Tea at Trianon: The Beatification of Sr. Wanda Boniszewska

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

Thursday, November 12, 2020

The Beatification of Sr. Wanda Boniszewska

From Catholic News Agency:

The beatification cause of a Polish religious sister who was tortured by Joseph Stalin’s secret police and reputedly bore the stigmata opened Monday. Cardinal Kazimierz Nycz inaugurated the diocesan phase of the cause of Sr. Wanda Boniszewska in the chapel of Archbishop’s House, Warsaw, Nov. 9. Boniszewska, who died in 2003 at the age of 96, was a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of Angels, a habitless Polish religious community founded in 1889. Her “Spiritual Journal,” published in 2016, recorded her mystical experiences between 1921 and 1980. Commentators have drawn parallels between the work and the “Diary” of Polish saint Faustina Kowalska. (Read more.)