Tea at Trianon: A Dearth of Irish Saints

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

Friday, January 8, 2016

A Dearth of Irish Saints

From Vultus Christi:

Morale is low in Catholic Ireland, particularly among the clergy. There has been, to the delight of the secular media, so much Catholic self–accusation and so much breast–beating that the memory of the heroic virtue and astonishing deeds of the saints has receded into the darkest archives of the corporate memory. In place of the memory of the saints and of their deeds — a source of joy — there is the numbing and amplified repetition of the same failures, betrayals, and sins — a cause for mourning and weeping. One has the impression that someone has a vested interest in keeping the bad news of sin in the public eye lest the good new of holiness somehow and leak out and begin to raise inconvenient questions. Whence comes this goodness? Whence this truth? Whence this beauty? Whence this heroism? Whence these miracles, these conversions, these inbreakings of joy? (Read more.)