Tea at Trianon: Blessed Rolando Rivi

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

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Blessed Rolando Rivi

Italian Communists on a murderous rampage killed and tortured a young boy in 1945 because he wanted to be a priest. To quote:

“Tomorrow, one priest less,” said the political commissioner of one of the Communist Party’s “Garibaldi Brigades” of Monchio, a small town in the northern Italian province of Modena. Those words uttered in 1945 signaled the commissioner’s decision that seminarian Rolando Rivi had to be executed. Rivi was only 14, and now he is the Church’s first beatified seminarian.

Rivi’s beatification took place Oct. 5 in Modena, and it was a true “feast of faith.” Nearly 20,000 people attended the event, coming from the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy, also known as “the triangle of death.”

From 1943-1949, approximately 4,500 people were killed in this region by communists. Among them were 93 priests, who were accused of several offenses, including collaboration with the fascist government, giving aid to fascist refugees or simply being priests or studying to become one. The latter was the case of Rivi. (Read more.)