Friday, July 16, 2010

The Throne of Glory


The daughters of St. Teresa during the Reign of Terror. More HERE. Share

7 comments:

lara77 said...

This where my deep loathing of the French revolution manifests itself.These nuns who dedicated their lives to God were guillotined because of their religion and devotion to his late Majesty, King Louis XVI. The hypocrisy of the French revolution was never so blatant. I think of how Robespierre and Danton met the same fate they decreed to others. I keep hearing the words of Jesus, "He who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword." AMEN

May said...

This is very moving, these holy nuns displayed such sublime heroism amidst utter horror. May they intercede for us in Heaven.

Anonymous said...

I would caution us to reducing the violence done to clerics and religious to some latent antipathy to religion - in those times the Church and its institutions was a holder of large amounts of land that those who would reward their patrons coveted. Marie Antoinette's own brother Joseph II expropriated vast domaines from Monastic orders in K-u-K Austria - like Napoleon, he attributed no worth to idle contemplation and foresaw more lucrative - ie utilitarian - uses for the spaces occupied by the religious. He didn't execute them, but he did expel them from the only home they knew. Many were forced to abandon their vocations and fend for themselves. Some found positions in other houses of their orders, or as chaplain or tutors to sympathetic Aristocrats in the lands more distnat from the Imperial center, ie the slavic Polish and saxon Moravian landed gentry, their voices long since lost to history behind the Iron curtain...

I expand on this train of thought under a post on latter-day liberal (in the good sense, ie not enlightened Josephinism) K-u-K aristocrat Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt Leddihn here:
http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/07/free-stuff.html#comments

The witness of these brave women echoes down the centuries a principle still controverted over to this day, a proper awareness of the antecedence of the economy of grace in human affairs.
Clare Krishan

Anonymous said...

e.g. this the former Premonstratenian Monastery at Klosterbruck in the present day Czech Republic
http://www.znovin.cz/article.asp?nArticleID=25
founded in the 12th Century, but nationalized in the 18th by the Catholic Imperial State for military training purposes... yikes!

elena maria vidal said...

Yes, Clare, it was awful what Joseph did in the Empire to the contemplative orders. I will never forget my visit to Austria and being shown monasteries that he had closed down. But then Joseph was very much into the new ideas. He may not have officially been a freemason but he was very influenced by their point of view. His mother would not have approved and I am sure most of his sisters did not approve. Thanks for the link to the Kuehnelt-Leddihn article!

Anonymous said...

and here
http://www.rotrekl.cz/z_louka.htm

sorry Babelfish has got the Glagolithic tongues down pat yet... my husband's Grandfather emigrated from a Hungarian hamlet hence our unusual patronymic (misspelled by the Ellis Island authorities, for they weren't familiar with transcribing Romanian S virgula in Crișan - meaning golden(*) from the placer gold deposits of the region the river is named after
___
* can also be sunburst red (Krzna in Russian) or resplendant, glorious (Krazna in Polish) depending on the linguistic context, in classical times, even into the 13th C Aristotolean-Thomistic synthesis, scientists assumed Gold was deposited by rays from the sun, silver from radiation from Venus, e.g Srebrenica =Silver-victory, and why the Russians, Ottomans and French were so keen on gaining hegemony over the Eastern flanks of the Holy Roman Empire with all its mineral deposits, Spain had South America, Britain had East Asia)

elena maria vidal said...

Fascinating! Thank you for the contribution!