Tea at Trianon: The Abolition of God and the Annihilation of Man

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

Sunday, September 11, 2016

The Abolition of God and the Annihilation of Man

From Crisis:

When a student of mine returned from a recent visit to Barcelona, where she’d spent a busy month babysitting small children, she reported that the host family she stayed with not only did not go to weekly Mass, or say Grace before meals, but positively refused to believe that these were practices other people might actually observe. When the student pointed out the oddity of their position—after all, Catholics the world over routinely do these things—they reminded her that while in Spain everyone is baptized, after a decent interval most people simply stay away, disdaining the Church whence their New Life in Christ began.

Utterly baffled by this anomaly, she went on to ask if the people of Spain ever return to church at all. Only three more times, they assured her. When making one’s First Holy Communion, they said—which is a big deal, indeed, a rite of passage—it is expected that people will attend since otherwise they can’t very well receive presents. And, then, when people decide to get married, there simply must be a Church wedding since there are so few backdrops as beguiling as the interior of an old church. Like La Sagrada Familia, for instance, a huge and stunningly beautiful basilica, looming in all its neo-gothic grandeur high above the Barcelona skyline. Who wouldn’t want to tie the knot in a place like that? And, finally, when people are about to be buried, it is the custom that the obsequies be performed, once again, in a church. After which, of course, oblivion awaits us all.

It had been, the student ruefully conceded, a real strain having to spend a month or more ensconced in the company of people who had pretty much emptied the cosmos of Christ, leaving the founder of their faith totally out of the picture. Had Jesus himself, one wonders, never left the tomb on Good Friday, would they have noticed anything missing from the Sunday that followed? Perhaps that’s what secularism does to people—it strips them of a hope they seem not even to miss. As if the very ladder we steadily climb into the heavens had all at once been dismantled, plunging us headlong into the abyss, and nobody notices. Or cares. As someone once said, there is nothing worse than the answer to a question nobody is asking. Could there be a sadder legacy to assign the inheritors of Spain’s future? Think of all those cherubic little children elatedly awaiting their first (and last) Eucharist, forced to live in a world shorn of any recognizable reminder that once upon a time their nation was the pride of Catholic Europe. (Read more.)