Tea at Trianon: St. Leo and Attila the Hun

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

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

St. Leo and Attila the Hun

From Word on Fire:

St. Leo the Great was an ardent theologian, a defender of the Faith, and a pastoral, simple man of holiness. Leo, one of only three pontiffs who’ve been given the title ‘Great’ (the others being St. Gregory and St. John Paul II), was the Supreme Pontiff from 440 to 461. When he took the reins of leadership Rome was in a dire fall, yet St. Leo was more than capable to steer through the raging waters of cultural and political strife. One of Leo’s great contentions was the necessity of unity for the Christian Church. Heretical factions were popping throughout the faithful. The Manichees, who held that evil was co-eternal with the good. The Nestorians who attacked Mary’s title of Theotokos. The Monophysites, who contended that Christ could not have been human and divine. And the Pelagians, who taught that man could achieve his own goodness by his own unaided will, no need for the grace of God.

Leo was a staunch defender of the primacy of Peter, not because he held the office but because of Christ’s call to have an authoritative head of His Church, through which the will of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit finds an embodiment. He practiced this office most profoundly at the Council of Chalcedon. However, his role as the pastor and shepherd of the Christian people took a much deeper tone in the wave of the coming Hun army, distinctly setting its ravenous sights on the great city of Rome. (Read more.)