Tea at Trianon: Kazakhstan’s Only Seminary

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, September 29, 2022

Kazakhstan’s Only Seminary

From Aleteia:

In 1991, Fr. Dumoulin was a priest of the Diocese of Monaco and a teacher at the Faculty of Theology in Lugano, Switzerland. When John Paul II secretly asked the institute in Lugano to train the bishops of the Soviet Union, Fr. Dumoulin came forward because he was a Russian speaker.
Fr. Dumoulin then gave courses to various bishops, including the bishop of Kazakhstan who, at the end of his stay, invited him to teach back in Kazakhstan. Unprecedentedly, behind the Iron Curtain that was gradually opening, Fr. Dumoulin gave courses to Kazakh teachers of the history of religions. The information was even announced by the country’s official radio station.
He noticed “a great thirst.” Out of around 50 students, about 20 asked to be baptized. “That deeply moved me,” he says. “There was an incredible sense of expectation in those years.” (Read more.)