Tea at Trianon: Cabrini (2024)

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

Monday, February 19, 2024

Cabrini (2024)

From John Zmirak at Chronicles:

What if I told you there was an exquisitely filmed and brilliantly acted new movie about the construction of one of history’s great landmarks, a building that enriched one of the world’s most vibrant cities and carried to the modern age the best of ancient traditions, uplifting all who passed through it?

Now what if I told you the film was about New York’s Pennsylvania Station? This was the grand Beaux Arts masterpiece wantonly torn down in the ’60s, and replaced with a dismal warren—an act which prompted architect and scholar Vincent Scully to say, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”

Could you even stand to watch it? Especially if you are a New Yorker, who must now crawl through those dismal tunnels under the bleak, suffocating low ceilings of that travesty now standing in the old station’s place, where the only traces of vanished beauty appear in the handrails of staircases, and haunting photographs of the former beauty hung about, as if to taunt us.

That’s how I felt watching the moving new film Cabrini. It’s a story about the Catholic Church, immigration into the United States, and the work of our country’s first saint. And it broke my heart in the same way a Penn Station movie would. We look at what once existed through eyes jaundiced by the bitter tears shed in noting what we face today.

In this film we see the young Frances Xavier Cabrini (Christiani D’Anna) first in her native, newly-independent Italy, running an orphanage she founded with the religious order she also created from scratch, despite her fragile health as an enfeebled survivor of girlhood tuberculosis. She dreams of doing even more good: She hopes to go to China and found an orphanage there, and after that intends (as she explains to a patient Pope Leo XIII, whom she managed to buttonhole) to found a vast “empire of hope,” of nun-staffed institutions caring for the needy from Peking to Persia. (Read more.)