Tea at Trianon: Where have you gone, Sr. Aloysius?

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, January 16, 2009

Where have you gone, Sr. Aloysius?

Tom Piatak offers some reflections on the film Doubt. (Via A Conservative Blog for Peace)

Catholic schools and the men and women religious and lay teachers who staff them still do enormous good in America. But the particular world depicted by Shanley—the parish church and school at the center of a cohesive neighborhood, where well-dressed neighbors who know each other well walk to a Mass unchanged for centuries—has largely disappeared. At the center of that world was the parish school, staffed by nuns. Despite the universality of Catholicism, this particular world was largely an American creation. The American bishops determined that their flock would not be lost to the Faith, and mandated that each church have a grade school. And so people who had been peasants in Europe managed to create the largest private school system in the world, entirely by their own efforts.