Tea at Trianon: The Sadness of Liturgical Abuses

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, March 8, 2018

The Sadness of Liturgical Abuses

From The Catholic Thing:

Consider the words he offered to explain his action: “Do you know why I’m not going to say the Creed? Because I don’t believe it! As if anyone understands it – but as for myself after many years I’ve realized that it was something I didn’t understand and couldn’t accept. Let’s sing something else that presents the essential things of the faith.” He doesn’t “believe it?” O.K., fine, that’s his free choice, although he may – with an eye to his own intellectual integrity – want to reassess his chosen vocation. But he doesn’t “understand it?” Certainly, it is true the Creed proposes a set of mysteries revealed by God, which being mysteries challenge and ultimately defeat the finite intellect attempting to grasp the Infinite. As readers are probably aware, even the greatest intellect of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, famously awoke from a dream in which he experienced God and termed all he had written as just a “heap of straw.” Yet on another level, the Creed is so simple even an elementary school student can understand it. (Read more.)