Tea at Trianon: Salvation and Super Heroes

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 17, 2014

Salvation and Super Heroes

From Crisis:

While we Americans value freedom—and rightly so—if we wish to safeguard this national treasure, we need to recognize that divine love is freedom’s true cause and only guardian. The deepest enemy of freedom is not the violent and deceptive establishment of world order. It is the absence of charity or narcissism, to call it by another name. The martyrs teach us that even in the face of violence, we can still love and thus conquer evil. And this love is our true freedom because charity turns us toward the God who saves us. What the Gospel teaches is that evil is self-annihilating in its resistance to charity; and this, precisely because evil is self-absorbed. It simply destroys itself as it seeks to destroy its enemy. It is a house divided.

But even more powerfully, once charity draws the person to God, evil vanishes altogether as light fills the darkness. Evil simply has no effective response because charity cannot be overpowered. And that’s not to say that we should forego legitimate self-defense. It’s merely to suggest that we should cling to the sobering (and admittedly less exciting) reality that self-defense cannot destroy evil, as does the love of Jesus Christ. “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). Not exactly what we call action, but it is the real power of divine love. (Read more.)

Via Mary Victrix. Share