Tea at Trianon: Two Josephs

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

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Two Josephs

The Josephs of the Old and the New Testaments.

Envy is the reason St. Joseph has to lead the Holy Family to Egypt because — as he is warned in a dream — the Christ Child is the target of the murderous intentions of Herod. Divine Providence saw to the funds for the journey in the form of the Wise Man’s offering of gold. St. Matthew connects the Holy Family’s journey in Egypt to the 400 years (between Joseph and Moses) that Israel was in Egypt: “And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son’” — Matt 2:14, 15 (compare Hos 11:1; Ex 4:22).
Two thousand years earlier in Egypt, Joseph had preserved grain and saved the fledgling nation of Israel from starvation. In Egypt, St. Joseph protected the nascent Church in the person of Mary, along with the Living Bread that would feed it, in the person of the Christ Child.