Tea at Trianon: The Mission

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

Monday, October 27, 2014

The Mission

From The New Yorker:

When the killing reached Bossemptele, a small town deep in the isolated interior of the Central African Republic, Father Bernard Kinvi, who helps run the Catholic mission there, tried to save everyone he could. A handsome man of thirty-two, Father Bernard wears a black cassock with a large red cross imprinted on the chest. He was born in West Africa, in Togo, and when he left the seminary and came to the Central African Republic, four years ago, he knew little of his adopted country except that “it was a place of military crises.” Bossemptele, with its mission compound—a pretty little church, a modest school, and a rudimentary hospital—seemed like a peaceful place. Old shade trees lined the road, and wildflowers grew in the fields.
Until 1960, the Central African Republic was a French colony, known as Oubangui-Chari. It is rich in resources, with endless forests, gold, uranium, and oil, but it is among the world’s poorest countries. It is landlocked, largely undeveloped, and surrounded by other troubled nations: Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, the two Congos, and Cameroon. Air France flies in once a week; few other airlines go there at all.

One of the country’s meagre blessings in the past several decades has been a relative lack of religious conflict. Of four and a half million citizens, fifteen per cent are Muslims; nearly all the rest profess some form of Christianity, often infused with animist beliefs. When Father Bernard arrived in Bossemptele, he detected no tensions between the Christians and the Muslims. “There were perfect community relations,” he told me, when I visited a few months ago. “Most of our hospital patients were Muslims, in fact.” Then, in 2012, he and the mission’s two other priests and four nuns began hearing reports about the Seleka, or “Alliance,” a Muslim rebel group in the east of the country. They were marching toward Bangui, the capital, a hundred and ninety miles away. “We weren’t affected,” Bernard said, speaking as someone in Tennessee might speak of a tornado in Oklahoma—a concern, but not a threat. “Then they started coming this way.” (Read more.)