Tea at Trianon: A Matter of Holiness

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, June 27, 2022

A Matter of Holiness

From First Things:

My wife and I have a son with Down syndrome. Three of our grandchildren have disabilities that range from moderate to severe. They all deserve the gift of life. They all make their siblings more genuinely human by the treasure of their presence. So we feel an immense gratitude to San Francisco’s Archbishop Cordileone for speaking the truth and doing the right thing by excluding Speaker Nancy Pelosi from Communion in her home diocese.

Pelosi has been a high-profile, vigorous, privileged, and defiant supporter of easy abortion access for decades. Whatever her virtues may be, her record as a Catholic Christian on the matter of abortion is an icon of public hypocrisy. Thus, in our family, we feel an equally intense disgust—“disappointment” is too weak a word—for those persons both outside and, more repugnantly, inside the Church, who have criticized or attempted to undermine what Archbishop Cordileone has done. There comes a point in the work of Christian witness where otherwise-sensible concerns for prudence and the complexity of politics become indistinguishable from the temptation to fellow-traveling and cowardice. Church leaders, both here and abroad, might profitably take note.

In the Catholic context, what the Church expects from each of us in sorting through tough moral issues is to follow our consciences—but first to form our consciences intelligently and faithfully, in accord with Christian truth. Conscience needs to be fed, developed, and disciplined to discern what’s right. Then it needs to tell us what’s right, rather than what we’d prefer to hear. And what the Church asks is that, before we act, we at least make a sincere effort to consider and understand the truths that she teaches and why, and to try honestly to follow her wisdom. If we do that, we’ve done what our faith requires. This isn’t easy. In practice, it’s very hard, because serious thinking about anything is drowned out in our current culture by emotion, distraction, dumbed-down slogans, and noise.

It’s our job as Christians to remove ourselves from those things, and to think before we act, so that when we act, we do so with our brain and an examined conscience, and not just with our bile and passions and the latest distortions from our mass media. We also need to pray for our country, and for each other, because we all very obviously need it. The nation we were six decades ago, and the nation we are today, are two very distinct creatures: similar on the surface, but different in substance. One of the differences is that we’re now wrapped in a nonstop, narcoleptic haze of consumer appetite that prevents us from understanding our situation and changing it for the better.

As for the Church: Georges Bernanos, the great French Catholic writer, liked to describe her as a huge railroad company carrying people to heaven—but one that’s unhappily prone to train wrecks. Left to her human management, the Church tends to end up, in Bernanos’s words, as a giant pile of crashed locomotives and burned-out carriages. We owe our ecclesial leaders the respect due their offices and our obedience to authentic Church teaching. But it’s worth remembering that men like Gregory the Great, or Leo XIII, or John XXIII, or John Paul II, are the exception, not the rule. Most popes are good men, dedicated (if often forgettable) in their ministry. Others are less inspiring. Dante planted several bishops of Rome quite firmly in his Inferno. (Read more.)