Tea at Trianon: The Return of a Lost Tradition

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, October 23, 2026

The Return of a Lost Tradition

From Alan Liang:

For centuries, the Dominican Rite has stood as one of the most venerable and distinctive liturgical traditions in the Western Church. In the mid-13th century, as the story goes, and as highlighted by Fr. William R. Bonniwell, O.P. (A History of the Dominican Breviary, New York 1945), the young Dominican Order, scattered across Europe, wished to possess a uniform liturgy across their houses. After various attempts, the fifth Master-General of the order, Humbert of Romans, commissioned a new standard and imposed it on the order, and at the request of his successor, Bl. John of Vercelli, was confirmed by Pope Clement IV in 1267.
The Prototype manuscript Humbert commissioned miraculously survives to this day, originally kept at the convent of St. James in Paris, smuggled out during the tumultuous revolution, before being again acquired by the Dominicans in 1841, and now kept in the mother church of Santa Sabina in Rome. (Read more.)