Tea at Trianon: The Church and America

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, July 8, 2012

The Church and America

Tension, assimilation, and mutual benefit.

Ever since the Calverts (Lord Baltimore) started Maryland (I know the Spanish were here first but America starts with the British*) the Catholic story in America’s been paradoxical, puzzling both to European churchmen such as the Popes and to American Catholics. Protestants turned agnostics founded this country, which happened to be a haven for Catholics thanks to liberty while the church, rightly fearing indifferentism and the founding fathers’ heresy and apostasy, until recently condemned religious liberty. (Americans had to choose between godless republicans or an anointed Christian king, not the monster American history makes him out to be... but he was Protestant and, in the motherland, persecuted the church; the colonies were free to do what they wanted with religion.) (Read entire post.)