Tea at Trianon: Three Priests Against the Witch Paranoia

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 3, 2021

Three Priests Against the Witch Paranoia

From Aleteia:

Born in 1546 in the Dutch city of Gouda, Cornelius Loos came from a distinguished family who had to leave their home city amid anti-Catholic hostilities. He was ordained as a priest after graduating from the University of Leuven. He later received a doctorate in theology from the University of Mainz, where he would also serve as a professor.
In the mid-1580s, Loos relocated to Trier, a western German city steeped in witch-hunting hysteria. Consecutive years of inadequate harvests in the region had presented the need for a scapegoat. Soon enough, people were preoccupied with tracking down “witches.”
As one observer of the period described, “From court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, [and] constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers.”
Almost no one accused of witchcraft in Trier would escape this grisly fate, and the intensity grew so maniacal that even persons of political influence fell victim. At the same, a certain segment of the population – such as copyists, notaries and, of course, interrogators and executioners – profited considerably from the cycle of arbitrary accusation and agonizing punishment.
Dismayed by what he saw, Loos endeavored to publish a manuscript, De vera et falsa magia (True and False Magic), criticizing witch-hunters. When word circulated about this project, he was incarcerated before his manuscript could see publication.
The imprisoned priest knew that witch-hunting was a dangerous sham, and he sought to point out that confessions made under torture were inherently unreliable. Of course, numerous people these days would agree, but in that era even privately entertaining such a viewpoint required some genuine independence of thought, and expressing such a viewpoint required serious courage.
As his views were so unpopular at the time, Loos would find himself coerced into recanting his statements about witch-hunting. He eventually obtained his release from prison, but authorities would place him under ongoing surveillance (and imprison him again on several occasions) for the rest of his life. He died of the plague in 1595 at Brussels. (Read more.)