Tea at Trianon: The Sainthood of Sarah Miles

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, June 25, 2026

The Sainthood of Sarah Miles

From Word of Fire:

As we read Greene’s novel, we discover that the new love pursuing Sarah is not a would-be adulterer but a hound of heaven. We learn that in a moment of desperation—namely, when she thought her beloved Bendrix dead in a bombing raid—Sarah uncharacteristically prays to God, offering that she will end her affair if only the Lord will spare her lover’s life. When the bloodied Bendrix appears in her doorway moments later, alive and unmaimed, Sarah finds herself in the startling position of trying to keep a promise to a God she didn’t know she believed in, unmoored from the only man she loves. Like so many of us, she finds herself navigating a sometimes confusing and uncertain call to holiness amid her own very human pain and weakness.

And yet she slowly, imperfectly, allows God’s grace to work in her life, albeit in a state of earthly suffering. As Katy Carl tells us, “We find in Sarah that rarest of literary creatures: the believable saint—a character whose authentic holiness feels real to us, in part because we have also seen her at her lowest.”

This notion—the believable saint—is much more than simply a literary rarity. It is, in fact, a common reality, one that Pope Francis made sure to draw our attention to. In Gaudete et Exsultate, he reminds us that the communion of saints may include more than those we venerate as a Church. It “may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones.” It may include “our next-door neighbours,” patiently persevering in raising their children, in working for their families. It may include a “middle-class of holiness,” saints that “may not always have been perfect, yet even amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord.” This, of course, proves to be the case with Sarah Miles, as the characters in our novel find themselves witnesses to inexplicable miracles linked to her intercession after her untimely death. Mrs. Sarah Bertram Miles, with all her faults and failings, still made it to the communion of saints. (Read more.)