Tea at Trianon: God Wants a Repentant Church

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, August 30, 2019

God Wants a Repentant Church

From Crisis:

The evidence is very compelling: when the episcopate is rooted in modernism and eschews a repentant Church for a relevant one, all the metrics (baptisms, confirmations, marriages, priestly ordinations, numbers of men and women religious, children in parochial schools and religion programs, etc.) display precipitous decline. That’s why Germany is in a freefall and the Catholic Church in America is fast becoming, in many places, in its metrics and sensibility, “mainline Protestant with mitres.”

For a prelate like Blaise Cupich who promotes the Francis Revolution while he shutters churches and finds a major shortfall in his budget, the question is: How’s that workin’ for you?

Africa is flourishing because it has chosen, for the most part, to be a Repentant Church. They are doing what sociologist Dean M. Kelly wrote about nearly half a century ago in explaining why conservative churches grow: they make serious demands of their parishioners in doctrine and behavior. Here the Orthodox Sensibility has gained the preeminence. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn. 1:5).

The apostle James says that we have not because we ask not. The Orthodox Sensibility is a major part of Mary’s Heel and we should ask Our Lady to expand it in places where the Modernist Sensibility currently reigns so a Repentant Church can be born. (Read more.)