Tea at Trianon: The American Creed

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, July 4, 2021

The American Creed

From Archbishop José H. Gomez at Angelus:

I am still struck at how the Catholic beginnings of this country are ignored in the telling of American history, even in otherwise excellent books. As I pointed out in my own 2013 book, “Immigration and the Next America,” such histories are not wrong, but they are incomplete. History is what holds us together as one nation. How we remember our past shapes how we understand where we are at in the present, and helps define our meaning and purpose as a people. We are in a period of deep division in our country. Not surprisingly, our anxieties about the present are playing out in fierce debates — in school boards, legislatures, and the media — over the meaning of American history and how to tell our national story.
Recovering the story of America’s “other” founding — which occurred more than a century before the Mayflower, Madison, and Jefferson — can help us see beyond our present polarization. Beginning in the 1500s, missionaries from Spain were proclaiming the love of Jesus Christ to indigenous peoples from present-day Georgia and Florida to Texas and lower California. French missionaries were consecrating the lands from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico to the Virgin Mary. (Read more.)

julygirl said...: The failure of the Catholics who explored this Country to make any outstanding mark in the history books is that they did not create any serious colonization. A few cities around the Country such as, San Antonio Santa Fe and St.Augustine for example, bare the trappings of their early Spanish heritage, and one could say the same thing about the French presence and influence being overlooked. But we all know who wrote the history books from which the every day student in public education derive their history, it was not the Catholics.; July 4, 2021 at 6:59:00 PM EDT