Tea at Trianon: Distributist Principles and Catechetical Formation

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, April 20, 2022

Distributist Principles and Catechetical Formation

From The Catholic World Report:

People who are serious about handing on the faith to the next generation, whether they are in Catholic parishes or schools, have been frustrated by the same problem: the widening gap between faith and the daily lives of their students.

To be sure, this is no novel issue. Back in the 1950s, Joseph Ratzinger diagnosed it as a new paganism lurking beneath the Catholicism of the time. He says, rather frankly, “she is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but actually have become pagans.” At the time, Ratzinger conjectured that “the modern man today, when he meets someone else anywhere, can assume with some certainty that he has a baptismal certificate, but not that he has a Christian frame of mind.” The latter is certainly true, but the former is becoming less certain.

Discouraged parish ministry leaders or school personnel need not despair. They can, I believe, bridge the gap by drawing inspiration from 20th-century distributist economists Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton and their call for a redistribution of the “means of production.” In the case of catechesis, formators need to redistribute the “means of formation” to parents. (Read more.)