Tea at Trianon: Interview with Charles Coulombe

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

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Interview with Charles Coulombe

Here is an excellent interview with author Charles Coulombe about the Pope Emeritus and the conclave.

The Church is stagnant in Western Europe and North America (areas which, demographically-speaking, are dying out in general) and these dying zones are precisely the areas from which come the cries for “women’s reproductive rights” and the “groups of nuns.” (The latter, incidentally, are inevitably members of similarly dying orders—the only orders of nuns that seem to attract recruits these days are those who hew a more orthodox line.) For an institution which must think in terms of centuries—and even if questions of “immutable” dogma were not involved—it would make little sense to tie one’s future to the views of a declining, one might almost say failed, portion of the Church.

From that perspective, it is not a question of being “forward thinking” or holding on to “old fashioned values,” but of surviving into the future (to say nothing of remaining true to oneself). Certainly the Cardinals (and anyone else knowledgeable about modern dating norms in Europe and America!) who have read Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae” will see that his predictions in 1968 about the probable future if artificial contraception became generally accepted, shall find Church teaching on this point prophetic rather than retrograde—even if it makes uncomfortable reading. (Read entire interview.)