Tea at Trianon: Evangelizing the Post-Christian Culture

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

Monday, April 11, 2022

Evangelizing the Post-Christian Culture

From Dr. Esolen at Crisis:

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley saw the phenomenon and satirized it; Orwell, grimly and mercilessly, Huxley, happily and mercilessly. It was the Two Minutes Hate instead of the Angelus. It was Orgy-Porgy with soma-spiked ice cream instead of the Eucharist. In neither dystopian world do we get any great art, or even any genuine folk culture. And, if we dispense with the dramatic exaggerations, that is where we in the western world are right now.

I bring these matters up because of the strategy the Church has taken, all my life long, toward evangelizing the current world. “Strategy” is, in this regard, an ugly term. But if you must be a calculating politician, you should at least be able to calculate. If you are going to reduce evangelism to an advertising campaign, you should at least know how to grab people’s attention. We have been like tacticians who have never heard of a flank attack; who play tic-tac-toe, and not very well, while the enemy is playing like Mikhail Tal. (Read more.)