Tea at Trianon: Conformed to the Blessed Cross

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, August 22, 2021

Conformed to the Blessed Cross

From Crisis:

On the 14th of May in 1940, following a massive invasion four days earlier by the German High Command, Holland was forced to surrender, along with Luxembourg and Belgium, each fated to spend the next five years in a state of brutal subjugation under the heel of the Third Reich. Wholesale deportations soon began, especially of Jews, who were routinely rounded up and sent to Concentration Camps where most of them perished in gas ovens. By the summer of 1942, the bishops of Holland were ready to mobilize. They issued a sweeping public condemnation of racial barbarity that so infuriated the Nazis that they ordered the arrest and deportation of all Catholics of Jewish descent, including a Carmelite nun by the name of Edith Stein and her sister Rosa, both of whom would die at Auschwitz on the 9th of August.

She had long foretold her end, however, writing her Superior three years before for permission to become a Victim Soul in order to help atone for the sins of the world. “Dear Mother,” she began,

I beg your Reverence’s permission to offer myself to the Heart of Jesus as a sacrificial expiation for the sake of true peace…I know that I am nothing, but Jesus wills it, and he will call many more to the same sacrifice in these days. (Read more.)