Tea at Trianon: Learning to Grow Through Our Faults

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

Monday, November 7, 2016

Learning to Grow Through Our Faults

From The Catholic Gentleman:

Deriving profit from our faults is one of the most important topics in the spiritual life. It is quite certain that, in the designs of God, the faults into which He permits us to fall ought to serve for our sanctification, and that it depends on us to draw this advantage from them. Nevertheless, it happens, on the contrary, that our faults themselves do us less harm than does the bad use we make of them. What I have to say on this subject has nothing to do with those cowardly souls who use reserve with God and who wish to belong to Him only up to a certain point. They commit deliberately and knowingly a thousand faults, from which it is impossible to draw any profit, on account of the bad dispositions in which they are. The persons for whom I write are those who have made up their minds never deliberately and with intention to commit a single fault, and who nevertheless do fall into many faults, in spite of their good resolutions, through inadvertence, or on the impulse of the moment, or through weakness. (Read more.)