Tea at Trianon: Building a Catholic “Civilization of Love”

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, March 13, 2021

Building a Catholic “Civilization of Love”

From The Public Discourse:

It is important to observe that we aren’t deriving these notions independently. We are relying expressly on the teaching of the Church. Paragraph 2105 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting Dignitatis Humanae, says: “The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially. This is ‘the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ.’” We happily affirm the civil liberty with respect to religion defined in the Catechism and Dignitatis Humanae, while noting that both documents insist on limits to that liberty related to “the common good” and “the objective moral order.” Too often the Church’s teaching in these matters has filtered down to the faithful as a kind of social and political indifferentism, and this is simply not reflected in the documents.

Regarding this “objective moral order,” Pope St. John Paul II wrote with approval of “theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man’s free obedience to God’s law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God’s wisdom and providence.” Here he refers to the order of creation itself, not any particular political order, but of course all authority ultimately participates in God’s authority. If that authority is to be just, it must reflect the divine order in which it, by the godlike nature and dignity of human reason, participates. Thus, again, we find ourselves choosing not between “theocracy” and a free marketplace of religious ideas, but between justice and injustice.

Now, it is true that modern societies suffused with Catholic faith and identity have often not fared well. However, the contexts in which the faith collapsed in Quebec, Iberia, Western Europe, Ireland, and so on, are so different that it’s difficult to draw a conclusion from them—unless the conclusion is that influencing politics and culture as anything more than a special interest group is intrinsically dangerous to the faith. But this claim contains an important unstated premise: that societies that never tried to be Catholic are doing better. Meanwhile, one of Peters’s examples of what is practical for Catholic politics in modern America is “cracking down on child pornography.” If this is the battlefield that generations of “prudent compromise” have left us to fight on, then it’s hard to see why we should prefer that strategy over alternatives. (Read more.)