazine, 23rd December 1940)

"The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas... He is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all."
(Editorial, The New York Times, 25th December 1941)

". . . recall another fact one dare not forget. We belong to the Church militant; and she is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator's supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights."
(Pope Pius XII speaking to the North American College in Rome, 1953)

"Any cult which denies the divinity of Christ, does not profess the existence of the Holy Trinity, refutes baptism, defames Christians, and derogates the priesthood, we consider to be damned."
(Sts. Aurelius, Felix, George, Liliosa, and Natalia (d. 852), martyrs of Cordoba, Spain. Reported in the Memoriale Sanctorum in response to Spanish Umayyad Caliph 'Abd Ar-Rahman II's ministers that they convert to Islam on pain of death.)

Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are. You can smell the sulfur here. Bring together a woman who tears up a photo of Pope John Paul II on primetime television and a man who wants to send JCBs into the Vatican, and you have yourself quite the toxic compound in matters pertaining to the faith. Sinead O'Connor (Satan has had a long run with this one) guests on this heinous composition, which no doubt ratcheted Ian Brown's anti-Vatican irascibility up another level. Stop filling people's heads with this shit. You heard fuck all from on high Ian, you heard a Ras Kass CD. This diabolical folie à deux lazily regurgitates chunks of Nature of the Threat by Ras Kass, which itself contains numerous erroneous claims. Nature of the Threat makes the ridiculous claim that Constantine somehow 'brainwashed' Christians into believing in the Resurrection; this has tickled the ears of Brown, who sloppily applies it to the Crucifixion. Jesus died in 33 AD. The Council of Nicaea was in 325 AD. How in the name of fuck, could any action of Constantine in 325, have 'hoodwinked' generations of Christians in this 33 AD - 325 AD time frame ? What exactly do Ras Kass and Ian Brown think happened in the three hundred years between the Ascension of Jesus and the formation of the Nicene Creed ? The early Church Fathers and Christian believers did not sit around twiddling their thumbs, whistling Dixie for three centuries sequentially before one day falling under the spell of the Emperor Constantine. Rather, these first century Christians were singing 'Carmen Christi' (or Hymn of Christ, Philippians 2: 6 - 11). Ras Kass and Ian Brown are putting an awful lot of weight on a 'Constantinian brainwash', but, in those six verses of Philippians 2, you will find first century attestation to belief in Christ's incarnation, divinity, crucifixion and resurrection. Considering how unanimously the early sources (Greek historians, Roman historians, pagan historians, Jewish historians, Christian historians) agree on this point, and scholarly consensus in the two millennia since, Jesus' death on the cross is the one thing we can be most certain about concerning His life. Constantine did not cook up some random creed in Nicaea in 325; for an understanding of the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds, go back to the first century Corinthian Creed (1 Corinthians 15: 3 - 8). I would advise Ian to read up on the lives of four Apostolic Fathers: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna and Papias of Hierapolis. I do not imagine it was merely on a whim that Clement of Rome was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea in 99 AD. Not for no reason was Ignatius of Antioch thrown to the lions in 108 AD. One year before his death, Ignatius of Antioch wrote, "Where the bishop appears, there let the people be; just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." The Church came into being from fighting through the blood of the persecutions. By the time Constantine came along and issued the Edict of Milan in 313, effectively ending the persecution of Christians, he was in a sense preaching to the converted, given that much of his audience by this stage was already Christian. The aim of the persecutions had been to force Christians into an acceptance of assimilation with pagan worship in the Roman Empire. The Diocletianic Persecution which commenced in 303 AD, the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the empire, was the final push towards this goal. Its failure was followed by the Edict of Milan (do not for a second think that this edict was issued for any reason other than political expediency). The Catholic Church did not get from 12 to 1.2 billion through mind control. The Catholic Church is the indefectible Body of Christ and the only Church founded by Our Lord, which will last until His return at the end of days. As the infallible Church, the Holy Bride of Christ is protected from all error in her teachings by the Holy Spirit. Pope John Paul II is not the Church. Whatever John Paul the Apologizer felt compelled to offer remorse for, of her historical past ("The church had to apologize..."), is exclusive to his pontificate (his apology would have been better placed for orchestrating the abomination of Assisi, his participation in pagan ceremonies, or his public veneration of the Koran, but I digress...). The Church is the cause of the holiness of its members, but its holiness is not measured by their response.

The Catholic Church does not 'oversee slave plantations', but to read more on slave labour, click here. The Vatican makes no pronouncement on "who is and who isn't getting in" [to heaven]. Sir Thomas More, when accused of such a charge in A Man for All Seasons, offers the eloquent response, "I have no window to look into another man's conscience." The Church does not pronounce subjective judgement. The Church does not judge the individual - but it does judge what is sinful and what is not sinful. Could Ian Brown give me the name of one person, of whom the Vatican has officially pronounced is in hell ? Do I hear the sound of crickets ? Non-judgmentalism is the battle cry of relativists and quickly devolves into an excuse for moral turpitude. Those who deny the existence of hell, deny the existence of God. Those who doubt the existence of hell, doubt the existence of God. Those who hope that no one is in hell, deny that hell is already populated and therefore deny the existence of God. The power that Christ conferred upon Peter and His successors is, in an absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Holy Catholic Church, by the will of her Founder and Head, is monarchical, with Sovereign authority uniquely vested in the pope through whom Christ the King reigns vicariously. The Pope is advocate of the Christian memory; he does not impose from without. The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. The Church is a mother. The Church is not a dictator. The Church is, after all, Mater and Magister, mother and teacher, and must correct as well as love. The Catholic Church will certainly tell people if they are on the right (or wrong) path before they are escorted into the presence of the Divine Judge. Just what shape or form does Ian envisage that God's judgement of mankind will take ? A sweepstake ? Here Ian is scheming to set up an opposition in God that does not, and cannot, exist. In God there is no division between justice and mercy. Each one flows from and into the other. The mercy of God resides in His justice just as His justice resides in His mercy. So much are they related that we can say God is mercy, and we can say God is justice. God's justice is not overridden by His mercy. God's justice extends in a most real way to those who abuse His mercy. Be a reservoir - rather than a channel - of grace. One of the six sins against the Holy Ghost is presumption of God's mercy. Modernism craves a licence to the sin of presumption, but a penitential heart seeks satisfaction to divine justice. Mercy only has currency when we understand the price of our redemption. A mercy deprived of justice is an open invitation to an "all you can sin" buffet. Mercy (misericordia, "having a heart for the miserable") is God's response to human misery. The first word of Jesus' ministry in Matthew (4: 17) is Repent. Beatus vir, qui timet Dominum, in mandatis ejus volet nimis. Hell is both the deprivation of the beatific vision (the punishment for original sin) and the pain of sense, the fire (the punishment for actual sin). Hell was tailor-made to move the human heart to repent and finally be saved. For those who will not love Him, fear of His justice may be the first steps to salvation. What is judgement ? Judgement is the exercise of justice. What is justice ? Justice is giving to each according to their due. Justice is rooted in truth. The exercise of justice is joy for the righteous, but is terror to the workers of iniquity. Anyone tearing up a photo of the successor of Saint Peter can go to hell. Anyone inciting people to send JCBs to the Chair of Saint Peter can go to hell. According to Islam, the majority of people in hell are women (Mohammed said, "I was shown the Hell-fire and that the majority of its dwellers are women."). But don't let minor detail like that interfere with your emancipation narrative. Speaking to the NME in April 1989, Ian Brown is convinced that he himself is getting into Heaven: "There must be some substance to Christ 'cos the myth has lasted so long, like 2,000 years... but it's convenient 'cos you don't have to make your mind up until you get to the gates... I'll go up there without a doubt." First up, the Gospel accounts of Christ are no myth. What abounds in this selection of Ian Brown quotes is an attempt to 'demythologise' the New Testament, which will only take you down the road of reductionism. Secondly, this 'I'll make my mind up when I get to the gates' mindset is both deluded and dangerous in the extreme. The whole 'making your mind up' process ends at the very moment you draw your last breath. Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus. In the words of C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity), there is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.

The Marxist sales tactic here is that economic poverty is the root of moral poverty. Sin, not inequality, is the root of social evil. Sin is the only real disgrace. Sin is dis-grace, and hell is a grace-forsaken darkness. Scripture and Tradition are replete with attestations to the reality of hell. Christ spoke an awful lot about Gehenna in the New Testament. Next to His Divinity, the topic Jesus spoke about more than any other, in all four gospels, was hell. He is not called the Saviour for nothing. God's word is final; God will have the final word. Some of the greatest saints in the Church have been emphatic in their eschatological writings as to what awaits; contrast these with the bamstick theology of Ian Brown and Noel Gallagher, whose concept of eschaton (Death; Judgement; Hell; Heaven) conveniently eliminates its inner two components. In this decommissioning of the Church as moral preceptor of humanity, Jesus is merely a live-and-let-live liberal who judged nothing and no one. This Pollyanna view of the reality of sin is very much reflective of the prevalent Balthasarian modern mindset that Hitler and Stalin are two shy of a Bridge game in hell. Waffling about Jesus' claim to be "the Resurrection and the Life", Ian Brown stated in 1989 that anyone with "a normal brain" can see how "false this statement is". On this track, he claims that Jesus' crucifixion too was a lie, yet in the same breath, pompously announces, 'Lord there'll be some resurrection'. Time for Ian to decide which master he serves. Given that the singer does not believe that Jesus was crucified (and resurrected), if this resurrection [of the dead] lyric is delivered in a Christian context, then he should stop banging the drum with prognostications of any resurrection to come. Ian does not believe that Jesus is divine; according to the singer, Jesus was "basically just an angry guy" with an understanding girlfriend. Therefore, who exactly does Ian think he is talking to when he says 'Lord' ? There can be no Lord without a resurrection, and there can be no resurrection without a Lord. Don't even know his name indeed. If this resurrection lyric is delivered in an Islamic context, then stop propping yourself up as some hallowed champion for "modern Christianity in action". The only place you're taking Christianity to is the rubbish dump. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve. Saint Paul, in Colossians (2: 8), warns us about folks who are hollow: "See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ." In Romans 10: 9, Paul tells us, "If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." The exact three things that Islam denies about Jesus are the exact three things (underlined above) we have to believe in order to be saved: death, deity, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now that is what I call flipping the scriptures. The Islamic polemic against Christianity, thus hinges on Christology. The earliest layer of Christian history in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15: 3 - 8; Philippians 2: 6 - 11; Mark's Passion narrative) proclaims the death, deity, and resurrection of Jesus. This denial of Jesus' crucifixion, a presentation of Christ as a phantasm, is also a strand of Gnosticism, which promotes the heretical notion that the spirit of Christ was a being who inhabited the body of Jesus long enough to share the truth of the secret knowledge of god. He did not really die on the cross, they speculate, but was taken back up to heaven before the physical body was crucified, with a conspiratorial substitution involving the body of Simon of Cyrene. This anti-biblical tract continues with the proposition that Christ was not the son of the god of Israel, but of a higher god. The damnable undertone here is that only by denying the crucified Christ, can man escape the authority of the god of this world. Since Ian's projection of Church history is clearly a regurgitation of the demented ramblings of Teabing, a numpty fictional character from The Da Vinci Code, it is important to go straight to the heart of the novel's erroneous claims: "Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned." (p. 317). In another passage (p. 313), Teabing claims, "More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them." By the mid-second century there were only five or six still being considered, and by the late second century, the early Church recognized the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the four inspired by the Holy Spirit and meant for the canon of the New Testament. The process of determining the canon was well under way long before Constantine became emperor (see, for example, the Muratorian fragment, dated to about 170) and before the church had the slightest prospect of political power. The critical phase occurred in the mid-second century. Long before Constantine came on the scene, the Church was fighting to keep Christianity firmly rooted in history and fact rather than the random mythologies reinvented at the whim of each rising Gnostic sage. Tatian the Syrian: "We are not playing the fool, you Greeks, nor do we talk nonsense, when we report that God was born in the form of a man" (Address to the Greeks 21 [A.D. 170]). There was no "new" Bible commissioned by Constantine. The emperor simply requested that Eusebius (the Bishop of Carthage) make fifty copies of the already existing and widely accepted scriptures. Constantine did not "embellish" Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, nor did he burn any gospels (only texts written by Arius, none of which were gospels). The Council Fathers at Nicaea discussed many things besides Arianism, including the proper dating of Easter, the validity of baptisms administered by heretics, and more. One issue they did not discuss, however, is which books belonged in the Bible. They drafted a list of canons. There were no gospels 'earlier' than Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. The gospels in the New Testament present many earthly aspects of Christ's life, such as His physical frailties (hunger, fatigue, death); emotions (anguish, outrage, love); and relational interactions (with His mother, friends, and followers). The only problem is that skeptics like Ian Brown and Dan Brown are too busy errantly 'reading between the lines' to notice them.

If Ian Brown's paranoiac heist-touting September 2007 Guardian rant about Mussolini and an underground cellar in the Vatican sounds like something straight out of a fiction novel, that's because it is. A synopsis of this demonic work of fiction by Robert Gallant from May 2007 is included below.

While Ian Brown is on this mission to return stolen religious treasures, could he see to restoring Hagia Sophia to its rightful owner ? Some Folks Are Hollow, marinated in anti-Catholic mythology, resides in the cesspool of iniquitous revisionist history, the breeding of Nature of the Threat, Rob the Vatican and The Da Vinci Code at their most malevolent:

Everyone believes that robbing the Vatican is impossible. The world's greatest collection of treasures, jewelry, and art sits inside the seemingly impregnable walls of the Vatican. A vast cadre of devoted priests, Swiss Guards, and Vatican Gendarmes protect the sanctity of the one-hundred acre heartbeat of the Roman Catholic Church.

But events, ingenious planning, and a man on a mission may make the impossible possible. A powerful cardinal is obsessed with becoming the next pope. A young priest and a beautiful Italian gymnast learn about a deadly conspiracy.

American jewel thief Craig Reynolds methodically positions the players and maneuvers events as he plans the greatest robbery in history. He will do it to achieve enormous wealth and for the prestige of becoming the master thief of all time. But will he sacrifice the woman he initially deceived but now loves ?

(Robert Gallant, Rob the Vatican)

"Indeed," Teabing said. "Stay with me. During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea."

Sophie had heard of it only insofar as its being the birthplace of the Nicene Creed.

"At this gathering," Teabing said, "many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon -- 'the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course , the divinity of Jesus."

"I don't follow. His divinity ?"

"My dear," Teabing declared, "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal."

"Not the Son of God ?"

"Right," Teabing said. "Jesus' establishment as 'the Son of God' was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea."

"Hold on. You're saying Jesus' divinity was the result of a vote ?"

"A relatively close vote at that," Teabing added.

(Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code)

The Council's decision was not whether or not Jesus is divine. They already believed He is. This was assumed from the beginning of the first century Church. The issue was whether Jesus is of the same divine substance as God the Father. A "close" vote ? Only 2 out of the 200 delegates dissented, and even they still believed Jesus is God. All the Council of Nicaea did was define in precise theological and philosophical terminology, how Jesus is divine: He is homoousios, "consubstantial with the Father" (Nicene Creed). The claim that no Christians believed Jesus was divine until the fourth century A.D. shows an utter lack of historical knowledge on Dan Brown's part. Indeed, the evidence points precisely in the opposite direction, as can be shown by making two brief points. First and foremost, the writings of the New Testament, which all serious biblical scholars - both Christian and non-Christian - admit was written in the first century A.D., within 20-70 years after Jesus' death, are filled with affirmations of the divinity of Jesus (Matthew 1; John 1, 5, 8, 10, 21; Romans 8, 10; Phillipians 2). Second, and perhaps equally devastating for Brown's position, it is widely known (except by Brown) that the earliest christological heresies in the early Church, one which took place during the time of the New Testament, did not deny the divinity of Jesus but His humanity. This heresy is known as docetism, from the Greek word dokeo, which means, "to seem," because its adherents were teaching that Jesus only "seemed" or "appeared" to be a man, but that he was not fully human, but rather simply a divine being walking about on earth. Evidence for this heresy is present in the letters of John, which denounce as heretics those who "will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh" (2 John 1: 7). It was only much, much later, in the fourth century, that Arius would come on the scene and deny the fullness of Jesus' divinity, and even he did not claim that Jesus was merely a "mortal prophet," only that he was a lesser deity, created by the eternal Father, and not "consubstantial with the Father" (Nicene Creed). Indeed, all one has to do is read the so-called "gospels" of the Gnostics, which originated many centuries after Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth, and compare them with the canonical accounts given in the New Testament to find that it is the New Testament Gospels which present a very human Jesus, while the Gnostic gospels present a phantasm from another world, the "higher world" of secret gnosis privy only to the initiate. Moreover, it is the New Testament Gospels that present a very Jewish Jesus, while the Gnostic texts reveal remarkable ignorance of the Judaism of Jesus' day but great familiarity with the Gnostic theological debates of the second through fourth centuries after Christ. Despite his revered status as "Royal Historian", Teabing, it seems, doesn't know his history all that well.

Some conspiracy theories are hollow...
Ian's claim that the art and gold stolen by the Nazis is in the Vatican is Pope fiction. Here, a U.S. soldier examines a solid gold statue, part of Hermann Goering's private loot, found by the 7th U.S. Army in a mountainside cave near Schonau am Konigssee, Germany, on 25th May 1945. The secret cave, the second found to date, also contained stolen priceless paintings from all over Europe. The Nazis looted not only fine art, but also religious items. As they murdered entire Jewish communities, they stole their Torah scrolls, ceremonial art objects and libraries.
Second row: At Schloss Neuschwanstein in southern Bavaria, Captain James Rorimer, who later would become the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, supervises the safeguarding of art stolen from French Jews and stored during the war at the castle (April/May 1945). The Monuments Men were army specialists from the US and other allied armies, whose job it was to find the stolen art, secure it and return it to the museums and families from whom it was taken. The National Archives says of the Monuments Men: "These courageous individuals rescued and returned more than 5 million cultural items to the countries from which they had been stolen." In addition to coveting and stealing the works they desired, the Nazis set about destroying pieces they considered 'degenerate' or non-Aryan. Poland came in for particular abuse - the Royal Castle in Warsaw - beloved symbol of Poland's culture and heritage, was almost completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1944. Hitler believed post-impressionist modern art, including Expressionists such as Kandinsky and Otto Dix, to be "evidence of a deranged mind". Henceforth, he declared the German populace would be fed a heavily censored diet of idealised, neo-classical works promoting racial purity. He ordered more than 16,000 works of 'degenerate art' to be removed from German museums. Ledgers reveal the fate of those artworks, many of which were destroyed. With echoes of human fate at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, the Entartete Kunst ('degenerate art') inventory, compiled in 1941-2, was systematically organised in a major campaign managed from the top.
Third row: Polish art historian Karol Estreicher with MFAA officer Lt. Frank P. Albright and two American GIs as they prepare to return Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine to the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, from where it had been stolen by the Nazis.
Fourth row: Hidden inside the Merkers salt mine, in the Wartburgkreis district of Thuringia, Germany, was the majority of Nazi Germany's gold reserves and paper currency. All but the largest paintings from the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin were also placed there for safekeeping. In today's dollars, the value of the gold found in Merkers would be almost $5 billion.
Fifth row: General Dwight D. Eisenhower went into the mine in April 1945 in order to examine the find.
Sixth & seventh rows: Jan van Eyck's The Ghent Altarpiece, the most frequently stolen painting in history, is recovered from Nazi possession.
Eighth row: U.S. Soldiers examine Edouard Manet's 'In the Conservatory', 25th April 1945.
Ninth row: Sergeant Kenneth Lindsay with a School of Botticelli portrait at Wiesbaden Collecting Point, 1945.
Tenth row: Some of Hitler's most treasured artistic works remained with him until his final hours in the bunker. This William Vandivert shot shows a 16th-century painting looted by the Nazis from a museum in Milan.
Eleventh row: A Rubens painting, 'The Graces in the Gardens of the Hesperides', taken by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), 13th May 1945.
Twelfth row: M. SGT Harold Maus of Scranton, PA is pictured with the Durer engraving, found among other art treasures at Merkers, 13th May 1945.
Thirteenth row: An unknown Rembrandt recovered safe in Munich, 13th May 1945.
Fourteenth row: Six trucks with part of the half billion dollars worth of Florentine art treasure, which had been taken to Bolsano by retreating Germans, arrives at Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy and passes by the reviewing stand of American, English and Italian officials, 21st July 1945.
Fifteenth row: The Diego Velazquez Painting 'Philip IV King of Spain', being examined by GEN Mark W. Clark, CG USFA, who was the host to allied leaders, and the Austrian people during a ceremony where art treasures recovered by the U.S. Army were returned to the rightful owners. LT. GEN Emile Marie Bethourart of France, LT. GEN. R.L. McCreery of Britain, Mr. Figl, Chancellor of Austria, and COL. GEN. Alexis Zheltov, Russian Deputy Commander, were guests of GEN Clark, 19th December 1948. A further discovery was made in 2012, when a collection of 1,406 artworks confiscated by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s was found in Munich. In one of the largest recoveries of looted art, the artworks were found by chance when tax authorities investigated Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of an art dealer in Munich. He was suspected of tax evasion, and investigators obtained a search warrant for his home in Munich; it was revealed that he had kept the works in darkened rooms and sold the occasional painting when he needed money. Investigators put the value of the cache at approximately one billion euros (£846m; $1.35bn).
Bottom row: When it comes to temporal wealth, the actual holdings of the Church - art, money, stock, bonds, land, hospitals, universities - the Church does not act as a corporation. Religious orders and dioceses each own these individually; the Pope does not own these. Until a few years ago, the Vatican was running a deficit each year of tens of millions of dollars. Dioceses are their own entities, meaning that their finances are not controlled by the Vatican. Turning now to the artistic treasures that do actually reside in the Vatican, it is worth noting that the Church spends a huge sum of money on the upkeep of this art. I can think of no worthier repository of history than the Vatican. The Catholic Church is the biggest patron of the arts that there has ever been. The Catholic Church, steeped in the intellect, established the university system, out of which would come many of the greatest achievements of western civilization. Ian is trotting out the familiar grumble that the Vatican should relinquish hold of this art and give the money to the poor. Would the singer sleep any better at night if this art was in the possession of some entrepreneur masquerading as philanthropist. So, what precisely is Ian's predilection for the transportation of this priceless art from the Vatican ? Ian has made it crystal clear in interviews that he has no interest whatsoever in the world of art, so we can safely assume that his calls to 'reclaim' these artworks have no artistic or aesthetic measure. If instead the desire is to see an equal distribution of wealth, why is it perfectly acceptable - nay, admirable - in Ian's eyes for Jay-Z to be sitting pretty on a fortune of $500 million ? Concluding a diabolical attack on Christianity in 1989, Ian moaned, "Very sad or ironic, the church is making money...the Roman Catholic Church is the richest religious organisation in the world, everyone must know that." Well, very sad or ironic, Adidas is making money...Adidas is the second richest sportswear manufacturer in the world, Ian Brown must know that. We are informed by Dave Haslam in a January 2000 'City Life' article that Ian is "well up on all the latest conspiracy theories about who killed Princess Diana." In June 2013, the singer went off on one at Finsbury Park with a rant about chemtrails. To conclude on the theme of the Vatican and World War Two, the reader is left with a choice between the contemplative contemporary reflections of Albert Einstein and the tinfoil encased mind of Ian Brown. I don't know about you, but I'm going to side with Einstein on this one.

Back To Ian Brown