Tea at Trianon: Death Clarifies What We Love

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

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Death Clarifies What We Love

From Church Life Journal:

In the midst of increasingly intense and competing narratives within the church and without—but especially within it—Rosemary, my Gram, reminds us that the Little Way is always possible. We can always choose to love. The simplicity of such a decision should not prevent us from grasping either its difficulty or its profundity. It is love that clarifies our thinking, not more thinking. It is love alone that can dissolve that inveterate bias native to our nature. Love is always the encounter of a person, preeminently Jesus of Nazareth, as Benedict XVI and Francis never cease to remind us, but through him it is also the desire for encounter with everyone else. Love alone rents asunder our petty and self-serving horizons and holds out to us the beautiful possibility of loving God with God’s own love. A love wherein we become capable of earnestly desiring the good of our neighbors and capable of the sacrifices it would demand.

Rosemary was a model of that kind of love and so she is a model for all of us living in the meanwhile, the time between confusion and clarity, between injury and healing, between the earnest desire for peace and its accomplishment. Her life invites us, has invited me, to consider how to live amidst the coming-of-age that is the story of our own lives no less than those of our grandparents. Caught between serious questions and their answers, between the Gospel and a secular age that further unlocks its inner riches, between faithfulness and selfishness; such a predicament demands that we earnestly and honestly seek clarity, but it also demands that we often live before it is reached. Is not the testimony of our sacred texts that we must gradually become certain kinds of people through sacrifice before we can “see” and “hear” and “understand” the fullest answers to our deepest questions? At least then, as we drive back and forth making our Little Way, let us not forget to love in the meanwhile. (Read more.)

From National Catholic Register:

There is, nonetheless, often the notion that doctrinal fidelity is somehow in tension or even at odds with pastoral concerns. The truths of the faith, so the thinking goes, are not as important as the unqualified welcoming of all. It is as if the purpose of the Church is to create a safe space. This is both wrong and dangerous. The Church should never be satisfied to leave a person in his or her sin. This is a false idea of love and a disservice to the sinner. We are called to love the sinner so that he or she may live within the light of truth, a reality that is both liberating and one that saves. This is much more difficult for the person accompanying the sinner than simply letting him or her stay in their sin, but it is essential. True love calls for a change in heart — ask any husband or wife. A good spouse demands more from the other than he or she would give on his or her own. (Read more.)

From Crisis:

The biggest threat facing America today isn’t China or Russia. It’s not radical sexual or racial ideologies, nor globalism and widening economic disparities. No, all of these threats, however real and legitimate, all dim in comparison to a much graver menace to our shared future: the dramatic decline in citizens’ religious affiliation and belief. A recent anti-religious op-ed by the Washington Post’s Kate Cohen hints at what awaits an America untethered from Christianity.
“In America, you have to opt out of religion in public life. That’s backward,” reads Cohen’s provocative title. Citing a number of examples, from court-mandated addiction recovery programs, to the language of the Pledge of Allegiance, to abortion restrictions, Cohen claims that it is “backward” that the religiously unobservant are the ones who must opt out of various aspects of American civil life that retain, however tenuously, a religious character.
She approvingly quotes a recent legal argument that Americans have the “absolute right to live free from the religious dictates of others.” She adds: “But as long as this country’s default setting is religious—both culturally and politically—we have to fight for it.” (Read more.)