Tea at Trianon: What To Do When Scandals Abound

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

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

What To Do When Scandals Abound

From Catholicism:

“Woe to the world because of scandals,” said Our Lord. “For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh” (Matt. 18:7). Later, the Apostle takes up a related theme: “For there must be also heresies: that they also, who are approved, may be made manifest among you” (1 Cor. 11:19).
In explaining Our Lord’s utterance in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Bishop Challoner comments there must needs be scandal, “considering the wickedness and corruption of the world.” Similarly, he comments on Saint Paul’s statement about heresies in this wise: “By reason of the pride and perversity of man’s heart; not by God’s will or appointment; who nevertheless draws good out of this evil, manifesting, by that occasion, who are the good and firm Christians, and making their faith more remarkable.”
Scandals abound in our day. We are being treated to one scandal atop another, in heaping mounds — “pressed down and shaken together and running over” (Luke 6:38), to borrow words Our Lord used in a happier connection. And I don’t mean in the temporal society we inhabit, but in the spiritual society of the Church, which is in itself a safe vessel upon which we can traverse the stormy seas of the sinful world. Fiducia Supplicans, coming out just before Christmas, introduced a new layer of moral ambiguity into the growing corpus of non-infallible magisterial texts, a bit of confusion that will have to be remedied when clarity and lucidity once again become marks of magisterial documents. Shortly after that scandal, and the online brawls it generated, an exposé was published of its author, in the form of disturbing extracts (entire chapters) from a text Victor Manuel Cardinal Fernández wrote when he was a priest of thirty-six years old. “Disturbing” is a euphemism. The passages that were made public (without authorization; Fernández himself suppressed the book), are frankly lewd and highly objectionable on many levels both moral and theological. Out of decency, I will not reproduce them here. (Read more.)