Tea at Trianon: A Sign of Contradiction

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

Thursday, June 1, 2017

A Sign of Contradiction

From the National Catholic Register:

In a world of Kardashian-worshippers, anyone who thinks sex is reserved for marriage, or that marriage cannot be redefined without grave consequences to society and culture, or that contraception undercuts not only the procreative dimension of marital union but also the unitive dimension, or, for that matter, that a man who grew up in Nazareth is the God of the universe and that He founded a Church (after suffering torture and death and rising from the dead) and gave her sacraments and the gift of infallibility – is by definition, weird.

See, once you accept the weird label, things get easier and become clearer.

You stop trying to please everybody. You start breathing easier when you get push back at fashionable parties. And you can fashion a way to describe why the weirdness of Catholicism is uniquely fitted to the weirdness of life itself, and why all of it (kata holikos means “of the whole, or “universal”) fits with what God has previously revealed in nature and with what the human heart really desires. (Read more.)