Tea at Trianon: Mother Catherine Mectilde de Bar

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 5, 2014

Mother Catherine Mectilde de Bar

From Fr. Mark:

Catherine Mectilde de Bar lived in a time marked by superstition, sorcery, dalliance with the powers of darkness, blasphemy and sacrilege. Recent distressing events in churches on every continent have demonstrated that global society today has more in common with war–torn 17th century France than one might think. Mother Mectilde bound herself in self–sacrificing love to the perpetrators of such horrible crimes, offering herself as a victim of reparation, that is, as an offering irrevocably made over to God with the intention of supplying for the love and adoration denied Him by those who hate Him and outrage His holiness while, at the same time, praying God to show them mercy and grace them with repentance....

Catherine Mectilde de Bar is an icon of the kind of spiritual motherhood needed in the Church today, not only in monastic and religious communities, but in every context where the Church is being born, and born again, of the Eucharist. Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Mother Mectilde demonstrates that the altar itself — the place set apart for the immolation of the Divine Victim — becomes a wellspring of supernatural fecundity in the life of every woman who adhering to the Holy Sacrifice, enters into the victimhood of Christ and, with Him, adores the Father in the Holy Spirit. (Read more.)