Tea at Trianon: Iraqi Church in Ruins

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

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Iraqi Church in Ruins

From Zenit:

The head of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq has said the Church in his country is "ruined" eleven years after the US-led invasion of Iraq.

“1,400 years of Islam could not uproot us from our land and our churches, while the policies of the West [have] scattered us and distributed us all around the world,” Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako said.

The patriarch, who has governed the Eastern Catholic Church since February 2013 said, “intervention by the West in the region did not solve the problems" but instead "produced more chaos and conflict.”

“Democracy and change come through upbringing and education rather than through conflict,” he added.

Before Saddam Hussein’s regime, the patriarch said there had been about 5,000 families and over 240 students preparing for their First Holy Communion in the Church of the Ascension. Yet, late this April, he celebrated the Holy Mass for First Holy Communion with “13 students only.”

Iraqi authorities are partially responsible for “this migration for failing to restore security and stability,” he said.

The patriarch has called upon Muslim clerics to issue a joint statement, denying violence and mistrust of all forms and ending considering others as "‘infidels.'" It should call “'for peace and brotherhood among the people,'” he said. (Read more.)