Tea at Trianon: Christian Burial Through the Ages

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, November 17, 2023

Christian Burial Through the Ages

From Catholic Exchange:

Care of cemeteries has a long pedigree within Catholicism. It is well known that during the age of the persecutions, Christians maintained their own cemeteries in the famous catacombs, subterranean chambers cut out of the earth. These tombs were cared for by a special class of craftsmen known as fossors, or fossores in Latin. Fossors performed a variety of tasks, most notably digging the passages within which Christians would bury their dead. A famous fresco of a 4^th century fossor known as Diogenes was discovered in the 1700s during the excavations of Antonio Boldetti. An inscription identifies Diogenes as a fossor while the image shows a man holding a pickaxe (a reproduction of the image can still be seen in Rome’s St. Marcellino church today).[1] (Read more.)