Tea at Trianon: A Lay Model for Young People

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

Friday, July 27, 2018

A Lay Model for Young People

From Zenit:

Pope Francis will canonize Blessed Nunzio Sulprizio (1817-1836), a young Italian layperson, on October 14, 2018, during the Synod of Bishops on Youth held in Rome. The pope, therefore, gives the young people a model of their age, in addition to the six other blessed who will be canonized that day. He announced this canonization himself at a public ordinary consistory on July 19, 2018, at the Vatican, an event all the more noticed that it took place during the summer.

Born on April 13, 1817, in Pescosansonesco, Blessed Nunzio Sulprizio was an orphan very early. He lived with a very violent uncle who beat him. Because of this violence, the young craftsman of Naples suffered from a wound in the leg, earning him the nickname “the little saint lame”. In spite of his illness, the young man assisted the other patients, and, in his poverty, relieved the misery of the poor. He spent the last two years of his life at Naples’ hospital for the incurable where he died on May 5, 1836, at 19 years of age.

Pope Paul VI, who beatified him on December 1, 1963, offered him as a model for young people: “He will tell you that you, young people, can regenerate within you the world in which Providence has called you to live and that it is up to you, the first ones, to devote yourself to the salvation of a society which needs precisely strong and intrepid souls.” Six other blessed will be canonized in October: Pope Paul VI and Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero as well as two Italian priests, a German nun, and a Spanish nun. (Read more.)