Tea at Trianon: Who is Driving the Campaign Against the Order of Malta?

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

Friday, March 13, 2026

Who is Driving the Campaign Against the Order of Malta?

From The Catholic Herald:

Somebody has got it in for the Order of Malta, the 900-year-old Catholic order which maintains hospitals and runs charitable activities all over the world. In Italy, a stream of very similar articles has been appearing, beginning with an attack last October in the left-wing newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, by a journalist writing as Thomas Mackinson. In recent weeks there has been an accelerating series of articles under different names, all of them repeating the same criticisms. People in the Order’s ambit are beginning to wonder who is putting them up to it and why.
The articles accuse the Order of betraying a reform intended by Pope Francis, who wanted to bring it more into line with the life of a full religious order. The criticisms highlight the role of the professed knights – those who take the traditional religious vows – and assert that these need to be made to live in community so as to be true religious. What the articles do not explain, however, and indeed seriously misrepresent, is how the Order came to be in its present position.
The background is the crisis precipitated among the knights by Pope Francis in January 2017, when he forced the Grand Master, the Englishman Matthew Festing, to resign. The result was effectively putting the Order into the hands of its German branch, under the Grand Chancellor (effectively prime minister of the Order) Albrecht von Boeselager. The German-backed faction consolidated their control in the five-yearly elections to the Order’s government held in 2019. Of the 18 names back by this camp, all but one were elected. (Read more.)