Tea at Trianon: The Syllabus of Errors

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, December 27, 2014

The Syllabus of Errors

From the Catholic Herald:

The Syllabus had a long and complicated history even before its publication in 1864. The first suggestion that the Pope should draw up a constitution listing the errors of the day emerged from the Provincial Council of Spoleto in 1849. Urged on by Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci (who later became Pope Leo XIII), Pope Pius set up a commission to study the matter, but this was overtaken by the Bishop of Perpignan publishing his own syllabus of errors in 1860. The Pope admired the bishop’s work and so set up a new commission which eventually came up with the document that we call the Syllabus, and which was published as an addendum to the encyclical Quanta Cura in 1864. So the gestation period of the Syllabus was 15 years, which is a sure indication that the document ran into numerous difficulties in the course of its preparation.

A casual look at the Syllabus itself shows the reader why this should be so. It is nothing to do with the contents of the document (which are mainly non-controversial, though more of that later), but rather to do with the form of the document. The Syllabus aimed to be, as its title says, a list of “the most important errors of our time, which have been condemned by our Holy Father Pius IX in allocutions, at consistories, in encyclicals, and other apostolic letters.” (Read more.)