Tea at Trianon: Advice to a Young Woman

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

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Advice to a Young Woman

From Crisis:

Do not confuse career with vocation. Career is at best something nested under and within your vocation, or maybe “career” is just a dubious modern concept. Either way, a career is not a life-path unto itself. This is why you need to take vocational discernment seriously rather than fixating on a career. To be sure, God’s timing is God’s, not ours. But don’t get distracted by the illusion that a career is a vocation; it is not. Don’t front-load your career quest and thereby push the vocation question into becoming an afterthought that you plan to get around to “someday.”

Two basic facts are before us: your body is designed to bear and raise children right now—not in ten years, but right now—and God created you as a human being, not a career automaton. In God’s creation of you, He loves you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you, and He has explained what He wants you, indeed each of us, to do with this adventure of human existence. First, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and, second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

This means that God calls every one of us to be holy. Our Catholic tradition gives us two main paths to aid in this: religious life and the sacrament of marriage. Then, within one of these, comes discernment of a particular path with a built-in community so that we can help each other stay oriented to the vertical love of God and also exercise day in and day out the horizontal call to love others. (Read more.)