Tea at Trianon: A Less Romantic Catholicism

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, February 2, 2023

A Less Romantic Catholicism

I come from a long line of people from Ireland who suffered a great deal to keep their Catholic faith. So I have always had misgivings seeing bloggers and authors advertising the Catholic faith as cool, happy or enjoyable. While our faith is a source of joy and peace it is not always tangible for it is a joy and peace not of this world. From The American Conservative:

The author of Rome ou Babel rightly points out the absurdity of accusations of colonialism against Europeans when they speak of the Christian sources of their own civilization. The Argentine displays here what demographer Eric Kauffmann has called “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” According to Francis, there are cultures that are allowed to care about their identities—the cultures of migrants coming to Europe—and those, like Europeans, whose concern for their own identity amounts to a sin.

Dandrieu shows that this immigrationist turn did not begin with Francis. The consideration of the issue exclusively from the point of view of migrants, without taking into account the societies that receive them, can already be seen in Pius XII's apostolic constitution, Exsul Familia. The questions of how the scale of migration or cultural background of the newcomers affects host societies are absent in it.

Catholicism's globalist turn begins in earnest in the 1960s. John XXIII saw mass immigration as a sign of a new era, and in his encyclical Pacem in terris argues that the current evolution of the world requires global institutions to govern the world. Despite the fact that he developed his own theology of nations, John Paul II also regarded mass migration as a process that, as he proclaimed on the occasion of World Day of Migrants in 1987, would create “a new world… founded on truth and justice.”

The late Benedict XVI defended Catholicism's European roots, but also associated it with certain messianism, as on World Day of Migrants in 2011, when he claimed that migration is “the prefiguration of an undivided City of God.” In his encyclical Caritas in veritate, as Dandrieu reminds us, he expressed one of the basic globalist tenets: the belief in the necessity of global institutions that would attend to the common good of all mankind and implement its unity.

Dandrieu argues that Catholicism is succumbing to the temptation of Babel that Benedict XVI—whose message was more multifaceted than Francis’s globalist messianism—warned against. The author illustrates this “babelism” with the words of William T. Cavanaugh, an American Catholic theologian. In an interview with the magazine La Vie, when asked whether nationalism and Catholicism could be reconciled, the American replied that "‘Catholic’ means universal, and the Catholic Church is the first truly global organization, so any segmentation is a violation inflicted on the Catholic nature of the Church." (Read more.)