Tea at Trianon: Our Lady of Revelation

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

Saturday, September 9, 2017

Our Lady of Revelation

From Unveiling the Apocalypse:

It has only been just over two weeks since the occurrence of the Great American Eclipse at the start of St. Michael's Lent, and we have already experienced a whole plethora of foreboding events. First we had the earthquake at Ischia occurring just nine minutes after the eclipse ended on US soil, which just so happens to be the site of alleged Marian apparitions which foretell the destruction of New York City in conjunction with visions of volcanic eruptions and an entire island sinking into the sea. This earthquake destroyed the Church of St. Michael (known locally as the "Church of Purgatory"), which was right next to the alleged apparition site at Zaro in Ischia. Four days later, we had the destruction wrought by Hurricane Harvey, which was the most powerful hurricane in a decade to strike the American coast. This was followed in quick succession by North Korea's hydrogen bomb test on Sept 4th, amidst several other provocations, accompanied by a threat of an EMP attack made by its leader Kim Jong-un. Since 2nd Sept, there has been an ongoing earthquake swarm in Idaho centred on Soda Springs - a location immediately adjacent to the path of totality, and just south of the caldera of the Yellowstone supervolcano. The largest earthquake measured here was 5.3 on the Richer scale, and there are concerns of a larger quake to come. Now we have the threat of Hurricane Irma bearing down on the coast of Florida which is currently Category 5, followed by other potential threats from Hurricane Jose and Hurricane Katia.

While all of this has been taking place on the ground, the night skies have been illuminated by another occurrence of the Northern Lights, following a powerful geomagnetic storm on 6th September, 2017. It is a well-known fact that Sr. Lucia had linked the Great Aurora of 1938 with Our Lady's words in the Second Secret, concerning the beginning of World War II:

"When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father."

Scanning through the various reactions on social media, the dramatic uptick of significant events that has already taken place since the eclipse and the start of St. Michael's Lent has not went by unnoticed. In the post The Sign of Jonah and the Unbinding of Satan, we had already noted that it was a chain of catastrophic events centred around the timing of a total solar eclipse over the site of ancient Nineveh that had ripened the inhabitants' receptiveness to the words of the Prophet Jonah, causing them to repent en masse. In light of this combination of recent events, the idea that America has entered into a 40-day period of trial from the date of the eclipse to the feast of Yom Kippur/Michaelmas now no longer seems so far-fetched. (Read more.)

Monsignor Charles Pope writes on earth, air, fire and water:

God’s and nature’s most life-giving gifts are but a few degrees separated from disaster and instant death. We live on the edge of an abyss because that is where life is found. It’s such a thin line, really. Mors et vita duello, conflixere mirando! (Death and life compete in a stupendous conflict!) To live is to cheat death.

All of the basic elements and forces: earth, air, water, and fire, are so death-dealing and yet so life-giving; somehow they are all part of the great cycle of living and dying that God intends. Only God is existence itself; the rest of us are contingent beings and part of a cycle. Only in union with Christ, who said, I am the life, will we ever cheat death. As Bishop Fulton Sheen once said, “Christ gave the earth the only serious wound it ever received, the wound of an empty tomb.” With Christ—and only with Christ—will we one day give the earth that same wound. For now, we live above the cauldron upon a thin crust; beneath us burns a tremendous fire. Somehow, mysteriously, it is the source of our bread. (Read more.)