Tea at Trianon: Is God Using Communism to Punish Us?

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

Thursday, May 14, 2026

Is God Using Communism to Punish Us?

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

In his 1948 book Communism and the Conscience of the West, Bishop Fulton Sheen argues that Christianity and communism have similar world views. Christianity contains the truth about our lives, teaching us that love of God and neighbor, respecting the natural law, and the anticipation that we will have to battle real evil in this world. It is bluntly realistic. Communism is a distortion of Christianity. It makes the individual, in Sheen’s phrase, “a robot,” a slave to unstoppable historical and economic forces, which will result in utopia - if only after a lot of violence.
Yet both Christianity and Communism see the world as the spiritual battleground that it is. Sheen respects Communism more than he does liberalism, which seeks comfort and virtue without any real battle.“Thought utopian and violent,” Sheen wrote, “Marxism reveals a better insight into the historical process than liberalism, which saw peace coming without a struggle and which denied that even a relative Easter of economic order would come without the Good Friday of self-sacrifice and effort.”
Sheen goes on to argue that “the Gospel for the last Sunday of Pentecost and the Gospel for the first Sunday of Advent are gospels of catastrophe, they proclaim that the final era of peace will not be ushered in until the final conflict between good and evil, when God shall come to judge the living and the dead and the new city of Peace will be descending from the heavens.”
Sheen also points out that the Russians learned Marxism from German intellectuals:
As many a parent who educated his child in an extremely progressive school, where the child equated freedom with doing what he pleased, is now the parent who wants to know what to do with his recalcitrant, alcoholic, neurotic son, so the Western world that taught Russia some bad ideas may soon want to know how it can be saved from a country which learned is lesson all too well. A Freudian psychoanalyst cannot help the son, so neither politics nor economics can help the Western world, for the fault is deeper; the world is under the judgment of God and needs repentance.
Sheen writes that “though Babylon fell because it was very wicked, it was nonetheless God’s instrument for disciplining the people of Judah. Assyria was bestial, but to was the ‘rod and staff’ of God’s anger against the people of Israel.” In the West, “communism may be the instrument for the liquidation of a bourgeois civilization that has forgotten God.” (Read more.)