Burial of Marie-Antoinette

In the Madeleine Cemetery, with the head between the legs. (Via Vive la Reine.) Engraving after a painting by Mouillard, 1893. Share

Groomed by PRIDE

 From Tierney's Real News:

A new study by the CDC shows that the number of young teenage girls who identify as gay, bisexual or transgender has FALLEN by 50% in just the past two years. CDC data shows the explosion among ninth-grade girls was never organic. It was social engineering via influencers, schools, and retail - and now the numbers are crashing.

Starting about 10 years ago, the percentage of young teenage girls who suddenly identified as bisexual (or gay) skyrocketed by 300%! It peaked under the Obama-Biden regime in 2021 at 32%. One out of three 9th grade girls were calling themselves bisexual, transgender or gay in 2021! WTH.

A new study by the CDC shows that it has fallen from 32% to 17% in the past two years. Praise God! (Read more.)

Share

Becoming a Knight in Burgundy

 From The Medieval Scholar:

Knighthood and nobility must nevertheless be distinguished. A nobleman’s son inherited family relationships and might inherit property; he did not simply inherit his father’s personal accolade. Late medieval records could distinguish nobles who were knights from nobles who remained esquires. The candidate needed promotion if he wished to cross that particular boundary.[1,5]

The household offered a setting in which inherited standing could become demonstrated usefulness. It brought young men into contact with experienced adults, obligations, and patterns of conduct. Historian Arie van Steensel describes noble education in the Burgundian Low Countries as substantially practical, with young nobles spending time at different courts. He also stresses regional variation: the dukes did not make noble culture uniform throughout their territories.

That helps explain why a family connection mattered without treating birth as the whole story. An introduction could secure an opportunity to serve. It could not, by itself, show whether the young man could make himself useful, handle responsibility, or sustain a reputation among those whose opinion mattered. (Read more.)

Share

Death of Marie-Antoinette

Here also on the 16th of October, 1793 fell a once beauteous head- now whitened by sorrow not by age- and venerable for the angelic purity and patience, the royal courage and Christian submission with which it had exchanged the most brilliant crown of the world for a crown of thorns, and that again for the crown of martyrdom. Here died the QUEEN- one of the noblest and the purest, and yet, if human judgments be alone weighed, the most unfortunate of women- tried in almost every possible agony of affliction- except a guilty conscience- and in that exception finding the consolation for all. She arrived at this scene of her last and greatest triumph, jolted in a common cart, and ascended the scaffold amidst the vociferations of a crowd of furies, whom we hesitate to acknowledge as of her own sex. Never in that gorgeous palace, on which she now cast a last calm look, did she appear more glorious- never was she so really admirable as she was at that supreme moment of her earthly release. ~from History of the guillotine. Revised from the 'Quarterly review.' By John Wilson Croker

On reaching the scaffold she inadvertently trod on the executioner's foot. "Pardon me," she said, courteously. She knelt for an instant and uttered a half-audible prayer; then rising and glancing towards the towers of the Temple, "Adieu, once again, my children," she said. "I go to rejoin your father."--LAMARTINE (Quoted in Madame Campan's Memoirs)

I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.~ Marie-Antoinette

Last letter of Marie-Antoinette.

Her last Holy Communion.

Her Sacrifice.

Her Forgiveness.
Madame Campan's account.
Transcript of her Trial. (Via Versailles and More)
The Mother.
Share

It’s Not the Economy — It’s the Lifestyle

Why we are all poor. From Tierney's Real News:

I’m worn out with people moaning: “Our grandparents could buy a house on one paycheck, but now we can’t even afford rent on two!”

QUIT YOUR BITCHING!!!!!!

Grandpa didn’t have a $90 month internet bill, a $130 phone bill, seven app subscriptions at $72 month, an Amazon addiction for $200 month, Netflix, Paramount or HBO for another $112 month and his haircuts didn’t need a ‘stylist’!

Yeah, maybe because Grandma wasn’t dropping half her income on $14 iced lattes and avocado toast shaped like art projects. Back then, if they wanted coffee, they boiled it at home in a dented pot. It tasted like burnt rubber and regret — but it woke you up and cleaned your pipes. And Grandma wasn’t “out to brunch.”

You think she had time for mimosas and hashtags? She was making something called ‘whatever’s left in the fridge’ and feeding six people with it. (Read more.)

Share

Leo XIV and the Place de la Concorde

 From CR:

The culminating moment of the papal journey was the Mass celebrated at the Place de la Concorde, in the heart of Paris, on the afternoon of September 26th, before an immense crowd estimated at 800,000 people. An event of profound symbolic character, given what this square once represented.

The Place de la Concorde, designed in 1755 by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, was originally known as the Place Louis XV. The French Revolution changed the history of this site forever. The great square became the principal theater of Jacobin capital executions, and in 1792 it was renamed the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine transformed capital punishment into a public spectacle before which the Republic demonstrated its power to suppress all “enemies of the people.” On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was beheaded there; on October 16 of the same year, Queen Marie Antoinette followed. The crime of Louis XVI was that of being a king. What was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal was not the man but the monarchical institution he represented. The square conceived to celebrate the oldest Catholic monarchy in Europe thus became the site of its symbolic annihilation. “The mere title of king,” Robespierre proclaimed, “draws down the scourges of war upon the troubled nation.” But Robespierre himself, following Danton, was guillotined at the Place de la Concorde in 1794: the Revolution devoured its children without mercy.

Pope Pius VI, in the allocution Quare lacrymae delivered in Consistory on June 17, 1793, attributed to Louis XVI “the glory of martyrdom.” He declared: “Who could ever doubt that this king was put to death out of hatred for the Faith and in contempt of the dogmas of Catholicism?” At the origin of the trial and condemnation of the French sovereign, Pius VI explained, lay the “impious ideologies” of “perverse philosophers” — the leading figures of the Enlightenment. From the very beginning of his pontificate, with the bull Inscrutabile Divinae of December 25, 1775, the Pontiff, addressing the Christian people and their pastors, had expressed his anguish at seeing that “restless and furious men, as though driven by an irresistible passion for novelty, do not hesitate to attack the very foundations of rational nature and endeavor — if they could — to subvert them entirely.” The principal revolutionary instrument was the flood of books inspired by Enlightenment ideas that had inundated France since the reign of Louis XV. For this reason, Pius VI exhorted the French bishops: “Remove the evil from among you — that is, with great energy and solicitude, strive to eliminate from your flock all these poisoned books.”

The Enlightenment constitutes a decisive phase of that ideological process which, from the humanist and Protestant Revolution, has led in less than five centuries to the Communist Revolution. Lenin wrote: “We shall probably have to follow… the advice that Engels once gave to the German socialists: to translate and disseminate among the masses the French Enlightenment and atheist publications of the eighteenth century.” But if it is true that the Revolution must continually renew its errors, an authentic Catholic reaction cannot cease to combat those errors, which have spread throughout the world and have unfortunately penetrated even within the Church. Leo XIV himself appeared to overlook the historical significance of the Enlightenment, describing it in his address at the Élysée Palace on September 25 as “a stage that brought to the world important achievements in the domain of human rights.” And yet, the following day, before his meeting with the synodal assembly, the Pope paused in prayer in the garden adjacent to the Institut Catholique, before the plaque bearing the inscription Hic ceciderunt — “Here they fell” — marking the spot where, in September 1792, approximately 115 priests and bishops suffered martyrdom for refusing to renounce their fidelity to the See of Peter. The murderers of these witnesses of the faith — later beatified by the Church — were steeped in precisely that Enlightenment ideology which aimed to eradicate the Christian roots of society. The Festival of the Goddess Reason celebrated in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on November 10, 1793, marked the apogee of the dechristianization sought by the “Philosophy of the Enlightenment.” It was for this reason that Pius XI, in his address of October 17, 1926, on the occasion of the beatification of the martyrs of the September massacres, recalled “the upheaval of the public order which, at the end of the eighteenth century, had its origin in France and swept away all things, sacred and profane, raging not only against the king and the nobility, but above all against the Church and her ministers. Most wicked men, who had unlawfully seized power, masking under the appearance of philosophy the hatred that animated them against the Church, strove with all their might to blot out the very name of Christian.” (Read more.)

Share

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.)

Share

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.)

Share

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