Tea at Trianon: Beatification of the Ulma Family

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, February 1, 2019

Beatification of the Ulma Family

From Rome Reports:

“The Polish people were also killed for only helping the Jews. This is also something important. The Germans created a law in Poland that for any type of help, even a piece of bread given to a Jew, the person would be killed.” More than 190,000 Polish people were killed as a result of this law, including the Ulma family: the father, pregnant mother and their six kids, ranging in age from eight to two. They were killed on March 24, 1944 by German soldiers, immediately after the soldiers killed the Jews hiding out in the house....As a result, in 2003, a process was opened to research the group of martyrs who hid Jewish people. Yet, in 2017 the Ulma family was set apart, and the Vatican began their own process of beatification and potential canonization. (Read more.)