Tea at Trianon: The NIU Shooting

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

Friday, February 15, 2008

The NIU Shooting

Is there any way to make sense of such senseless evil? Scott Richert discusses the question.

In our increasingly post-Christian nation, pride and envy and anger are in much more abundant supply than guns. We don't know yet what the gunman hoped to accomplish by his action; unless he left a note or a recording, we may never know. But we can be certain that, in his heart, the passions that we all fall prey to all too often burned white hot. Barring demonic possession, the differences between his soul and ours are a matter of degree, not of kind.
Tonight, we pray for the dead. We pray that God may grant them eternal rest, and eternal memory. We pray for their relatives and friends, who must suffer the pain of being deprived of the ones they loved and endure the regrets that inevitably arise from the words left unspoken, the wounds that now will never be healed.

And, as our Lord taught us, we pray, too, for our enemies, that God may have mercy on the soul of the man who could perform such an evil act. In doing so, we don't excuse his sin, or lessen it, or attempt to explain it away. We pray that God may have mercy on him, because, in the face of his sin, his only hope--like ours--lies in the mercy of a God Who so loved the world that He sent His Only-Begotten Son to suffer and to die, so that we may not perish, but may have life everlasting.