Tea at Trianon: The Last Modern Pope

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, April 30, 2025

The Last Modern Pope

From First Things:

For me, the Francis years have the unmistakable sense of an ending, of a last hurrah. Nobody would have predicted that in 2013. To begin with, Francis was, quite simply, a phenomenon. For a while he was as unavoidable as Taylor Swift was last summer. The soundbites echoed through the media for days. The face—grandfatherly, shrewd, usually wearing a broad smile—was everywhere. The Paris Climate Agreement, the prevention of U.S. military intervention in Syria, the peaceful 2016 elections in the Central African Republic, and a surge in confessions in England were all attributed to his efforts.

Moreover, he was consistently surprising. Next to Francis, Donald Trump looked drearily predictable. Just when you were tempted to write him off as a liberal, he would poleaxe the German bishops or issue a thunderous statement on “gender ideology.” Just when you were relishing his comment that “If we don’t proclaim Jesus Christ . . . [w]e would become a compassionate NGO and not a Church,” he would release some turgid document composed in impeccable U.N.-speak. His sternest critics would find themselves floored by a public gesture of kindness or a beautiful mini-sermon on the love of God. Previously undreamed-of initiatives crash-landed on the Church: an Amazon synod; a synod on pretending not to want to change Catholic teaching on the sacraments; a synod on synodality; a ban on advertising the Latin Mass in parish bulletins; a cinematic collaboration with Wim Wenders; a deal to give the Chinese Communist party new powers over bishops and priests. Even the hideous cover-up scandals, like the Zanchetta and Rupnik affairs, had an insane, couldn’t-make-it-up quality to them. He visited sixty-eight countries, published millions of words, and rewrote swathes of canon law. This was a pontificate on a Napoleonic, a Henry VIII scale. You could almost miss, underneath it, the signs of an era coming to a full stop.

That era began in 1864, when Pope Pius IX outraged European and American opinion by condemning the notion that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” It was, of course, a thoroughly modern sentiment. As Roger Scruton observed, one definition of “modernity” is the condition in which people go around thinking about what it means to be modern. And for the 150 years after Pius’s throwing-down of the gauntlet, there was a general impression that the Church should be thinking about it a great deal, and that the pope’s job was to define the Church’s relationship to the modern world. (Read more.)