Tea at Trianon: Christian Ideologues

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, January 12, 2014

Christian Ideologues

From Fr. Angelo:

In Evangelii Gaudium (84-85), Pope Francis places in opposition to the joy of the Gospel the pessimism of such prophets and says that such defeatism is an “evil spirit” which “is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centered lack of trust.” But in the context of this remark Pope Francis does not mention ideology or “ideological Christians.”

Ideological Temptations

However, there is another address in which Pope Francis speaks about ideology: his remarks to the leadership of the Council of Bishops’ Conferences of Latin America and the Caribbean concerning he Church in Latin America (July 28, 2013). In that address Pope Francis identified a number of “temptations against missionary discipleship,” a major category of which he entitled “ideology”:

This is a temptation which has been present in the Church from the beginning: the attempt to interpret the Gospel apart from the Gospel itself and apart from the Church.

Specific forms of ideology he mentions are the following: sociological reductionism, psychologizing, the Gnostic solution and the Pelagian solution. In each case there is a reduction of the Gospel to something less than itself—what Gnerre would call the ignoring of facts: the reduction of the Gospel to social justice, to self-awareness, to “a preoccupation with certain pastoral “quaestiones disputatae,” to “purely disciplinary solutions.” These temptations are also decidedly anti-ecclesial, that is, they tend toward sectarianism. (Read more.)