Tea at Trianon: The Three Tongues on the Cross and The Inheritance of Christianity

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

Sunday, March 8, 2026

The Three Tongues on the Cross and The Inheritance of Christianity

From Jared Selim:

When Our Lord hung with outstretched arms upon the tormenting Cross of Golgotha, Pilate fixed a titulus above His Head. It declared before the world in the three great languages that resounded through Judea: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
These languages were Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. In the scornful inscription of the Romans, they declared despite themselves what the Jews who delivered their Messiah to death would not: the true and universal Kingship of the Logos made flesh, Filius Dei—the Son of God. As St. Jerome said, “the voices and writings of all nations proclaim the passion and the resurrection of Christ. […] the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans, [were] peoples which the Lord has dedicated to His faith by the title written on His cross.”1
If these three peoples represent all nations, then every Christian, by our baptism and life in Mother Catholic Church, enters into the Hebraic, Greek, and Roman expressions of Christ.2 The Messiah shines in the particular forms and manners of these nations.(Read more.)