Tea at Trianon: Even Peter Nods

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, February 1, 2022

Even Peter Nods

From Crisis:

Having the power to teach or to govern or to sanctify, therefore, is a charism that only Christ can confer, and one whose exercise, particularly in the papal office, requires at every turn, “a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith.
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.
So many temptations, as it were, are served up by the spirit of a fallen age, and their very insidiousness will need especially to be resisted by Christ’s Vicar. The example of his saintly immediate predecessor came instantly to mind. Here was someone, said Benedict, who, “in the face of erroneous interpretations of freedom,” nevertheless stood tall in the saddle, insisting without the slightest equivocation upon “the inviolability of the human being and of human life from the moment of conception until natural death. The freedom to kill,” about which John Paul II simply would not compromise, “is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being to slavery.” (Read more.)