Tea at Trianon: Fighting Catholic Gaslighting

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

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Fighting Catholic Gaslighting

From Crisis:

My point is that we must fight this gaslighting. We are not being disobedient when we kneel for the Eucharist or sing Gregorian chant or ask to attend the Mass that nourished our ancestors for centuries. The good news is the long run is on our side. As Mass of the Ages shows—and I can’t urge you enough to see it—the Traditional Mass is the one doing what Vatican II hoped for: filling the pews with prayerful participation of Catholic families, especially the youth.

The movie Gaslight ends with Ingrid Bergman realizing she has been sane all along and refusing to help Charles Boyer, who is carried to prison after his plot has been foiled. It may not be until our grandchildren’s or great-grandchildren’s time (after all, we’ve had sixty years of gaslighting), but we shall be proved sane, and there will be a happy ending. (Read more.)

From The Catholic World Report:

Loss of Latin: To be sure, the Council Fathers opened up the possibility for a greater use of the vernacular (e.g., in the Scripture readings, prayer of the faithful), but they were quite clear that Latin should not only be retained in the liturgy but that the faithful ought to be able to respond to the Latin prayers and sing the venerable Gregorian chants.¹ Every major religion retains a place of honor for a sacral language, lest the pedestrian override the sacred.²(Read more.)

Also from The Catholic World Report:

Many of the people who now call themselves traditionalists and who harbor some or all of the positions outlined above were people who a mere ten years ago would have been content with being called “conservative JPII Catholics”; they harbored no such deep resentments toward the Council and were quite adept at making the proper distinctions between the Council as such and the often silly adaptations that came after. They understood the need for ecclesial obedience and cohesion in the face of an increasingly hostile culture and found in Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI great figures of cultural resistance and stalwart defenders of orthodoxy. Some of them were active in the “reform of the reform” of the liturgy and were not the implacable enemies of the Mass of Paul VI they later became. The Lefebvre folks existed but were an extreme and marginalized minority and their “soft schism” was rejected by almost all conservative Catholics as a dead end. These conservative Catholics understood that there were still deep pathologies in the Church and much more work needed to be done, but there was confidence in the authority of Rome, that the center would hold and was holding, and that the Church would survive the centrifugal forces threatening to rip her apart so long as the Rock of Peter held firm.

What happened? (Read more.)