Tea at Trianon: Bishop and Martyr

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

Monday, July 29, 2013

Bishop and Martyr

The sufferings of Eastern-rite Catholics under Romanian Communism. To quote:

CHAINS AND TERROR

by Ioan Ploscaru

To all of us, the Greek-Catholic priests and bishops, freedom was offered in exchange for switching to the Orthodox Church. To me personally they proposed this exchange a number of times beginning with my first arrest. But one cannot compromise with one's conscience. If I had given in, it would have been a great disaster for my conscience and a source of confusion for those among whom I was living.

In the memoirs I have written you will not find grave lamentations, much less desperate states of mind, because in offering all of these sufferings to God they become bearable. But I would not have been able to bear them alone, if Jesus had not been always beside me and all of us.

I considered our jailers as “instruments,” and against none of them do I make any accusation: on the contrary, I desire for those inquisitors true conversion to God and true and clear repentance for all that they have done.

I was in prison for 15 years, 4 of them in isolation. Freed in 1964, I was still monitored, shadowed, pursued. Even in the years afterward I have continued, at times, to be afraid.

For all of the sufferings that I have had to bear, may God be praised unto the ages of ages. (Read entire post.)