Tea at Trianon: The Counter-Reformation: Ignatius and the Jesuits

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

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

The Counter-Reformation: Ignatius and the Jesuits

From The Catholic World Report:

Loyola is a castle at Azpeltia, located in the Pyrenees Mountains. It was there that Iñigo, as he was then called, was born, in 1491. His background was military, and he fought briefly against the French in Pamplona. A serious battle injury brought him back to his native castle and confined him for weeks. He was a worldly sort and would love to have occupied his hours reading romantic novels. Instead, only two books, on the lives of the saints and the life of Christ, were available. The biographies of the saints began to fascinate him, make him think of the uselessness of his own life up to that point, and provoked the interior question: If such acts of spiritual heroism were possible in the lives of others, why would they not be possible in his?

A hunger for God began to overtake him by degrees, and after a time he resolved to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat. Sometime during the course of that visit he determined that thenceforth he would lead a penitential life and his stay in the nearby small town of Manresal where he experienced solitude and prayer, confirmed his desire all the more. He made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and then studied in Barcelona, Alcala, and, finally, at the University of Paris, where he received the Master of Arts in 1534. Still his fervor did not slacken. At Paris he was to meet companions who were like-minded in spiritual outlook and whose names would become well known in Jesuit annals: Francis Xavier (a Spanish Basque like Ignatius), Favre, Laynez, Salmeron, Rodriguez, Bobadilla. Together they would become “the Company”, the first Jesuits, defenders of the faith in heretical times.

On the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, August 15, 1534, these men professed their vows in the chapel of Saint Denis on the hill of Montmartre in Paris. They vowed to work for the glory of God. They agreed that when they finished their studies and became priests, they would go to Jerusalem together, but if they could not go there in a year, they would go to Rome and offer to go anywhere the Pope deemed necessary. Their hopes of going to Palestine would not be realized, but other needs quickly became apparent. (Read more.)