Tea at Trianon: Chaput: 'Speaking the Truth is Polarizing'

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

Friday, January 20, 2023

Chaput: 'Speaking the Truth is Polarizing'

From The Pillar:

Archbishop Charles Chaput, OFM Cap., is the emeritus archbishop of Philadelphia, and a long-time leader among American bishops. The archbishop, 78, became in 1988 the second priest of Native American ancestry to become a diocesan bishop. After serving nine years as the Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, Chaput became in 1997 the Archbishop of Denver, and was appointed in July 2011 to lead the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Chaput and the Philadelphia archdiocese hosted in 2015 the World Meeting of Families. In the same year, Chaput was a delegate to the Synod of Bishops on the Family, and was elected to a term on the Permanent Council of the Synod of Bishops in the Vatican. The archbishop, the author of four books, talked with The Pillar this week about the deaths of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell, the synod on synodality, and the Second Vatican Council. (Read more.)