A Prince Among Stones (21 page)

The most important influence on me occurred when I was studying in Cambridge at the age of sixteen. There I met Father Alfred Gilbey, the chaplain to the university. Mgr Gilbey – his father was a scion of the family of gin merchants – was my great hero. He had studied Modern History at Trinity College, Cambridge, attended the Beda College (sponsored by the bishops of England and Wales for older vocations to the priesthood) and became the Chaplain to Cambridge University in 1932.

Father Gilbey was very much a traditionalist and celebrated the old Catholic Mass throughout his life, for decades after the modern Mass had been universally adopted in 1965. He told a story that on his final visit to Rome, the then Pope sent word that Mgr Gilbey was invited to celebrate the new Mass, with the Pope as the only concelebrant, in St Peter's. He was highly amused by this – though naturally he accepted the invitation. Although he was concerned about the direction of the Church, Father Gilbey did not in any way attack the new Mass, and pointed out that the rite had changed half a dozen times since St Peter's time in Rome.

Cambridge only admitted female undergraduates as full members of the university after the Second World War – whereas Oxford had done so in 1920. Mgr Gilbey would refuse to act as chaplain for the women undergraduates, saying he had quite enough demands on his time looking after the male students. Yet he was exceptionally kind to undergraduates, and indeed exceptionally so to me, since I was not an undergraduate there.

I used to drop in to see him at the Catholic Chaplaincy in Fisher House on Guildhall Street in Cambridge. Indeed, I continued to visit him right up to his final, ninety-sixth, year, just before he left the Travellers Club in Pall Mall which had been his permanent base for over three happy decades after he stepped down from the chaplaincy at Cambridge, and where he had his own makeshift chapel on the top floor, in which he celebrated the old Mass.

While being tutored in Cambridge I had also encountered a very interesting Belgian Benedictine priest, Father Dominique de Grunne, who, like Mgr Gilbey, also lived well into his nineties, a lesson perhaps in the benefits of leading a priestly existence. Father de Grunne was a member of an old Catholic aristocratic family, and had become a Benedictine monk. However, he had not been happy as such and did not see eye to eye with the community of Maredsous, the important Benedictine abbey and monastery near Namur in Belgium, which he had entered.

After serving as a stretcher-bearer during the German invasion of Belgium in 1939 (during which campaign his father was killed in the fighting), he went to Switzerland to recover, and from there became the private tutor of the future King Baudouin of Belgium. By coincidence, many years later my son Rudolf was to teach Baudouin's own great-granddaughter.

He then came to Cambridge to study, having got to know Stephen Spender and, through the Spenders, the Darwins and the Cornfords. In 1952 he moved to Oxford. Hugh Trevor-Roper described the new arrival, who was doing the round of parties there, as ‘charming, elegant, well-born, rich, handsome and intellectual', and as someone ‘before whom all social doors have flown irresistibly open'. His charm and sociability led to him later becoming laicised, as he had a long liaison with the wife of a well-known author, a Catholic; she was separated from but still married to the writer.

Father de Grunne was indeed a highly intelligent man and I learnt much from him; we got on extremely well. He always said that if you view life and spirituality as a graph it doesn't matter if it goes up and down as long as the basic trend is upwards, which was a reassuring thought. His maxim, especially towards the end of his life, was ‘pas de sentimentalité', a sage motto for anyone as they grow older.

By the time I went up to Oxford Catholicism was completely part of my life. I would have had long arguments with friends trying to persuade them of my views, the ordinary discussions of undergraduate life, disputes long into the night. I had theosophical doubts, what I believe is called ‘theodicy', based on Leibniz: in other words, how do you make an all-loving and all-powerful God compatible with the existence in this world of evil? But these are the troubles which cross the mind of most people at some point in their life.

When Josephine and I had decided to get married, the fact that I was a Catholic and her father a diehard Ulsterman inevitably led to some friction. The Ulster Establishment could not bear the idea of Roman Catholicism in the same way that was evidenced by the German Baltic barons with their Lutheran faith in making their way in Russia (a notable exception was Count Alexander Benckendorff, Ambassador to London of the Tsar of Russia and a passionate Anglophile, who had converted to Catholicism from Lutheranism, and is the only lay person buried in Westminster Cathedral).

On one occasion when my future father-in-law, Montagu Lowry-Corry, and I were discussing the music for the wedding with the priest at the Brompton Oratory, the priest told him that a member of their priestly fraternity had been one Father Lowry-Corry, who was a great favourite. I saw my father-in-law squirm.

When Josephine converted to Catholicism a few months after our wedding, her father refused to speak to her for about a year, saying that none of his relations had ever been Catholic or even seen Catholics. I clearly remember overhearing him saying to a friend of his at dinner one night, a dinner at which we were all present, that they were ‘lucky enough', even in Ireland, never to have had a Catholic servant – incredible, really.

My own children, like me, would have known that they were Roman Catholic from an early age. When we lived in Holland Villas Road, the house next door was a convent, and we would see our elder son, Rudolf, even as a seven- or eight-year-old, chatting to the nuns over the wall. He told one of the nuns, ‘I know what I am going to do. I am going to grow up to be a priest and I will end up as Pope', by which she was extremely amused and which she relayed to Josephine. Rudolf indeed did become a priest – as also did my younger son, Konrad – though neither to date has, yet, been elevated to the papacy.

My daughter Dora has been involved with the Rolling Stones through her own PR and events company, and so the next generation represent both sides of my interests. I am sure that Dora must have frequently been frightfully annoyed by her two brothers appearing to be so pi . . . While she relished the opportunity to be part of a Stones tour, my impression was that Rudolf and Konrad were just as equally horrified by it and did not approve of my involvement with the band. However, Rudolf assures me that this is not true: he accepted that involvement as part of my work and although the world of rock'n'roll was not his particular ‘scene', he trusted in my integrity and knew I would never do anything contra to faith or morals.

At one of the Stones' early concerts in London I had given them each six tickets. Out of her six tickets Dora ended up with eleven. Rudolf had only managed to ‘get rid of one', so I gave his other five to Dora. Both boys were totally removed from rock music and the lifestyle. They loathed the music, in fact they didn't think it
was
music – but they had not realised, at least at that stage of their life, that they could convert their tickets into plover's eggs, rarities that others would covet.

Konrad is now a traditionalist priest in Venice, and brings to his work a stricter and more severe outlook on life than Rudolf, which I think comes from my father's side. Dora is a mixture: she has a practical side, which she gets from me, as well as an extremely kind side which I think comes from my mother.

I would not have ever seen myself becoming a priest although I could quite easily imagine having become a don, especially if I had had enough money to live comfortably as an academic, but the call of the priesthood was never strong enough to tempt me.

Rudolf's path to the priesthood was led by his interest in teaching, while Konrad arrived there via a flirtation with the law. He had always been very devout, but I believed was a more worldly person than his elder brother, and I thought he would enjoy the law. In his final term at Oxford I asked him whether he had considered a career and he said he had not really given it much thought. I said, ‘Doesn't your tutor talk to you about that?' ‘Did yours?' he asked. I agreed that he had never done so. Konrad said he would go and ask his tutor's advice.

When I next saw Konrad, he informed me, ‘I saw my tutor, and told him that my father wants me to go into the law. So he sent me to see the law tutor. I went into the law tutor's reading room where there were huge tomes, massive Law Reports. The tutor told me, “Loewenstein, take out any of those books, open it at any page and read it out to me. Can you see yourself giving your life to that absolute rot?!”?'

Despite the law tutor's lack of encouragement, Konrad did nonetheless take his law exam in London and spent some time in chambers of a friend of ours, Mark Littman, a prominent arbitration lawyer. Konrad and Mark liked each other enormously and would have extraordinary discussions (as they still do now) during which Mark would believe he was going to convert Konrad to Judaism, and Konrad that he would convert Mark to Catholicism. After six months Konrad decided he did not want to continue with the law, saying, ‘I've learnt that law is one thing, and justice is another.'

He then went to the University of Southern California to work for a Ph.D. in philosophy, while teaching alongside his studies. I thought he might enjoy the academic life, but eventually he told his mother that he intended to enter the Church and, when he talked to me about his decision, said, ‘I know you're sad to know that you won't have any descendants with your name, but think of the prayers!' With Rudolf and Konrad entering the priesthood there would clearly be no direct male descendants in my branch, but in fact I was unperturbed by the news, because there were plenty of Loewenstein males in the other branches of the family, though mostly of a Catholic line.

Of course both my mother-in-law and my mother, for totally different reasons, would have been horrified at their grandsons going into the Church – my mother-in-law out of disapproval and lack of understanding of such an apparently foolish aberration; my mother because she would have thought that they were escaping from the world rather than living their lives to the full.

In June 2002 Konrad was ordained in Wigratzbad in the Fraternity of St Peter, established by a group of followers of Mgr Lefebvre (the founder of the Society of St Pius X) who wished to return to full union with Rome. The Fraternity only follow the old rite in Latin and the old calendar. Konrad then celebrated his first Mass, a High Mass with wonderful music, in my mother's old home, Schloss Holzen, in a splendid white-and-gold baroque church.

It was most moving for me since, although my grandfather had sold it, the castle and the estate before the war, my mother and her forebears are all buried there.

Konrad's mode of priesthood is most impressive though occasionally inclined to be extremely rigorous. I once heard him preaching from the pulpit in the Church of St Louis en l'Isle in Paris – the occasion a High Solemn Requiem Mass for Baron Alexis de Redé, my partner in the Leopold Joseph consortium: the Mass was accompanied by Mozart's music performed by the Orchestre de Paris. I was in the front row with Mesdames Chirac and Pompidou and Monsieur and Madame Balladur. I wrote about it in a letter to my friend Jonathan Guinness: ‘Konrad delivered a severe sermon from the pulpit. He went on to point out that all in the congregation would sooner or later die and some would go to Heaven and some would go to Hell; looking dramatically around he said that the only hope was to lead a good Christian life and he then concentrated on chastity, whereupon there was a tremor
dans
le tout Paris
and Givenchy's aged companion passed out.'

In case I have given an overly stern portrait of Konrad, I should report that Rudolf managed to achieve the near impossible when preaching a homily for Josephine and my golden wedding: he made Konrad laugh out loud in church.

It reminds me of Robert ‘Bertie' Swann, a friend from Oxford, telling me that one time when he was in Paris he had gone into Notre-Dame and to confession to an aged French priest. Bertie's French was somewhat halting, and the priest was obviously getting more and more interested in what was actually a very humdrum list of misdeeds. At the end the priest said to him ‘Eh alors! Vous avez bien dit
l'inceste
?' When Bertie denied this the priest became very bored and a little irritated and gave him one Hail Mary as a penance.

There is also a story about one of the Catholic Loewensteins who had indeed been at one time Germany's ‘senior Catholic layman'. It appeared that he was spotted coming out of a lady's bedroom (not his wife's) on his way to Mass in his private chapel at 7.00 a.m. A cousin of his raised an eyebrow, whereupon he explained, ‘It's all right. I have already confessed.'

A natural progression for me in the 1980s was to become increasingly involved with Catholic charities. The first of these was the Order of Malta, the Roman Catholic Order of Chivalry of which my great-grandfather had been a member. The Order had originally been established in the eleventh century to protect Christian pilgrims en route to the Holy Land and the Crusades. Disbanded by Napoleon and ejected from Malta, the order was refounded in the nineteenth century as a charitable organisation specialising in setting up hospitals, clinics and care homes, helping the sick regardless of their own religion, which, however, included teaching them the faith.