Tea at Trianon: Lead Kindly Light: Essays for Ian Ker

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 10, 2023

Lead Kindly Light: Essays for Ian Ker

From Stephanie Mann:

One thing reading this book has done is help me decide what to read next. While I'll continue to dip in to read a chapter from Mary Katherine Tillman's John Henry Newman: Man of Letters, after reading the penultimate essay in this book New Years Eve, Stephen Morgan's "The Combat of Truth and Error: Newman and Chesterton on Heresy", I know I'll pick up Matthew Levering's Newman on Doctrinal Corruption next.
I have too many stars beside the 18 essays and articles in Lead Kindly Light to discuss them all. Of course, I appreciated the three biographical offerings in the first section, "Along the Way of Life: Reminiscences", especially Bishop James Conley's, since he was our pastor at both the Newman Center at WSU and at Blessed Sacrament.

Of "The Trinity of Cardinals", I enjoyed hearing the "voice" of Cardinal Pell so clearly in his contribution, adapted from his Saint Thomas More Lecture in Oxford in November of 2021.

All four essays in the "Some Devotional Theology" section were excellent: Father Geissler, FSO on Newman's appreciation of the great charisms of Saint Paul, Father Beaumont, CO, on Newman's patron as an Oratorian, St. Philip Neri; Sister Dietz, FSO (another Newman scholar Bishop Conley brought to Wichita, and who returned to give a Newman Lecture at Newman University several years later; she also met me, my late husband Mark and the late Father William Carr at one of the fountains on St. Peters's Square in 2002 to lead us to the bus for a visit to the Newman Centre of the Spiritual Family the Work in Rome!!) on Newman's growth in belief and devotion to the Holy Eucharist; and Father Jones, OP, tracing Newman's exploration of Mary, the Mother of God, as the New Eve. (Read more.)