Tea at Trianon: Christmas Reflections of Pope Pius XII

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 7, 2008

Christmas Reflections of Pope Pius XII

Pope Pius XII often made Christmastide the occasion for making powerful statements about violations of human rights. According to the NOR:

Pius XII's 1941 Christmas Eve broadcast, "Christianity and the World Crisis," served as a reaffirmation of Christianity's central role in society both in terms of promoting and maintaining justice as well as in calling for a new order founded on moral principles. Pius XII also saw the opportunity to single out and attack those policies of Nazi Germany that he believed were the cause of the war, as well as methods by which society might correct them.

Pius XII begins by remarking that many nations in Europe had "fashioned Christianity to their liking, a new idol which does not save, which is not opposed to the passions of carnal desire nor to the greed for gold and silver which fascinates, nor to the pride of life; a new religion without a soul or a soul without religion, a mask of dead Christianity without the spirit of Christ."

While Pius XII did not name Germany in particular, he is here reaffirming his predecessor Pius XI's attack on this method of Nazi rule, that is, replacing the Church with a new religion of the State. Pius XII held that the de-Christianization of many of Europe's institutions had led to the moral decay that allowed systems such as Nazism to spring up. It is this moral decay that Pius XII sought to reverse, for only then can society rid itself of the hate and dehumanization that marked Nazism.