Tea at Trianon: Blessed Marmion: A Life in the Trinity

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, September 28, 2014

Blessed Marmion: A Life in the Trinity

Father Mark on the venerable Irish Abbot who wrote of the liturgical life of the Church so beautifully. To quote:

Although Joseph Aloysius Marmion was baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; although he was plunged into the life of the Three Divine Persons, becoming by grace what Jesus is by nature, that is, a well–beloved Son; although he was raised in a pious, God–fearing, Catholic family, and even dressed in black from the time he was a small boy to get him used to the soutane for which, in his parents’ eyes, he was pre–destined; although he studied philosophy, and then theology, at Clonliffe and in Rome; although he read his breviary faithfully, offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass each morning, never failed to make his daily Way of the Cross, and never omitted his daily rosary; it was not until he experienced total immersion in the liturgy of the Church as a Benedictine monk that the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity came alive for him. In the sacred liturgy — and principally in the Divine Office with its daily round of psalmody punctuated by the ever–recurring Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto — Columba Marmion passed from a speculative, notional knowledge of the Most Holy Trinity to an experiential, sapiential, cordial knowledge of what it means to be « a son in the Son ».(Read more.)