Tea at Trianon: The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul

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

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul

From These Stone Walls:

I wrote a promised sequel to “USA Today’s Tim Roemer on how to Save the Catholic Church.” My sequel is not about the state of our Church, but rather about the state of our bishops as they prepare for a Vatican Summit on the crisis in the priesthood. Nine days after I wrote it and mailed it for scanning, however, it has simply disappeared. Foul play or lost in the mail? Who knows? So now I must re-write it and re-mail it, and by the time you are reading this I will have done so. Hopefully, it will be our featured post next week. I decided to reprint a post for this week I wrote for an Australian site in 2010 that is no longer online. The timing for it is good, and I have a haunting feeling that I am supposed to put it before you again. In “Anti-Catholicism and Sex Abuse,” in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, author Ryan MacDonald wrote:

“On a website located at Priests in Crisis, Father MacRae published an article in December entitled “The Dark Night of a Priestly Soul.” I urge every Catholic, every bishop, priest, and deacon, to read that article.”
(Read more.)