Tea at Trianon: The Springtime That Never Came

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

Thursday, June 30, 2022

The Springtime That Never Came

From One Peter Five:

The genre of a book-length interview has drawn many into its alluring clutches, and understandably so: it is a relatively easy way to write a book. Just pose a lot of timely, interesting, important questions, mixed in with some prompts for welcome autobiographical ruminations, to a person who likes to talk, and voila!, within some weeks or months, a manuscript will come forth. Thus, John Paul II published Crossing the Threshold of Hope in 1994.[1] More recently, Cardinal Sarah burst onto the scene with The Power of Silence, God or Nothing, and The Day Is Now Far Spent. Cardinal Burke joined in with Hope for the World and Cardinal Müller with the unimaginatively named The Cardinal Müller Report. Unfortunately, even Jorge Mario Bergoglio has entered the fray with meandering interviews that almost no one will read.

Unquestionably, the finest entries in the genre since Ratzinger are the book-length interviews of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, the lowest-ranking of all of the figures mentioned and yet the most bold, most logical, most comprehensive, and most traditionally Catholic of them.[2] Perhaps being an auxiliary bishop in the Siberian region has its advantages. Bishop Schneider, no stranger to readers of OnePeterFive, first did a major interview in 2018 with Dániel Fülep, Catholic Church, Where Are You Heading? (English translation available for free here). After that, two major interviews have been released in print: Christus Vincit, with Diane Montagna (Angelico, 2019), which currently has nearly 1,000 reviews at Amazon; and the book I am reviewing today, The Springtime That Never Came, with Paweł Lisicki (Sophia, 2021). I had the privilege of reading this text before it was published and must say that it is a sheer delight from start to finish, a worthy successor of Christus Vincit that develops further the argumentation of the earlier interview and covers new ground as well. It is a must-read.

The interviewer, Paweł Lisicki, is a major journalist and intellectual in Poland, an outspoken critic of liberalism in politics and in the Church. At the same time, he is a philosophical melancholic who would fit well in a Dostoevsky tale.[3] His personality shows in the questions he poses to Bishop Schneider, which are ruggedly honest, at times even slightly polemical, as if he wants to push the good bishop as hard as he can with the objections that can be raised either against the claims of the Catholic Church or against the solutions proposed by traditional Catholics. This is valuable: it means there are no lobbed softballs.

The “live” character of the book is well preserved. As Lisicki notes in his engaging introduction, the conversations took place in person, were recorded, and then transcribed. Pretty much everything was on the table; I cannot think of a single “hot topic” that was not broached.[4] The book is divided—a little arbitrarily, given that certain topics resurface throughout—into eleven chapters: 1. When Misfortune Looms; 2. What About Celibacy?; 3. The Gnostic Threat; 4. The Illusion of Progress; 5. Protestant Sources; 6. The Leftist Face of the Church; 7. How Many Religions Are True?; 8. Between Heaven and Hell; 9. Automatism and Anthropocentrism; 10. The Rupture of Continuity; 11. In an Orderly Formation. (Read more.)