The Real Pride Month

Madame Elisabeth, Dauphin Louis-Charles, Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI and Madame Royale assisting at Mass at the Tuileries

 From The European Conservative:

Such dislike, though, would be a mistake, because June has a much older and worthier title: the Month of the Sacred Heart. Not well known outside Catholic circles, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is in one sense as old as Christianity, when St. Longinus’ lance pierced it and out flowed blood and water, prefiguring Baptism and the Eucharist. In the Patristic and medieval eras, saints and mystics wrote of it, and of the salvific nature of the wounds and precious blood of Christ. In the latter period, these were ever more bound up with the growth of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament (and miracles arising therefrom) and the stories of the Holy Grail. It was under the banner of the Five Wounds that the Pilgrimage of Grace marched out against Henry VIII in defence of the Old Religion.

Our current version, though, dates back to the 17th century, with the revelations of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. While bound up with making reparation to the Saviour who loves us so much, and suffered death to redeem us, the devotion from the beginning has had a social aspect. One of the requests made to St. Margaret Mary by Jesus was that Louis XIV consecrate his kingdom to the Sacred Heart and place the emblem on his flags and battle colours. This he did not do. But the devotion was taken up by many other royals: Queen Henriette Marie, consort of England’s Charles I; her daughter-in-law, Marie of Modena, James II’s queen; King Augustus I of Poland; King Philip V of Spain; Louis XV’s consort, Queen Marie Leczinska; her father, King Stanislaus of Poland, and her son, the Dauphin Louis; King Augustus III of Poland; Elector Maximilian III of Bavaria; SG Madame Elisabeth of France; her brother, King Louis XVI, who consecrated France privately to the Sacred Heart, and vowed to so publicly if he regained his throne; Maria, Queen of Portugal; King Charles X of France; Henri V, de jure king of France; SG King Francesco II of the Two Sicilies; Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie; Bl. Emperor-King Karl of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, SG Zita; King Alfonso XIII of Spain; Albert I, King of the Belgians; Carlist heir Alfonso Carlos I; and a host of others down to the present. 

Such counterrevolutionaries as the Vendeens, the Tiroleans under Andreas Hofer, the Spanish Carlists, and the Mexican Cristeros adopted it as their special badge. Garcia Moreno, president of Ecuador, consecrated his country to the Sacred Heart with its bishops in 1873. Following this, several Latin American countries began performing this national consecration: El Salvador (1874), Venezuela (1900), Colombia (1902), Nicaragua (1920), Costa Rica (1921), Brazil (1922), and Bolivia (1925). In Europe, Ireland’s bishops followed suit in 1873, Spain in 1919, and Poland in 1920. Across Europe and the world, shrines were dedicated in honour of the Sacred Heart—most notably that of Montmartre in Paris. In architecture alone, the Sacred Heart devotion has given the world a priceless treasure to be proud of, to say nothing of the stalwart folk who rallied around the emblem in defence of Christendom’s soul. (Read more.)

 

Once again, we try to make it clear that Marie-Antoinette never made a comment about cake, brioche, etc. And she was not a spendthrift but probably spent less than other queens, and definitely less than all the mistresses. From All That's Interesting:

Some historians have suggested that revolutionaries caught wind of the quote “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” from Rousseau’s writings, then falsely credited it to their despised queen as a form of propaganda. But even this does not hold up to modern scrutiny.

The earliest known source that connected the phrase to Marie Antoinette was the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr. In an 1843 issue of the journal Les Guêpes, Karr wrote that he found the quote originally in a “book dated 1760,” which he said meant that the rumor about Marie Antoinette must have been false, as she’d have been about five years old at the time the book was published. So, it’s very possible that the French citizens were indeed circulating the propaganda against the queen, though clearly not everyone was buying it.

Why, then, has the misquote carried on for nearly 300 years?

“It did not come to be misattributed to Marie Antoinette during the 18th century, but during the Third French Republic starting in 1870, when a careful program of reconstructing the historical past took place,” Denise Maior-Barron, an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, told Live Science.

While the French Revolution of 1789 is considered to be the major revolution in France’s history, it is not the only time the French people rose up against their government.

Towards the end of the 19th century, France saw another major shift in power when members of the Third French Republic dethroned Napoleon III following his failed war against Prussia. Those same republicans then sought to effectively rewrite bits of France’s history to paint key figures in a different light — particularly, the disfavored queen Marie Antoinette.

“The masterminds of the French Revolution destroyed the French monarchy by continually attacking, and eventually destroying, its most important symbols: the king and the queen of France,” Maior-Barron said. “For this reason the ‘Let them eat cake’ type of clichés persist.” (Read more.)

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Tax-Raising Democrats Could Learn a Cautionary Tale from the UK

 From Chronicles:

In a nocturnal video posted to his office’s YouTube channel, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani greeted this year’s April 15 tax day by announcing, “I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich.” Mamdani, who won the mayoralty by an absolute majority last November, recorded his video on Central Park South, one of the city’s poshest streets, in front of hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin’s apartment building as music that sounded vaguely like the soundtrack to HBO’s Succession played in the background. Mamdani chose the location with purpose: Griffin represents, to him, “the richest of the rich,” and therefore a source of revenue to fund his social programs via a “pied-à-terre tax.” The new levy will tax second homes owned in New York by non-residents valued at $5 million or more.

Griffin responded in a CNBC interview, saying he may reconsider a $6 billion construction project that would create an estimated 15,000 permanent jobs in New York and instead focus on future projects in Miami, where he resides. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal describing Mamdani’s video as “creepy and weird,” Griffin added that Mamdani’s singling him out “put me in harm’s way.” President Trump has weighed in, telling radio host Sid Rosenberg that any city’s mayor should “cherish” business leaders and “convince them not to leave” rather than drive them away.

According to the New York Post, Mamdani has reached out to Griffin to ease the tensions but received no response. If Mamdani needs more evidence that he might be in the wrong, however, he should look across the pond to the United Kingdom, whose Labour Party, in office since 2024, has raised taxes and abolished its so-called “non-domicile” (“non-dom”) tax exemption for the non-UK income of foreign nationals who reside in Britain. (Britain, like almost all countries except the United States, does not tax its own citizens’ foreign-earned income).

The results have been a disaster. According to figures cited by the Daily Telegraph, some 10,800 millionaires expatriated from the UK in 2024 alone, an average of one every 45 minutes. More jarring evidence came on May 15, just days after Griffin’s CNBC interview, when the Times of London released its 38^th annual “Rich List,” a compendium of the country’s richest 350 individuals, including UK citizens worldwide and foreign citizens residing in Britain. (Read more.)

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The Ancient Philosophy of Brutality in Euripides’ Cyclops

 From The Collector:

Euripides’ Cyclops is the only satyr play that has survived intact. We do not know anything about the performance history of this play, or why or even when exactly it was written. The plot borrows from well-known versions of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. The plot is simple and brutal, but with comic elements provided by Silenus and the satyrs. The play is perhaps easy to dismiss, but Euripides raises some interesting questions about power and brutality.

The three main characters in the play are Polyphemus, a cyclops; Odysseus, the cunning Homeric hero; and Silenus, the former companion and tutor of Dionysus. There are also a number of satyrs, described as Silenus’ sons, that act as the chorus. Odysseus’ shipwrecked crew is present, but none have speaking roles and were probably not depicted on stage.

Silenus has a few guises in Greek mythology. Sometimes he is depicted as a drunken man and other times as a satyr-like creature. In Euripides’ Cyclops, he is depicted as an old man. In the play, Silenus is toadying, coarse, sly, and greedy. He is there for comic effect, as are his sons, the satyrs. Odysseus is the same character we see in the Odyssey. He uses his cunning to outsmart the cyclops and escape. However, in Euripides’ play, we do not see all of the tricks Odysseus uses in Homer’s story.

Polyphemus is a cyclops. He lives on an island with his cyclops brothers. They are referenced but not seen. Cyclopes are solitary creatures and self-sufficient. Polyphemus lives off the sheep, which he forces the satyrs to look after. They were captured and enslaved after becoming shipwrecked on the island. Polyphemus is brutish but not unintelligent. He believes himself to be superior to the gods by virtue of his brute strength. (Read more.)

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Why Constantinople’s Fall Was Not Inevitable

 

From The Greek Reporter:

Historian Anthony Kaldellis, Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, challenges the long-held idea that the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was inevitable, arguing that the siege should be understood through the specific military and tactical factors that shaped its outcome.

Speaking to Greek Reporter about his new book, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople, Kaldellis explains that historians cannot prove that an event was inevitable because they have only one historical timeline to go by. “In a sense, nothing in history is inevitable,” Kaldellis tells Greek Reporter. “We can’t go back and run experiments to see if we change certain variables what would happen.”

His argument is directed against the idea that Constantinople’s fall was inevitable, a view he noted appears across scholarship, novels, journalism, and online commentary. Rather than reading 1453 backward from its outcome, Kaldellis argues that the event should be examined through the variables that determined the result “one way or another.” (Read more.)

More HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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Another Obama Judge

 From Tierney's Real News:

I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted by all the corruption, obstruction and deceit from Obama judges and prosecutors. For years, Trump supporters have watched the same script play out over and over again: President Trump tries to fix something, drain some swamp creatures or deliver results for the American people—and the permanent Washington machine responds with lawsuits, activist judges, and the familiar cast of Obama-driven operatives.

The latest act played out at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. A federal judge blocked urgent renovations to a crumbling national landmark and ordered Trump’s name stripped from the building. This wasn’t neutral justice. It was judicial power-grab meets lawfare, engineered by the same Obama-tied networks that have spent a decade trying to stop Trump.

On May 29, 2026—conveniently on JFK’s birthday—U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, issued a sweeping 94-page ruling. He blocked the board’s plan for a full two-year closure needed for $257 million in critical structural repairs funded by Congress in the Big Beautiful Bill and declared that only Congress could alter the Kennedy Center’s name. (Read more.)

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Why Christians Shouldn't Fear Abstraction

 From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

You’ve seen these a thousand times, in a thousand iterations of nonsense. And you’ve spent your life, if you’ve bothered to pay attention, being gaslighted by our Elites and Betters into believing that if you see nonsense, it’s your fault. You’ve been told, explicitly or implicitly, that these and others in this vein represent the highest achievements of modern artistic culture. And that if you don’t respond to them, if you don’t feel something profound in front of them, the problem is you.

And I’m here to tell you that you’re right; it’s bollocks. I completely affirm you in this: the Emperor is, in fact, stark nekkid.

A great deal of what is called abstract art in the modern art world is nothing more than transgressive and subversive deconstruction. It isn’t trying to help you see any true thing clearly, or help you know something true. In fact it is an attempt to break reality, to reduce truths to meaningless components, taking things like colour, form, line etc. and treating them as ends of their own, without the connecting thread of meaning or purpose. (Read more.)

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Henrietta Maria: Number One Lawbreaker

Henrietta Maria holding a butterfly

 My guest post at an amazing site called Novels Alive.

In the lone tent, waiting for victory,
She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,
Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain:
The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky,
War’s ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring:
Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King,
Her soul a-flame with passionate ecstasy.
~from “Henrietta Maria” by Oscar Wilde

Henriette-Marie of France, or “Henrietta Maria,” is the protagonist of my new novel My Queen, My Love (Mayapple Books, November 25, 2021), the first of the Henrietta of France Trilogy. It is the story of the fifteen-year-old princess Henriette-Marie who is mandated by the Pope and by her brother the King of France to convert the English back to Catholicism by marrying their King, Charles I. Meanwhile, the Catholic Faith is outlawed in the British Isles, so as Queen she becomes the number one lawbreaker. The powerful Duke of Buckingham tries to thwart her growing influence with her husband. And England has become known as a place where queens lose their heads. 

[...]

As Regent, Queen Marie chose to avoid war by making peace with the other Catholic powers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. She believed that Catholic monarchies should unite to keep Protestantism at bay. She sent her youngest daughter Henriette to marry in England because she believed there was a chance of bringing Charles I into Catholicism. So at fifteen years old Henriette-Marie aka Henrietta Maria was sent to marry Charles Stuart, who was a decade or so older. The royal couple initially clashed over culture and religion. They quarreled whenever together and so avoided each other for weeks at a time. When they finally did fall in love, theirs became one of the most devoted in the history of royal marriages, and was blessed with nine children. (Read more.)

A review from Gwendalyn's Books:

Henrietta is one to root for as we see the very young bride overcome so many obstacles. Particularly because she is a devout Catholic, and by the actions of the villainess character, George Villiers.

The author take great care to include a vast amount of characters, which made for a more rewarding read for me. A book to catapult its readers into the turbulent era of England in the 1600’s. From the beginning I was hooked and read this one in a day.

Historical fiction at its finest. This was an exceptional portrait of a the wife of Charles I. Brought stunningly to life, with seamless narration and three dimensional characters, a true treasure piece of historical fiction.

E.M. Vidal meticulous research and descriptive writing, has brought one of England’s most tragic queens, Henrietta Maria, vividly to life. (Read more.)

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Britain Mourned George Floyd. Why Won't It Mourn Henry Nowak?

 From Amuse on X:

Begin, then, with the deaths a nation could not stop talking about. When George Floyd died under a Minneapolis officer’s knee in May 2020, Britain responded as though the killing had happened in Bristol rather than 4,000 miles away. The Guardian’s own survey of that summer found demonstrations in more than 260 British towns and cities, from Shetland to south Wales, with crowds of 15,000 in Manchester and well over 210,000 marchers nationwide by mid June. The future Prime Minister knelt for the cameras. This is worth dwelling on, because it proves something the British establishment now seems eager to deny about itself. It is fully capable of treating a police death on another continent as a domestic moral emergency. The machinery exists. The will exists. The question is only when it switches on.

Now set against that the case of Henry Nowak. Last December, Nowak, an 18-year-old finance student at the University of Southampton, walked home from an evening out with his football teammates and was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa with a 8.5 inch blade, one wound piercing his heart. When officers arrived, Digwa told them what prosecutors would later call a wicked lie, that he was the victim of a racist attack. The gravely wounded teenager told police he had been stabbed. They handcuffed him anyway. They arrested the dying boy on the word of the man who had killed him, and only when Nowak collapsed did they remove the cuffs and begin first aid. He died at the scene. This week a Southampton jury convicted Digwa of murder, rejecting his claims of self defence and racial provocation, and convicted his mother of assisting an offender for hiding the weapon. Hampshire’s Deputy Chief Constable apologized that Henry was handcuffed and arrested in the moments before he lost consciousness, the Independent Office for Police Conduct opened an investigation, and his reported final words, according to trial reporting and the shadow home secretary, were the three that a nation had treated as sacred only six years earlier: I can’t breathe.

Let me anticipate the first and fairest objection, because the strength of this argument depends on conceding it. The two deaths are not medically identical, and no honest observer should pretend otherwise. Floyd was wasn’t killed by the police but from a fatal overdose of fentanyl according the coroner’s report. Nowak was murdered by a private criminal, and Hampshire Police have cited a pathologist’s view that the depth of the chest wound meant officers could not have saved him even had they believed every word he said. If the claim here were that the police killed Henry Nowak in the way Democrats claimed an officer killed George Floyd, that claim would be false. But that was never the comparison worth making. The variable under examination is not the cause of death. It is the response of a society to a death, and on that variable the two cases are almost laboratory clean. (Read more.)

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Beatings, Bible and Latin: Life as a 17th Century Grammar Schoolboy

 From BBC:

Beatings, Latin translations and Bible studies - a 17th Century grammar schoolboy received a very different style of education from today's students. An exhibition at Huntingdon's former grammar school explores how teaching and learning have changed over the centuries in the Cambridgeshire town.

Curator Stuart Orme said: "Birching (beating with birch twigs) was quite common in the 17th Century and the birch was the symbol of the schoolmaster." The tiny medieval building is now the Cromwell Museum. Its former pupils included the statesman Oliver Cromwell, diarist Samuel Pepys and wartime evacuees.

Most 17th Century school teachers were priests at a time when it was seen as a part-time job, requiring only preaching on Sundays and performing wedding or funeral services, said Orme. Cromwell (1599 to 1658) attended the school between 1610 and 1616, and the local priest Thomas Beard was the future Parliamentarian leader's teacher. Beard found the duties too much, said Orme, and asked to be released in 1614, saying he was "tired with my painful occupation of teaching and would gladly now be set free" - but was not allowed to stand down. (Read more.)

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