Tea at Trianon: Nuns and Religious Professions

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

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Nuns and Religious Professions

The Liturgical Arts Journal:

Hence it must be stated that nuns are part of the earliest history of the Church. The first Catholic nun was Our Lady, the Blessed Mother. She leads the way, and was followed by others during the apostolic age, including St. Mary Magdalene, whom legend avers fled the Holy Land amid persecutions, arriving on the shores of France at the fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer where she evangelized in the Roman port of Marseille, and finally lived as a hermit high in a cave on a mountain ridge called Sainte-Baume.

Thus the noble vocation of professed religious sisters continues to this day. In 2017 the Filiae Laboris Mariae (Daughters of the Works of Mary) community began ad experimentum in the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph with the permission of Most Rev. James Johnston. Their original home was at an old convent at the church of St. Mary in Independence, Missouri.

The Labor Mariae sisters were founded earlier that same year by Mother Maria Regina of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, a native of Holland, who had been a religious sister for over twenty-five years. She is pictured on the left, wearing the crown of thorns on her final profession day as a member of the new community. The other sister is the newest postulant, Sr. Maria Gratia of Canada. (Read more.)