Tea at Trianon: From Feminist to Traditionalist

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

Saturday, April 23, 2022

From Feminist to Traditionalist

From The Post-Gazette:

For a girl who grew up with no stronger anchor for my identity than sharing a love of 90s cartoons with my peers, this was revolutionary. Here was a tradition of faith and reason and living with roots deeper than I could ever know. Here was something, at once deeply human and beautifully transcendent, that existed for millennia before me and will exist long after I am gone, something that can give shape and structure and meaning to my life in a way nothing else could.

It was irresistible.

When I was baptized, many friends and family assumed it was because of a boy. While it was strange for self-described feminists to deny my agency like that, it wasn’t completely wrong. I had been on this journey for years when I met the man who would become my husband, a cradle Catholic who wasn’t terribly devout, but felt similarly unmoored on the tides of mainstream culture. We became, and still are, excellent travelling partners — not through distant lands, but through the faith tradition, ever ancient, ever new, in which we feel so beautifully at home.

I was aware, as the priest poured water over my head 15 years ago, that I was making a conscious choice to belong to something — to Someone — beyond myself. A baptism is a rebirth, and as with any new beginnings, you can never tell where they’re going to lead.

Even so, I would never have believed that in 2022 I would be expecting my sixth child, that my family is one of the “very religious” ones that prays grace before every meal and a rosary every day. I change the linens at our home altar to correspond to the color of the liturgical season. My children know the saints they are named for, and with delight pick a dessert to honor their feast days. They excitedly learn the prayers of generations past in both English and Latin.

They also have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe. There are, after all, different kinds of rootedness: Going deeper into the ancient doesn’t have to exclude a healthy love of the here and now.

But it can’t end there. That, at least, is what I have learned from my own life, marked for so long by confusion and insecurity and aimlessness. I have found peace — a peace I hope to pass down to my children — in contemplating the unending depths of divine beauty, goodness and truth. (Read more.)