Tea at Trianon: A Word on Fr. Maciel

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, February 15, 2009

A Word on Fr. Maciel

Fr. Blake weighs in and such is the excellence of his words that I for one will be reading his post more than once. As Father writes:

One of the mysteries of the Christian life is, "where sin is, there grace abounds," or "God writes straight with crooked lines". In the second half of the twentieth century there where extra-ordinary founders like Escriva, Theresa of Calcutta, and yes, Marcial Maciel, maybe even Lefebvre could be included. There were also movements like Charismatic Renewal, Liberation Theology, the Ecumenical Movement and more localised movements like Taize or Medjugorge, possibly even the personal devotion to JPII himself.

It was an age in which the person was pushed to the fore, and in which we looked for immediate fruit and bathed in the charisms of others and searched anxiously for own. We disregarded the "charism" of being a good husband or wife, mother or father, or even just a good person and promoted the extra-ordinary. In the secular world too it was the age of the celebrity and the sound-bite.

I hope we are moving away from all that with the aid of a bit of healthy Augustinian skeptical pessimism, a return to Tradition, to a close examination of texts, to the law and what it says.

The change from the age of John Paul "the Great" to that of Benedict, described by one French journalist as, "the Ordinary" in a way epitomises the transition of the 20th to the 21st century, it is movement to solid ground.