Tea at Trianon: The Synod and the Family

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

Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Synod and the Family

From Voice of the Family:

Voice of the Family is honoured to make available to the public this English translation of the intervention made to the Ordinary Synod by Archbishop Fülöp Kocsis, Metropolitan Archbishop of the Archeparchy of Hajdúdorog.

I am focusing my observation on paragraph 8 of chapter 1, but in truth I sense a general deficiency in the text as a whole, the lack of something that should penetrate our vision regarding these themes. For this reason, I could still indicate all of the paragraphs that, analyzing the contemporary situation, speak of a changed society and epoch, calling these difficulties which have appeared in recent times “challenges.”

It appears to me that the text misses a clarification which is more precise from its inception, from the root of these changes: from where do they come? The great part of these are not compatible with the plan of God; they do not come from Him. If it is thus, then it must be said: From where do these changes, these difficulties, derive?

We must say with clarity that in our very spoilt world the family and the man of good will with good intentions is under attack, under a ferocious and enormous attack. And this attack is of the Devil. We must call these diabolic forces which have a role to play with these phenomena by name because this way we can find some indications even for the research of possible solutions.

“Our battle in fact is not against flesh and blood, but against the Principalities and the Powers, against the dominations of the dark world, against the spirits of evil that live in the celestial regions.” (Ephesians 6, 12)
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