Madame Louise of France: the Princess Who Became a Nun

 

From Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira:

Wishing to enter the convent, while attending the Countess of Rupelmonde’s reception of the habit at the Carmel, she decided to join that Order. She began to prepare herself for it by studying the rule of St. Teresa and slowly abstaining from the comfort that surrounded her. She would stay away from the heated area of the castle during periods of appalling cold.

She could not stand the smell of candles and only overcame this repugnance after years of effort. Finally, she obtained the consent of the king and on February 20, 1770, entered the Carmelites of Saint Denis. France admired her example, and Pope Clement XIV wrote the princess to express his happiness at seeing his pontificate marked by such a comforting event for religion.

Therefore, this event took place nineteen years before the French Revolution broke out.

In the convent, she fought hard for her companions to stop distinguishing her from the others. She also worked to overcome her difficulty in staying a long time on her knees, a grace she obtained after a novena to St. Louis Gonzaga. She received the habit on September 10, 1770, clad in the mantle of Saint Teresa, owned by the Carmelites of Paris, and took the name of Sister Therese of Saint Augustine.

What an honor to receive the habit clad in the mantle of Saint Teresa!

Later named mistress of novices, she excelled in that difficult work, manifesting constant joy in the midst of the difficulties she encountered. Later she was unanimously elected mother superior. When the Visitor General of the Carmelites brought the news to the king, he said that Sister Therese had only had one vote against her. ‘So,’ Louis XV replied, ‘was there a vote against her?’ ‘Yes, Sire,’ answered the prelate, ‘but it was her own vote.’

(Read more.)

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Congress Jumps Into Action as Fears Grow China Could Spy on Americans in Their Cars

 From AMAC:

“First and foremost, no one should spy on you in your car. You should be able to control every signal coming in or going out of your car,” Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, a co-sponsor of the House legislation, told Just the News. “The data that you're creating in it is really your data. You should have a property right in that. We're a long ways off from being able to get full control of that.”

“In the meantime, I think, hopefully, we can at least agree China shouldn't be able to do that,” he added during a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.”

The bill Davidson has cosponsored is called the Connected Vehicle Security Act, and it has a companion in the Senate introduced by his home state Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio. The legislation has attracted support from all political spectrums, including liberal senators like Elissa Slotkin.

The legislation has also won support from the powerful United Autoworkers Union (UAW). The UAW has approximately 392,447 active members, along with over 580,000 retired members, its website says.

“Our national and economic security relies on a strong US auto industry,” UAW President Shawn Fain said when the legislation was unveiled. “The American Dream was launched and sustained out of good union auto jobs here in the United States. If we want to rebuild US manufacturing and raise standards for the working class, we can’t keep offshoring and outsourcing our auto industry, driving a global race to the bottom for short-term corporate profits," he said.

“By building on and strengthening the existing connected vehicles rule, this legislation puts common sense guardrails on a major threat to our nation’s auto industry,” he added. (Read more.)

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Human Qualities and Apostolic Charity

It is not sufficient to love souls in the secret of our heart, working and sacrificing ourselves for them; this love must also be manifested exteriorly by an agreeable and pleasant manner, in such a way that those who approach us may feel themselves loved, and consequently encouraged to confidence and to trust. A rude, brusque or impatient manner might even cause some to go away offended, and perhaps, even scandalized. The apostle may well have a heart of gold, rich in charity and zeal, but if he maintains a rough and sharp exterior, he closes access to souls, and considerably diminishes the good he could realize. The saints, while being very supernatural, never neglected these human qualities of charity. St. Francis de Sales liked to say that, as more flies are attracted with a drop of honey than with a barrel of vinegar, so more hearts are conquered by a little sweetness than by rough manners. And St. Teresa of Jesus, who wished her daughters to be united by the bond of pure supernatural charity, did not believe it superfluous to make recommendations of this kind: "The holier you are, the more sociable you should be with your sisters...." (The Way of Perfection) This is very useful advice for anyone who wishes to win souls for God.

~from Divine Intimacy by Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, OCD., p. 1009 Share

Marie-Antoinette in the Conciergerie

An engraving of the imprisoned Queen being consoled during prayer. Via Vive la Reine. It looks like she is having a vision of the Sacred Heart. Share

Ilhan’s Pirates Capture Minnesota

 From Tierney's Real News:

Police have not identified the shooters publicly. Police also said neither of the two shooting victims are students at Eden Prairie or Minnetonka. Police say that the victims are from St. Paul - which is miles away. Police responded to reports of gunfire outside Aerie Stadium at Eden Prairie High School at around 8:40 pm on Friday. The school grounds were cleared while the game was underway. Two Somalis from St. Paul who were “known to the cops” were transported to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.Eden Prairie is a suburb of Minneapolis. Minnesota Democrats love to blame the gun instead of the criminals and heathens behind the gun and cancel our traditions instead of defend our country! This is a major reason I finally left Minnesota in 2022! (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

In February 2023, a copy of the Quran that a 14-year-old autistic boy had brought to his school in Wakefield, England, was dropped and lightly scuffed. No law in England makes that a crime. Within days, however, the boy had received death threats, and his mother stood before a crowd in a local mosque, with a police officer in the room, apologizing for what her son had done. A secular country watched a family submit to a blasphemy rule that Parliament had abolished in 2008.

Liberal societies measure freedom by asking what the state forbids. By that measure the Wakefield mother was free, and so, in the same sense, would be a Dearborn engineer who quietly stops ordering wine at company dinners. In either case, the state forbids nothing. Something else does. The economist Timur Kuran named the mechanism preference falsification in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. People misrepresent their private views when dissent is costly, and each public act of conformity raises the price of dissent for everyone else. Moderates cannot find one another because each sees only the rest of the conforming faces. Outsiders mistake the conformity for consensus.

Selection, more than conspiracy, explains who sets those demands. The devout volunteer for the mosque board, write the checks, and teach the weekend and afternoon school. The moderate who disagrees rarely fights; he simply attends less, which is what Albert Hirschman called exit, and every exit leaves the institution more orthodox than the community it claims to represent. Gulf money and imams trained in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan accelerate the sorting. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who helped found the European Council for Fatwa and Research in 1997, predicted that Islam would return to Europe through preaching rather than conquest. In France, Bernard Rougier’s 2020 study of the suburbs documented entire ecosystems of mosques, bookshops, associations, and sports clubs under Islamist rule. (Read more.)

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Your Life Is Not Wrong Just Because It's Hard

From Of Home and Womanhood:

People are overwhelmed and tired all the time. You would not simply say to someone in medical school that because it is hard, therefore it is wrong to do. Or someone running a marathon should just quit because it hurts. We constantly do hard, difficult, painful things, and that does not make these things bad, most of the time it means the opposite. And parenthood is the exact same way.

We should be able to say that motherhood can sometimes be exhausting without treating children as some sort of disease in which fewer children is the cure. We should be able to listen and offer help to mothers without just dismissing them for having what we deem “too many children”. So how many children exactly are we allowed to have before we lose the right to ever complain about anything? And why is it that motherhood seems to be the only difficult thing in life we treat as some sort of mistake, just because of how difficult it is? This and more is what we are covering in the podcast episode. We are talking about the double standards we have for mothers, why saying I am “overwhelmed” has somehow become a direct insult against how many children you have, and why most of all, I refuse to believe that the answer to the hard parts of life and loving others is to simply have less people to love. (Read more.)

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Understanding True Elegance

 

From Letters from the Old World:

While aesthetics are of great importance, the weight that gives them meaning comes from something much deeper than appearances. Elegance is not limited to clothing, although that is frequently the first impression a woman makes, and thus why the career woman reads as “aspirational” upon a cursory glance. True elegance, however, comes from a rightly-ordered life. This is why Girlbossing at the expense of home and children can never achieve the depth of elegance intrinsic to motherhood; mothers have earned a level of dignity and refinement through great personal sacrifice: their bodies, their focus, their nights, their mornings, their days and years.

All of the difficulty, all of the messiness, give the beauty of it a dimension that cannot be replicated by, “My boss was mean to me at work” or “I stayed an extra two hours at the office before coming home to cry and drink wine with my cat.” Underneath one life is a sense of vibrant fecundity, while underneath the other is the hollow realization that everything you have in the world is going to die with you. The deliberate uglification of motherhood has served to corrupt and subvert our understanding of these roots. It’s time our aesthetic perceptions better reflected the truth. (Read more.)

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Capital Punishment and the Order of Reason

 From Imperator:

The Church has always upheld, in continuity with Sacred Scripture and the wisdom of the Greco‑Roman tradition, that capital punishment is just when the sword is wielded by legitimate authority and ordered to the common good.

Echoing this perennial teaching, St Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae that as minister of divine justice, the civil ruler may licitly take life when a malefactor’s deeds have gravely wounded the order of justice and threaten the community.

He teaches that one who threatens the harmony of the state has, by his own deliberate act, fallen away from the order of reason and thereby forfeited his claim to those goods that exist for the wellbeing of the political community. Such a man may therefore be removed by public authority just as a surgeon amputates a gangrenous limb for the health of the whole body lest it spread corruption throughout the entire organism.

He further affirms that capital punishment is not just retributive but also protective of the common good, since it restores the order of justice and prevents the spread of further evils, whether through recidivism or by the corrupting example given to others.

Aquinas is clear that in committing such acts, the life of the malefactor is forfeit, and their possibility of repentance does not override the community’s right to safety and security, nor the authority of the civil ruler to defend the commonwealth through proportionate punishment. (Read more.)

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Why Columbus Sailed West

 From The Western Spirit:

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic with three ships, hoping to find a new route to Asia, but instead reached the Caribbean and began a new chapter in the history of Europe and the Americas. What many people do not realize is that his voyage was connected to the centuries-long conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim world that controlled trade routes to the East. For generations, European merchants depended on trade networks that connected the Mediterranean with the wealthy markets of Asia, but many of these routes passed through territories controlled by Muslim rulers, who profited from the trade.

Then, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, bringing the ancient Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire under Muslim rule and strengthening Ottoman control over trade in the eastern Mediterranean. European rulers already had good reasons to search for alternative routes to Asia, and the growing power of the Ottomans made the prospect even more attractive. While the Portuguese explored the possibility of sailing around Africa, Columbus proposed something much more ambitious: reaching Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.

The rulers who eventually agreed to finance his expedition were Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, who had just completed the Reconquista by capturing Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, in January 1492. (Read more.)

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