Tea at Trianon: Beginnings and Re-Beginnings

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, February 22, 2013

Beginnings and Re-Beginnings

From Fr. Mark:

The time of catering to the appetite for novelty, to the demands of itching ears, and to the voices of dissent repeating the latest secularist ideologies is over. Reflecting on the situation here in Ireland, it seems to me that "now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2) to begin afresh: with the liturgy, with God, with adoration. Operi Dei nihil praeponatur -- "Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God" (Rule of Saint Benedict 43:3). If this is, in fact, the supreme rule of the Council, then it must be the supreme rule for straightening the crooked paths of the past fifty years, for leveling the mountains of our accumulated ideological prejudices, and for rebuilding, in the Holy Spirit, a temple worthy of the thrice-holy God: the Body of Christ, His Church. (Read entire post.)