Tea at Trianon: How Socialism Infiltrated the Church

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 30, 2022

How Socialism Infiltrated the Church

From TFP:

To understand the crisis inside the Church, one must first look at the processes that led to the present situation inside the Church. The roots of this crisis extend much farther back than the times of the Second Vatican Council. It can be seen in the appearance of Christian Socialism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the first manifestations of Christian Socialism came directly from the French Revolution and thus predated social Catholicism.
During the French Revolution, there were factions that, taking the motto of “liberty, equality, fraternity” to its ultimate consequences, adopted communist positions. The most prominent representative of this trend was François-Noël Babeuf, called Gracchus (1760—1797). “The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will [be] greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.”
“His idea,” says historian Pierre Gaxotte, “is that the Revolution had failed because it had not been carried out to the end. All the measures it had taken were good. . . But this was just a first step toward the ‘radical reform of property,’ that is, toward ‘the community of goods and works.’ Obviously, full collectivism would have been dictatorial.”

For those radical factions, one had to eliminate not only the king in the State but also the “king” in society—the employer—and the king in the family, that is, paternal authority. The clearly utopian dream of a perfectly egalitarian and free society without classes, property or the monogamous family loomed then on the horizon. (Read more.)