Tea at Trianon: Mistakes of Modern Catholic Parenting

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

Saturday, August 15, 2020

Mistakes of Modern Catholic Parenting

From Leila Miller:

When parents go soft on the moral law in a misguided attempt to “love” the child and make him “feel accepted,” the parents end up looking just like the same world that embraced, er… devoured the child in the first place. This is a recipe for losing the spiritual battle, not winning the child back. When even a particularly devout parent with good intent (usually the mom) convinces herself that “I will push him away if I don’t accept his choices!” or is terrorized by thoughts that the child will kill himself if she doesn’t go along (a common fear), Satan has his firm foothold. Things go downhill from there, and the enemy snares not only the child, but the whole family.

After all, the child cannot become the prodigal if the parents go out into the pig slop with him.

How can a child come back one day when the path to Truth has been rubbed away by parents who thought they were being compassionate and empathetic? There will be no refuge remaining for the child who regrets and seeks to turn around, because there will be no foundation to come home to. The parents themselves may not realize what is happening until it’s too late. And by the time the parents realize that they, too, are out of the Church (at least practically, if not yet formally) they may not even care anymore. They may have already started to blame the “mean, unloving Catholics” for “pushing us away from Christ,” or they may have already rejected a Church that “needs to change with the times”—even as it is they who have rejected Christ, of their own volition and by their own fear, neglect, and laxity. (Read more.)