Tea at Trianon: Our Lady of Champion Painting Will Be Unveiled at the National Eucharistic Congress

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, July 17, 2024

Our Lady of Champion Painting Will Be Unveiled at the National Eucharistic Congress

From National Catholic Register:

Our Lady will have a place at the National Eucharistic Congress (NEC) — including under the title Our Lady of Champion. A new painting showing Our Lady appearing to Belgian immigrant Adele Brise — the Church-approved apparitions involved three appearances of Mary in the Wisconsin woods in 1859 — will be unveiled at the NEC before it is enshrined Aug. 15 at the namesake Marian shrine.

This notable painting will make its main debut in a smaller reproduction at the NEC in Indianapolis. In a way, this national event helped inspire the painting. One of the representatives of the congress was leading an initiative and working with churches and sacred places around the country to commission new sacred art to beautify the spaces of prayer in Indianapolis. After the congress, these new works, the planning dictated, would “go home” to their permanent places in the church or shrine that commissioned them.

When the representative presented the possibility to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, the shrine thought it was “a wonderful idea to create more art surrounding Our Lady of Champion’s apparitions in the United States and to encourage artists to use their God-given talents to bring awareness to Marian devotion in the United States,” said Chelsey Hare, director of communications at the shrine. (Read more.)