Tea at Trianon: The Last Lambeth Conference

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, October 15, 2022

The Last Lambeth Conference

From First Things:

First, it is necessary to clarify what else today’s Communion is not and does not do. The Anglican Communion no longer holds a common teaching about the gospel. There can be no “common Anglican catechesis” (let alone a “common Anglican Catechism,” as a recent Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission recommended), because the Anglican Communion holds no gospel formation in common with the great traditions of the Church Catholic. Among the Communion’s members there can be no shared curricula, no shared seminaries, no shared ordained pastorate. Therefore, the Anglican Communion is incapable of a common evangelistic mission. Perhaps some cooperation here and there on an ad hoc, local, and personal basis, but nothing in the way of an organized, conversionary witness in a non-competitive and mutually supporting fashion. Finally, of course, this means no eucharistic communion. That fundamental sign of disunity in Christ has already been a creeping reality, given the divisions of the past twenty or so years. Such a reality would be shocking, were it not already part of the resignation that has increasingly characterized Anglicanism over the last two decades. (Read more.)