Tea at Trianon: The Catholic Bubble

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, April 11, 2015

The Catholic Bubble

Here is an excellent article about the Pharisaism that has crept into the Church. We see in the comboxes of the internet Catholics who analyze with scrupulous detail the minutiae of doctrine without regard to charity or kindness. They pick apart every word and deed of the Pope, just as Christ was picked apart by the Pharisees. As Our Lord said:

But woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you yourselves do not enter in; and those that are going in, you suffer not to enter. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: because you devour the houses of widows, praying long prayers. For this you shall receive the greater judgment. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you go round about the sea and the land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, you make him the child of hell twofold more than yourselves. ~St. Matthew 23:11-15

From Aleteia:

Serious Catholics — by and large and in my own experience — don’t spend a lot of time in public spaces. By “serious” I don’t mean the man who goes to the early Mass every day before work, or the group who come to say the rosary on Wednesday evening, deeply faithful as they are, but those of us who care about Catholicism as a thing: the people who read the Catholic press, keep the Catechism by their computer, argue over Francis, can parse the distinction between the ordinary and extraordinary magisterium, mentally grade the homily, take sides on Scott Hahn, follow church politics and fret about the state of the Church, or fuss about those who fret about the state of the Church. Some of them do it for a living.

I speak as one of them. We wear the Church on our sleeve. It is, as I say, a thing for us. The Church is a life and a family but also something external, something we analyze and examine. This is especially true for converts, who make up a higher percentage of this group than they do of the Church in general. For us, the public space we inhabit tends to be the space we choose and the spaces we choose tend to be filled mostly with people like us, which is to say, other serious Catholics. (Read more.)