Tea at Trianon: Novena to St. Patrick

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

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Novena to St. Patrick

The novena to St. Patrick begins today. Let us ask his intercession for the home-schooling debacle in California. For many years, the Irish people were compelled to find alternative ways of educating their children. They learned as a people that to be a Christian is to be a contradiction to the world. They learned this early on, as their often intense commitment to the monastic life bears witness.

Daniel Mitsui, an artist who writes as well as he draws, describes the permanent scars of the long struggle of the Church with her enemies.

Among certain Catholics, there is a sort of easy optimism regarding the near future of the Church; an expectation that if things ever get too bad, God will raise up some new saints and heroes and geniuses to make everything good again. It is an expectation that this will happen as a matter of course.

But the promise against the gates of hell was a promise of ultimate victory only, not of stability and comfort in our lifetimes. If the Church would survive, it would at times survive as it did in the Roman catacombs, the caves of Lebanon, the English recusancy, or the Goto Islands. It would at times survive despite staggering material defeat in desperate circumstances. Hope would be no virtue were it easy.

[....]

But we were never promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against Christian civilization. In Europe, Christian civilization was resurrected five times; there is no promise of a sixth. Christianity may very well need to survive without Christian civilization, as something brutally persecuted, internally conflicted, and societally irrelevant. This really is nothing more than the normal state of Christianity.