Tea at Trianon: Those Other Women in the Church

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

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Those Other Women in the Church

From The Catholic World Report:

Religious contemplatives not only sustain the Church. They remind all people that this world is not the end for which we are created. Today, in a secular culture and within a limping Church, their vocation can be difficult to fathom – especially since their chief desire is the precise opposite of those clamoring for women to have more ruling power. Religious contemplatives eschew power and Church politics; they want to be left alone to worship, to pray, and to live out the unique charism they have received from their saintly founders.

Yet amidst this storm for women’s power, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life is restricting female contemplative communities through the instruction Cor Orans, which itself is the application and clarification of Francis’ 2016 apostolic constitution on women’s consecrated life, Vultum Dei Quaerere. The autonomy of each individual monastery, long understood as essential for a community to maintain its charism, is suddenly being stripped and placed into the hands of a “Federal President” appointed by the Vatican. Individual institutes will be forced into “federations” that could require certain practices and forbid others that a monastery or institute has done for centuries.

In addition, Cor Orans doubles the required formation period of contemplative nuns to nine years, and stipulates that ongoing formation occur outside the monastery, a practice forbidden by St. Teresa of Avila in her constitutions for the Carmelite order. Should a monastery have only five professed nuns, it loses its right to elect its own superior; the Federal President would then take over. When St. Teresa opened her first monastery in 1562, she was joined by just four novices. (Read more.)