Tea at Trianon: On the Urgent Need for a Militant Catholicism

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 9, 2025

On the Urgent Need for a Militant Catholicism

From Radical Fidelity:

There is no shortcut to sanctity. There is no Christianity without the Cross. Holiness is a thousand decisions daily, each one a cut, until you bleed out for Christ. And yet, we live in a time when the very notion of suffering is considered pathological, something to be treated, numbed, or medicated out of existence. The modern world, including not a few within the Church, has declared war on pain—and in doing so, has declared war on Christ. To reject and avoid a path of suffering is to reject the Gospel.
Christ did not flee suffering; He ran toward it. His entire mission was to embrace the wood of the Cross and be lifted upon it. “I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptized,” He said, “and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:50). Archbishop Fulton Sheen, recognizing the soldierly soul of Our Lord, declared that victory over evil would come only through “the glad acceptance of suffering.” Not resignation, not mere endurance—but gladness. Joy in pain. This is incomprehensible to a culture raised on convenience, consumerism, and comfort. It is especially incomprehensible to the average modern Catholic, whose soul has been disarmed by softness and seduced by the false gospel of comfort.
The disease of effeminacy, long warned against by saints and doctors of the Church, has become epidemic. St. Thomas Aquinas defines effeminacy as the vice by which a man “shuns what is hard because of an attachment to pleasure” (ST, II-II, Q.138, a.1). In simpler terms, the effeminate man cannot endure discomfort—he recoils at fasting, avoids discipline, shrinks from confrontation, and flees from spiritual hardship. This is not just a moral weakness; it is a spiritual defect that cripples the Church’s ability to form saints. It breeds men who are unwilling to be martyrs, husbands who will not sacrifice, fathers who will not lead, and priests who will not preach the truth. This is the kind of man who scrolls through his phone looking at the lives of the rich and filtered, addicted to envy, lulled into acedia by social media’s satanic liturgy of vanity.
We are living under the threefold tyranny of the modern mind: pleasure, safety, and self-worship. These idols rule the culture and now increasingly infect the Church. Christ calls men to take up their cross and follow Him; the world calls them to take up their remote, take another bite, and follow their impulses. We are told suffering is to be avoided at all costs, and in place of mortification we are given mindfulness; in place of fasting, self-care; in place of penance, pop psychology. Catholic men have exchanged the hairshirt for the gym shirt and pretend they are warriors because they lift iron instead of spiritual burdens. They are more formed by dopamine than by discipline. They have learned to fear discomfort more than they fear Hell. (Read more.)