Tea at Trianon: Being Catholic

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

Monday, August 27, 2018

Being Catholic

A well-written article which makes some salient points. I remember reading Malachi Martin long ago. Now we know that what he wrote was true. From The Week:

The report released earlier this month by a grand jury in Pennsylvania detailing alleged sexual abuse — the vast majority of the more than 1,000 victims teenaged boys abused by some 300 priests over 70 years — defies description. For someone who has long regarded himself as a traditional-minded but sane Catholic, tales of satanic sex cults to which the clergy belonged with other unspeakable blasphemies long peddled by Fr. Malachi Martin have seemed like the products of lurid, diseased imaginations.

But having spent nearly a week reading slowly through all 1,400 pages of the report, I can say I was wrong. All of these things exist. When Blessed Pope Paul VI said that the "smoke of Satan had entered the Church" half a century ago, he meant it quite literally. On Sunday, virtually every American Catholic who attended Mass heard a letter from his or her bishop read aloud. Some of these letters, including the one written by my own ordinary Bishop Paul Bradley of Kalamazoo, Michigan, contained some lucid and even admirable sentences. Most did not. A typical example of such a letter was the one attributed to Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and the former bishop of Pittsburgh. This missive, which was rightly mocked from at least one pulpit in his own diocese (why not all of them?), did not contain a single reference to sin or God but was full of corporate buzzwords and self-serving lawyerese.

Wuerl is only one disgraceful prelate. To rehearse all the evasions, elisions, prevarications, and other species of stupidity in the various clergy letters and the multitude of crimes for which they are meant to cover would exhaust the space of a short column. It is simpler to make a handful of straightforward observations.

One is that as a class the American episcopate is made of the pompous, the contemptuous, the worldly, and the faithless. They are, with a few honorable and pious exceptions, worthless company men who have disgraced their office. If they are proven complicit in the cover-up of abuse — by, for example, deliberately attempting to conceal evidence until the statue of limitations for a given jurisdiction was reached — they should be laicized and handed over to the secular authorities to be punished. Others whose crimes are of the order of gross negligence or incompetence should resign and live out the remainder of their days in monasteries performing works of charity. They should be replaced by younger, abler men with clean consciences, sons of the dioceses over which they will govern rather than glad-handers from certain trendy Roman seminaries. All of them in the meantime should undergo lengthy and rigorous public penances for their sins and those of their brother priests. I do not mean selling their mansions or the faux humility of dressing themselves in black instead of purple or red; I mean wearing hair-shirts underneath their cassocks and dining on ashes every Friday night and even flagellating themselves in public.

[...]

There are other practical lessons for the laity here. Stop answering blanket appeals from your bishops asking for money. Propping up the diocesan bureaucracy and Division I NCAA prep academies disguised as "Catholic" schools is not the business of the faith. Stop writing "open letters," as if you seriously expect men who are incapable of even feigning remorse over the rape of children to be moved by your futile words and read the Open Letter to Confused Catholics. Say the rosary, the most powerful weapon against evil the world has ever seen, and fast. Become dedicated clients of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Barbara and St. Athanasisus. Sleep on the floor. Learn to despise the things of this fleeting earthly life, especially when there is nothing in them of beauty, and delight in contemplating all that is heavenly. (Read more.)