Tea at Trianon: A Venerable Crime Fighter

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, March 11, 2019

A Venerable Crime Fighter

From The National Catholic Register:

Many Catholics today know little of that dramatic story. Now, however, with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and Pope Francis having announced that Cardinal Mindszenty was declared “Venerable” Feb. 13, a major step toward beatification, Catholics everywhere should learn of the man’s heroic struggle.

“A quiet, rugged fighter,” Clark told me one summer day — three decades after he had hosted an aging Cardinal Mindszenty in California on behalf of Gov. Reagan. “The foremost clergyman in the fight against communism.”

The so-called primate of Hungary had been persecuted first by occupying Nazis during World War II before suffering worse and longer torment by the occupying Bolsheviks who followed in 1945. In 1949, the communists were sick and tired of this uncompromising defender of the Church. They beat him, tortured him, drugged him, tried to force a “confession” from him, subjected him to a classic show trial, and slammed him with a life sentence. It was an outrageous injustice. Pope Pius XII excommunicated all involved in the farce.

Then came the events of October-November 1956, when Soviet Red Army troops invaded Hungary to crush the nation’s uprising of freedom fighters trying to liberate their country from the jackboot of atheistic communism. This smothering totalitarianism had robbed them of everything from private property to freedom of religion. Soviet communism was a criminal enterprise, just as communism remains so in the 21st century in North Korea and Cuba.

The October-November 1956 uprising in Hungary sprung Cardinal Mindszenty momentarily free. After Soviet tanks succeeded in killing thousands of Hungarians, Moscow clamped down tighter. Cardinal Mindszenty could have seized the opportunity to flee for safer environs outside the Iron Curtain, as did huge numbers of Hungarians amid the chaos, but he refused. He would stay there with his people. He was granted political asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. Cardinal Mindszenty’s plight did not go unnoticed outside Hungary.

Bishop Fulton Sheen in 1957 devoted an entire Life Is Worth Living TV broadcast to the man he called “The Dry Martyr of Hungary.” “In the 20th century, there is a new kind of martyrdom,” said Bishop Sheen. In the past, Christians had been martyred by murder; they were soaked and marred with wet blood.

“The old martyrs were wet martyrs,” said Bishop Sheen. The martyring of Cardinal Mindszenty, by contrast, was not. He was being slowly annihilated without being bloodied. The communists excelled, said Bishop Sheen, at producing “dry martyrs, who suffer brainwashing and mental torture for their faith.” (Read more.)