Tea at Trianon: Hungary Tries to Help the Christians

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

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Hungary Tries to Help the Christians

From Christianity Today:

Many of the 1.5 million refugees who have fled to Germany since the country announced its “open door” policy in 2015 traveled through “the Balkan route,” though Hungary has now erected a fence on its southern borders with Serbia and Croatia. Hungary’s new office will have a starting budget of $3.35 million with which to help persecuted Christians, to raise international awareness of their “untenable situation,” and to coordinate humanitarian efforts, Balog said. (Canada’s office had $5 million.)

In Iraq, a Christian population estimated at more than a million before the 2003 war—and considerably more prior to that—today stands at less than 300,000. Many displaced from Iraq’s Nineveh Plains after the 2014 ISIS offensive currently seek a permanent home in the West. In Syria, a similar situation has developed since the country’s civil war started five years ago. Other countries in the region have seen a hemorrhaging of indigenous Christianity with the resurgence of Islam as a political ideology since the last century.

Iraq ranks second and Syria is fifth on Open Doors’ 2016 World Watch List, a list of 50 countries where Christians come under the most pressure. Almost 40 of the 50 countries are majority Muslim or have Islamist non-state actors (e.g. militias) at work. The Hungarian government will spend the coming weeks working out the exact duties of the new department, though it will have a primarily humanitarian focus, said Eduard von Habsburg, the Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See.

The decision to launch the new department came after Orban and Balog traveled to Rome in August to meet Pope Francis. Orban and Balog, respectively a Protestant layman and a Calvinist pastor, were the only non-Catholic members of the group whom Pope Francis received in a private audience in August. Von Habsburg said that government officials’ interactions with leading European churchmen and with the patriarchs of the Middle East contributed to the decision to form the agency. (Read more.)