When the renowned Kilkenny writer, Hubert Butler, was considered to have insulted the Papal Nuncio to Ireland in the 1940s, he paid a heavy price.
Butler's crime was to raise, in the Nuncio's presence, the question of the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism during the Nazi occupation of what was to become Yugoslavia.
The Bennetsbridge writer, who had travelled widely in the Balkans before the second World War and helped Jews fleeing Austria during the war, was forced to resign as secretary of Kilkenny Archaeological Society as a result of the perceived slight.
Lectures beginning in Kilkenny next week might force us to think of that episode's relevance today. "History Is Now" is the title of the ninth annual Co Kilkenny VEC lecture series, organised by the arts education officer for the south-east, Proinsias O Drisceoil.
The title from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding refers to the "presentness of the past" and the role of historical legacies in our lives and times, according to Mr O Drisceoil, who has lined up an impressive list of heavyweight speakers.
The opening lecture tomorrow week, "Northern Ireland: from Cultural Conservatism to Civil Cosmopolitanism" is by Robin Wilson, director of the Democratic Dialogue think-tank and former editor of the Belfast Fortnight magazine.
Poets Mary O'Malley and Aonghas MacNeacail, folklorist Dr Angela Bourke of UCD and Prof Denis O'Donoghue of the National Humanities Centre in North Carolina and Magdalene College, Cambridge, are among those who will follow.
The Hubert Butler lecture will be delivered on February 18th by the American poet and critic Chris Agee, who describes his subject as "a profound sceptic and a profound optimist".
The six lectures are on successive Thursdays at Butler House, Patrick Street, at 8 p.m. Tickets cost £4 per lecture.