Tea at Trianon: Melinda Gates is Wrong

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, May 27, 2019

Melinda Gates is Wrong

From The National Catholic Register:

In 2017, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $375 million for population control to organizations providing contraceptives and abortions, and they also gave over $117 million previously. I wonder, why don’t they give money for adoption services and to care for mothers and babies to live better lives as opposed to ending or preventing life?

In 1968, Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, an encyclical that explains Church teaching on family planning and contraception. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that contraception is “not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality… The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle...involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality” (CCC 2370).

For the record, the Church does not teach that Catholics must have endless children. For serious reasons, people can use Natural Family Planning (NFP) to avoid pregnancy. There are even fertility monitors now that can tell a woman if she is fertile at a click of a button, and it’s 98% effective. (Read more.)