Tea at Trianon: The Rocks of Madness

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, October 2, 2016

The Rocks of Madness

From Crisis:

Thus is the brave new world in which we live, the fruit of the tragic 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act, permitting certain in-vitro fertilization practices in Canada: Unlike our neighbors to the south, we cannot buy or sell sperm or eggs, but we can use them. A number of Catholics supported the Bill back then, as at least prohibiting some of the worst evils. However, contrary, I would argue, to Pope John Paul II’s teaching in paragraphs 73-74 of Evangelium Vitae, we introduced into positive law some other grave evils, as we see in the case of the prolific Aggeles who, it seems, will not be charged, as not compos mentis enough to understand what he was doing....

Recall the host of evils that arise from this practice: children who know not their fathers, nor their (surrogate) mothers; multiple siblings who know not they are siblings; lack of genetic diversity; technological manipulation and control of human reproduction. And perhaps the most disturbing: thousands, if not millions, of non-transferred embryos left in cold storage, left to what the Church has called an “absurd” fate, likely eventual death, as they are abandoned and forgotten. For a Magisterial and theological take, see the trivium of documents: Humanae Vitae (1968), Donum Vitae (1987) and Dignitatis Personae (2008) all well worth a read.

Thus is the Promethean Age of Man, or, in this case, Woman: If Woman wants a child, and has no Man, then a child must be given her, in a twisted parody of Luke’s Gospel, where a Woman conceives of the Holy Spirit, without a Man. And, lest we forget, this Woman had the help and support of one of the greatest of Men, Saint Joseph.

I keep hoping we might return to some sort of sanity and reason in our world, but, ten years after Benedict XVI’s crisp, clear, and direct Regensburg Address calling for such a return, my hopes keep getting dashed on the rocks of madness. An article this morning announced that they now may be able to use sperm alone to fertilize “any cell of the body.” Hence, we may soon have children without mothers, along with children without fathers. All you men out there, we may even be able to conceive our own children, quite literally ourselves, in a bizarre twist to cloning, the ultimate vanitas vanitatis. (Read more.)