Vow of Louis XVI

Here is an English translation of the Vow of Louis XVI made in the Tuileries palace in the spring of 1791:

Well dost Thou see, O my God, the great sadness that oppresses my heart, the grief that wounds it and the depth of the abyss into which I have been cast. I am assailed by countless evils from all sides. To the oppression of my soul, the horrible tragedies that have befallen me and my family add up to those that cover the whole extension of the realm. The clamoring of all the misfortunate and the moans of our oppressed religion reaches my ears, and an inner voice suggests to me that perhaps Thy justice holds me accountable for all these calamities for not having restrained, during the days of my power, their main causes, which are the people’s licentiousness and the spirit of irreligion, and for supplied heresy, now triumphant, its weapons by favoring it by laws that gave it redoubled strength and enough boldness to dare anything.
 
O Jesus-Christ! Divine Redeemer of all our iniquities, today I come to find relief for my soul in Thy Adorable Heart. I call to my aid the tender Heart of Mary, my august protectress and Mother, and the assistance of Saint Louis, my advocate and the most illustrious of my ancestors. Open Thyself, adorable Heart, through the most pure hands of my powerful intercessors, receive benignantly the vows of which confidence inspires me and that I offer Thee as the frank expression of my sentiments. If, as a consequence of Divine goodness, I were to recover my liberty, my crown and royal power, I solemnly promise:

1. To revoke at once all the laws that will be indicated to me by the Pope, or a Council, or by four of the more learned and virtuous bishops of my realm, as contrary to the purity and the integrity of the Faith, and contrary to the discipline and the special jurisdiction of the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church; and especially to revoke the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

2. To take, within a year, all the necessary measures to establish, with the approval of the Pope and the episcopate of my realm, and in accordance with canonical standards, a solemn feast in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to be celebrated forevermore throughout all France on the first Friday immediately after the eight days following the Feast of Corpus Christi and to be always followed by a general procession. This feast will be celebrated in reparation for the outrages and desecrations perpetrated in our holy temples by schismatics, heretics and the bad Christians in these times of so great turmoil.

3. To go in person on a Sunday or a holy day within three months of the day of my deliverance to the Church of Notre Dame of Paris, or to any other principal church in the place where I will be at that time, to pronounce a solemn act of consecration of my person, my family and my realm to the Sacred Heart of Jesus next to the main altar after the Offertory of the Mass and through the hands of the priest, promising to give to all my vassals an example of the worship and the devotion due that adorable Heart.
4. To erect and adorn within a year of my release and at my own expense, in the church that I will choose, a chapel or an altar to be dedicated to the Sacred Heart, which will stand as a lasting monument of my recognition and limitless confidence in the infinite merits and inexhaustible treasures of grace that this Divine Heart contains. 

5. Finally, to renew every year, wherever I might be on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, the act of consecration stated in the third point and to participate in the general procession that will take place right after that day’s Mass.

 Now I cannot pronounce this pact except in secret, but I would sign it with my own blood if necessary; and the most beautiful day of my life will be when I will be able to proclaim it aloud in the Temple.

  O Adorable Heart of my Savior, may I neglect my right hand and my own being if I were to ignore Thy benefits these my promises, if I were to cease to love Thee and place all my trust and comfort in Thee! Amen.”
  
Louis XVI, King of France

 (Read more,)

 The original French version is HERE. In the spring of 1791, after signing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy a few months earlier, King Louis XVI fell ill at the Tuileries, where the royal family were living under house arrest. His illness was undoubtedly the result of the stress of the upheavals which he had tried to prevent, as well as the fact that his conscience was troubling him about signing the Catholic Church in France over to the revolutionary government, severing the ties with Rome. Louis had signed it under duress but deeply regretted his decision immediately.

According to biographer Bernard Fay, Louis made the Vow under the guidance of his non-juring confessor, a Eudist priest Fr. Hebert. In the 1600's a Visitation nun, Saint Margaret Mary, had claimed that Jesus had requested that the King of France consecrate France to His Sacred Heart. The consecration had never been performed. So, with the help of Fr. Hebert, Louis drafted the following Vow, which he sealed in the walls of his apartments.

The Vow was not found until the palace had been partially burned by the Commune and was being torn down in 1871. It was discovered still sealed in the wall of the king's room. Louis was a locksmith and was fascinated with construction, so building a hiding place for his papers would not have been beyond him. He was known for his penchant for secrecy and his hiding of private papers from prying eyes. The fact that the Vow was not discovered until the 1870's demolishes the claim of some that it was merely a product of pious forgery during the 1814-1830 Restoration. The methodical legality of the document is typical of Louis XVI, who as an amateur cartographer was characterized by his precision and attention to detail.
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"Your Virtues and Your Kindness"

Our Lady (or perhaps the virtue of Faith, since she carries the cross) and Marie-Antoinette hold the Gospels for Louis XVI as he makes his coronation oath. The picture is accompanied by the following verse:

The hands of Divinity
Louis, sends you the crown
The scepter, the sword, the law gives to you
But it is your virtues and your kindness
Which assures you the throne in our hearts.

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Raphael and the Pursuit of Sublime and Heavenly Beauty

 

From Word on Fire:

Raphael’s drawings clearly show that the young artist learned quickly and adapted to the rapid artistic developments occurring during the Renaissance. Leonardo and Michelangelo’s influence becomes apparent in the motion, arrangement, and anatomical accuracy that began to characterize the figures in Raphael’s sketches, which he referenced for his paintings. The progression of his technique reveals that Raphael was a man who strove for perfection—and many would argue that he achieved it to the greatest extent possible within the realm of human capabilities.

Raphael’s continual refinement of his skills in the chase after excellence didn’t stop there. He went to Rome in 1508, becoming the court artist for Pope Julius II (r. 1503–1513) and Pope Leo X (r. 1513–1521). He made drawings of the ancient monuments in the city to learn the ins and outs of classical architecture. This knowledge proved useful for the School of Athens, a fresco that Raphael made for a four-part series in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Apostolic Palace.

We’ll never know how much further Raphael could have gone in his endeavors. Raphael did not enjoy the longer lives of his contemporaries, whose artwork had such a noteworthy impact on him; Michelangelo and Leonardo died at 88 and 67 years of age, respectively. Raphael left this world at 37, making the progression of his artistic career even more remarkable than theirs, at least in regard to time. In 1520, he completed what became his last masterpiece: The Transfiguration, a stunning example of his masterly orchestration of light, color, and human bodies to create a dramatic scene. (Read more.)

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Preoccupation with Sexual Sin

 From Catholic Culture:

In the rising tide of sexual immorality—or in judging the pitiful state of the world—devout Catholics tend to remember the famous statement by Our Lady of Fatima that “More souls go to hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason” (July 13, 1917). Ever since that time, we have been citing this statement as an indication that more souls go to hell for sexual sins than for any other cause. But this is not necessarily what Our Lady meant, and we will certainly not achieve Heaven simply by avoiding these sins ourselves.

It is perhaps more likely that Mary had in mind the declaration of the Holy Spirit through St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. [Gal 5:19-21]

But there are a great many self-identified Christians who, in the midst of their sexual purity, indulge in the non-sexual sins in this list. (Most of us have done so.) Moreover, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul further warns his readers: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (3:5). For Paul, in effect, it seems that the sins of the flesh are all of those sins that arise from our wayward passions—that is, the sins that are triggered by unregenerate desires of every kind, which have not been conquered and transformed through our participation in the grace of God. In this sense, we might say that “sins of the flesh” are not simply sexual sins but rather all the sins we commit when we are not living in the Spirit, in accordance with the grace of Jesus Christ. (Read more.)

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The Hardest Truth about Islam and Christianity

People often cite the fact that the Koran mentions the Virgin Mary with reverence, a fact which never stopped a single Muslim from kidnapping and enslaving millions of Christian women and girls in harems for over a thousand years. And the rape of "infidel" women is not seen as a sin from the Islamic point of view. From Patrick Novecosky:

Relations between the papacy and Islam stretch back more than 1,300 years to the era of Pope Donus in the 7th century, when the rapid expansion of Islam transformed the Christian world. What followed was not primarily dialogue, but conflict. Muslim armies swept through formerly Christian lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Europe responded with the Crusades. Constantinople fell. Naval battles like Lepanto became defining moments of civilizational struggle. For much of history, Christianity and Islam encountered each other not in shared spaces of worship, but on opposing sides of war.

That history does not dictate the future, but ignoring it doesn’t lend clarity to the present.

The Catholic Church’s modern approach to Islam largely dates to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Its declaration, Nostra Aetate, marked a turning point, stating that the Church “has a high regard for the Muslims,” who worship the one, merciful God. It called for both sides to move beyond past hostilities and work together for justice and peace.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church builds on that framework. It teaches that Muslims, “together with us, adore the one, merciful God” and are included in God’s plan of salvation. That’s pretty remarkable language, especially when viewed against centuries of conflict. They reflect the Vatican’s deliberate effort to emphasize common ground and reduce religious hostility.

But they do not erase fundamental differences.

Islam rejects the Christian understanding of God as Trinity, denies the divinity of Jesus, and does not accept the central claim of salvation through the cross and resurrection. These are not minor disagreements. They go to the heart of what each religion believes about God and humanity’s relationship to Him. Any serious discussion of Christian-Muslim relations must grapple with that reality. (Read more.)

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The Death of Jacques de Molay

 

Awhile ago I listened to a fabulous book on the Templars by historian Barbara Frale, who spent years researching in the Vatican secret archives. Templars were not ordained to the priesthood but professed vows like monks. They were accused of heresy by King Philip IV of France. The Templars were absolved of the accusations of heresy by the Pope, only to be executed by King Philip. Philip wanted the wealth of the Templars and would stop at nothing to get it. The execution of the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and his brethren was in violation of Church law, rather like the execution of St. Joan of Arc. When Jacques de Molay was bound to the stake on an island in the Seine near Notre Dame de Paris, he asked that his arms remain free. While burning, the Grand Master lifted his arms towards the spire of Notre Dame, offering his life to Our Lady, as once his order had been completely consecrated to her. From Dominic Selwood:

In Paris, King Philip immediately saw that the tide was turning against him, and that he needed to do something decisive. He therefore summoned the bishop of Sens and forced him to re-examine the Templars in his diocese. When 54 Templars insisted on their innocence, the bishop dutifully denounced them as relapsed heretics.

As Philip had known all along, a heretic who confessed was welcomed as a lost sheep, given penance, and reconciled to the Church. But if the penitent then slipped back into the heresy, he had rejected all grace, spurned salvation, and was a direct threat to Christian society.

On the 12th of May 1310, as Philip knew he would, the bishop of Sens burned the 54 Templars alive. This appalling cruelty gave Philip the shot in the arm he needed. The remaining Templar resistance petered out.

The sorry tale was drawing to a close. In October 1311, the long-awaited Council of Vienne opened to give final judgement. The evidence did not amount to much. The only Templars who had comprehensively confessed to Philip’s 127 charges were the ones tortured in his dungeons or those in territories loyal to him. There were virtually no confessions from abroad.

True to form, Philip showed up to threaten Clement with physical violence unless he shut down the Templars. There were protests from the other church delegates, who felt the Templars had not been given an opportunity to defend themselves. They also pointed to the suspicious similarity of the charges with those Philip had recently brought against the dead Pope Boniface VIII. None of this helped Clement, who threatened anyone who spoke further with excommunication.

Finally clear to impose Philip’s will, in March 1312, with Philip and his son flanking him, Clement issued the bull Vox in excelso. Citing the irreparable damage done to the Templars’ reputation, he pronounced judgement with a formula that completely sidestepped the question of innocence or guilt:

We suppress, with the approval of the sacred council, the order of Templars, and its rule, habit and name, by an inviolable and perpetual decree, and we entirely forbid that anyone from now on enter the order, or receive or wear its habit, or presume to behave as a Templar. (Vox in excelso)

It was over. All that remained was to tie up the loose ends. Templars who had confessed crimes were sentenced to imprisonment. Those who had remained silent were sent to other religious Orders.

To draw down the final curtain, on the 18th of March 1314 the four most senior living Templars were hauled to Paris. On a rostrum erected on the parvis before the great cathedral of Notre-Dame, they were publicly condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Hugues de Pairaud and Geoffroi de Gonneville accepted the sentences in silence. But Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney stunned the crowd by talking over the cardinals and professing their innocence and that of the Temple.

The electrifying news was rushed across the city to King Philip at the Louvre. Desperate to crush this dangerous new defiance, he abandoned all legal procedures and ordered the two old Templars to be burned without delay.

So as dusk fell and the canons of Notre-Dame lit the candles and incense for the lucernare before Vespers, the provost of Paris’s men torched two nearby pyres and sent de Molay and de Pairaud up in smoke alongside the canons’ prayers.

A royal chaplain eyewitness described de Molay’s last words (in verse):

“God knows who is in the wrong and has sinned. Misfortune will soon befall those who have wrongly condemned us; God will avenge our deaths. Make no mistake, all who are against us will suffer because of us. I beseech you to turn my face towards the Virgin Mary, of whom our Lord Christ was born.” His request was granted, and so gently was he taken by death that everyone marvelled. (Geoffroi de Paris)

Rumours began to circulate that, at the end, de Molay had also shouted out, summoning Philip and Clement to meet him within a year and a day before God, where they would be judged for their crimes. (Read more.)

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Good Friday

From Daniel Mitsui.

The Reproaches (Improperia)

I.
1 and 2: My people, what have I done to you
How have I offended you? Answer me!
1: I led you out of Egypt,
from slavery to freedom,
but you led your Savior to the cross.
2: My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!

1: Holy is God!
2: Holy and strong!
1: Holy immortal One, have mercy on us!
1 and 2: For forty years I led you
safely through the desert.
I fed you with manna from heaven,
and brought you to a land of plenty; but you led your Savior to the cross.
Repeat "Holy is God..."
1 and 2: What more could I have done for you.
I planted you as my fairest vine,
but you yielded only bitterness:
when I was thirsty you gave me vinegar to drink,
and you pierced your Savior with a lance.
Repeat "Holy is God..." 

II.
1: For your sake I scourged your captors
and their firstborn sons,
but you brought your scourges down on me.
(Repeated throughout by Choir 2)
2: My people, what have I done to you?
How have I offended you? Answer me!
1: I led you from slavery to freedom
and drowned your captors in the sea,
but you handed me over to your high priests.
2: "My people...."
1: I opened the sea before you,
but you opened my side with a spear.
2: "My people...."
1: I led you on your way in a pillar of cloud,
but you led me to Pilate's court.
2: "My people...."
1: I bore you up with manna in the desert,
but you struck me down and scourged me.
2: "My people...."
1: I gave you saving water from the rock,
but you gave me gall and vinegar to drink.
2: "My people...."
1: For you I struck down the kings of Canaan.
but you struck my head with a reed.
2: "My people...."
1: I gave you a royal scepter,
but you gave me a crown of thorns.
2: "My people...."
1: I raised you to the height of majesty,
but you have raised me high on a cross.
2: "My people...."

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Blessed Karl, Clericalism and Lay Church Governance

 From Charles Coulombe at One Peter 5:

In many ways, Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King Franz Joseph epitomised the traditional relationship between the lay and clerical powers of the Church. As with the other Crowned Heads of Europe, he had inherited a particular style of Catholic devotion peculiar to his own dynasty – the Pietas Austriaca. Bound up with a veneration of the True Cross and the Passion, the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph (the family patron), this religiosity had led to the tremendous collection of relics at the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace in Vienna. The Maundy Thursday Footwashing and the Corpus Christi procession were highlights of court life in Vienna, and in 1898 Franz Joseph led the Imperial Family in observing the Consecration of All Mankind to the Sacred Heart, led by Leo XIII in Rome. In the canon of the Mass, the Good Friday Collects, and the Holy Saturday Exsultet, the Emperor was prayed for by name.

Franz Joseph was crowned and anointed King of Hungary in 1867. As Emperor-King he appointed the Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops, subject to Papal approval. Exempt from this were Salzburg and Olomouc, their metropolitans being elected by the cathedral chapters, and the former ‘Salzburg dioceses’ of Seckau, Lavant, and Gurk. The Archbishop of Salzburg had the right of appointment for Seckau and Lavant, the occupation of Gurk was regulated in a mixed manner, that is, the Emperor proposed two candidates, the subsequent nomination was made by the Archbishop of Salzburg. The Nuncio had to be consulted to make sure that the choice was not obnoxious to the Pope – either disapproval would derail the process; the separate Austrian and Hungarian ministries of Worship and Education would do the research, but it was Franz Joseph who had to approve the choices, both for Latin and Eastern Rite Catholic Bishops. Moreover, he had to bear in mind that some of his appointees would sit in one or more legislatures within the Monarchy.

There were three national parliaments. In the Upper House – House of Lords (Herrenhaus) of the Austrian Parliament could be found the prince-archbishops of Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, Görz, and Olmütz, the archbishops of Lemberg and Zara, the Byzantine Catholic archbishop of Lemberg, the Armenian Catholic archbishop of Lemberg, and the Greek Orthodox archbishop of Czernowitz, as well as the prince-bishops of Brixen, Breslau (although located in what was then Germany, for the diocesan territory in Austrian Silesia), Krakau, Seckau, Trient, Laibach, Lavant, and Gurk. In the Hungarian Upper House, the Főrendiház or “House of Magnates,” had an even higher proportion of ecclesiastical members – although it was also more interfaith than Austria’s: forty-two dignitaries of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, including the Primate, Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, and various other high officials, and thirteen representatives of the Protestant confessions. The annexation of Bosnia in 1908 presented a challenge in creating representative institutions for a region that had never known them. But while Bosnian diet (Sabor) would only one have one house, it would also have religious representatives appointed by the Monarch. These were, in deference to the Muslim majority, the Reis, who was the principal of Muslims’ granted lands, and the Muslims’ regional leader from Mostar; four Metropolitans and the president of the Orthodox community; the Catholic archbishop and two province members of Franciscan order of Bosnia and Herzegovina; and the Sephardic rabbi of the higher order. The various provincial diets in the Austrian half of the Monarchy also numbered the local Catholic bishops in their number.

Another religious duty that Franz Joseph took very seriously was that of funding missions – even though Austria-Hungary had no colonies. The Catholic Church in Scandinavia, Albania, and Bulgaria (Latin and Byzantine in that case) was heavily funded by the Emperor, as was the Church in the Holy Land and Egypt (the Coptic Catholic Church was funded from its beginning thereby, and Franz Joseph paid for the building of the Latin Catholic Cathedral of St. Catherine in Alexandria, where, ironically, the remains of  his wartime enemy King Victor Emmanuel III would rest until their recent repatriation to Italy). But since 1826, very largely out of funds given by both Franz Joseph and his two immediate predecessors, a large amount of this largesse went to the Church in the United States. Through an organisation called the Leopoldinenstiftung – the “Leopoldine Foundation” – the Habsburgs and many of their subjects poured millions of dollars into the American Church, founding 400 parishes, subsidising wholly or partly 300 missionaries (such as St. John Neumann and Ven. Bishop Baraga), and sending an endless flow of vestments, statues, stained glass, liturgical implements, and the like. A great deal of dynastic money went to Eastern Rite churches in the United States as well. Unfortunately, the outbreak of war in 1914 ended the flow of generosity – which, of course, would be repaid by Woodrow Wilson’s insistence of the deposition of Franz Jospeh’s successor, his exile, and the partition of his domains. (Read more.)

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Lady Day

 

 From A Clerk of Oxford:

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, 'Lady Day'. As I explored last year, the medieval church considered 25 March to be the single most important date in history, at once the beginning and the end of Christ's life on earth: it was the date of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the eighth day of Creation, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the sacrifice of Isaac, all profoundly meaningful events in the carefully-crafted divine story of salvation history. Its resonances reached even unto Middle Earth, as Tolkien aligned the downfall of the Ring to this most auspicious of dates. (Read more.)

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"The Vision of St. Joseph" by James Tissot

What a wonderful angel! Via East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

"I am poor, and in labors from my youth and being exalted, I was humbled and troubled." Psalm 87:16

Joseph of Nazareth

On a joiner's bench

You ply your trade.

Hands calloused

Fingers nimble.

Wood chips and shavings

At your feet.

Sawdust

In your beard.

You sing

The song of your people

Longing

For the Face

Of Him

Who is to come.

Joseph of Nazareth

Of David's line

You sing

The wedding song.

"My sister, my spouse

Is a garden

Enclosed..."

Virgin husband

Of the Daughter of Sion

You prepare a

Dwelling

For the Stainless One.

Joseph of Nazareth

In sweat of anguish

You ponder

Another Joseph

Thrown in the cistern.

Your song

Becomes sad.

"Save me

O God

For the waters

Are come in

Even unto

My soul..."

You sing

Then fall silent.

Sleep comes

With the breeze

That stirs

The curls of wood...

And then

The voice: 

"Joseph, Son of David,

Fear not...."

By a Carmelite tertiary Share

Marie-Antoinette's Library at Versailles

All of the Queen's books were bound in red Moroccan leather and stamped in gold with her coat-of-arms

From Les Carnets de Versailles [translated by Tea at Trianon]:

Several handwritten catalogs, written between 1781 and 1792, list the Queen's books: nearly 500 titles, for a set of around 1,800 volumes. We find on the shelves of Versailles all the great authors, Latin and Greek classics as well as French and foreign writers. The ancients...but also La Fontaine, Boileau, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Regnard, Crébillon, Destouches, Madame de Sévigné, Madame de La Fayette, Lesage rub shoulders with the contemporaries - Voltaire, Rousseau, Beaumarchais , Goldoni, Defoe, Mme Riccoboni, Fielding, Richardson…

Marie-Antoinette had a certain predilection for romantic literature, entertaining works, theater and music. It also has a large music library (scores and booklets) supplied by the Menus Plaisirs. The more austere books, less appreciated by the sovereign, are not overlooked: theology (Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Nicole), history (Mézeray, Montfaucon…), science (Buffon, Nollet, Duhamel du Monceau …) are present on the shelves. There are also large volumes of travel and archeology, illustrated with magnificent engravings.... 

Like many of the Château's collections, the books formerly stored in the Queen's library have been scattered. The shelves today hold a deposit from the National Library of France, composed of 18th century works, of royal origin, selected for their binding in red morocco. Some books with the arms of Queen Marie-Antoinette were nevertheless able to return to the site, in particular the two acquisitions made in 2019: an Office of the Virgin, printed in 1771 by Michel Lambert, and Les Lacunes de la philosophie, by François Louis d ' Escherny, published in 1783. (Read more.)

Faux bookshelf disguising a door panel

More on the Queen's library, HERE. Marie-Antoinette also had a library at Petit Trianon, HERE and HERE.

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St. Joseph: The Model of Manhood

March is the month of St. Joseph. From The Catholic Gentleman:

Why did God choose St. Joseph? Of all the thousands of Jewish men, many of whom no doubt were righteous, why was a humble carpenter chosen for the task of being the earthly father of the Savior? The answer is simple: God knew St. Joseph would immediately do anything that was asked of him, no matter how difficult.

The saints agree that conformity to the will of God through prompt obedience is one of the surest paths to holiness. St. Joseph exemplified this virtue, and a perfect example is the flight into Egypt. The angel of the Lord appeared to St. Joseph in a dream, warning him of the danger that was coming. Scripture then tells us that, “When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt.” Did you catch that? The minute he woke up, he obeyed. He didn’t let fear of uncertainty paralyze him, he didn’t spend weeks planning, and he didn’t save up some money first. He took Jesus and Mary and left for Egypt, entrusting his family to the providence of God. That is prompt obedience, and that is why  St. Joseph was entrusted with the greatest responsibility ever given to a man. (Read more.)

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Virgin of the Rose Bower

The enclosed garden: “Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee.”

 From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

The painting by Stefan Lochner is among the most concentrated visual expressions of the western iconographic prototype we call the “hortus conclusus”. The phrase is drawn from the Bible’s Song of Songs that begins, “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse…” It has always functioned in Christian spiritual theology as a Marian title, signifying virginity, purity and the inviolate womb in which the Incarnation took place.

In the later Middle Ages, the hortus conclusus prototype was increasingly visualised using the forms of fashionable private pleasure gardens familiar to the aristocracy and urban elite. This convergence allowed Marian images to appropriate the language of cultivated leisure: enclosure, refinement, ordered nature, while reorienting it toward chastity, contemplation and sacred presence.

Our word “paradise” derives from the Old Persian pairidaeza, meaning an enclosed garden or walled park, a term that entered Greek as paradeisos and then Latin as paradisus. Originally denoting royal pleasure gardens, the word was adopted in the Septuagint to translate the Garden of Eden, permanently linking enclosure, order, and cultivated beauty with the biblical vision of divine dwelling. (Read more.)

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Ecce Agnus Dei

 

The Franciscan answer to the Catharist heresy. From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

These icons were in the line of a movement that started in the 12th century of showing the physical and real suffering and death of Christ on the cross that led to the naturalistic depictions of the crucifixion we’re familiar with today. The intention is to generate an emotional response of pity, empathy, sorrow and repentance in the viewer. And this is part of a greater spiritual movement that was later to be popularised by the new mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, who emphasized the importance of Christ's human and physical suffering and our own ability to “enter into” and participate in it through our affections. Of course, the creation of sacred art is a key component of this kind of evangelisation.

 [...]

As such, the artistic development of these paintings over the following 200 years would be part of a larger and permanent change in the way Christians thought about Christ, their ideas of having a genuine affective relationship with a real person, who knew pain and understood them at a visceral level. The Italo-Byzantine and Duecento panel paintings showing Christ in agony only intensified as more natural looking figures were created.

Master of St. Francis. Perugia National Gallery. It’s impossible for a photo to do justice to it. It smacks you in the head when you walk into the very large room it’s housed in. At least 12 feet tall. You have to stand on the other side of the room to take the whole thing in.

And this movement, in both spirituality and art, is thought by some scholars as a response to the materialist ideas of the Cathar heresy1 that was spreading in Northern Italy and southern France at the time. In the early 12th century the idea that Christ was just a man and His death was of no redemptive significance, were growing.

The Cathars adopted the ancient Manichaean dualistic ideas of two gods; an evil god who created material reality and a good god who created spiritual beings like angels and human souls. The soul was entrapped in the material body and had to be released by a process of spiritual purification and ultimately death. Catharism rejected Catholic sacraments and authority, including the Bible, and its popularity ultimately threatened the political and economic stability of Europe.

Of course this all meant that the Cathars also rejected the redemptive value of the crucifixion, holding that Jesus was just a human being, perhaps inspired by the Holy Ghost, and that the only way to be “saved” was to free the soul from the evil material world. (Read more.)

 

My novel on the Cathars, HERE.

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A Road Trip to Avalon

 

 

Some young knights on a quest. From The Saxon Cross:

Glastonbury is a weird town. For two thousand years it has been the spiritual center of England. For a long time this was because Glastonbury Abbey was the largest and most powerful monastery on the island. But while the monastery has long lain in ruin, the town is still very much a spiritual center. The town is chockfull of New Age shops, druids, neo-pagans, witches and occultists. Something very real draws this sort of person to the town, and I think some of them are genuine seekers. Of course, they’re looking in all the wrong places, but the power they feel is real. Glastonbury is a Christian holy place and that power still pervades the ground.

First we walked the ruins of the great abbey. This island is littered with the ruin of the work of the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII. During King Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries the abbey fell into disrepair, and its last abbot was draw, quartered, and hanged on Glastonbury Tor in 1539. Glastonbury then ceased to be the center of Christianity in the isle, and the blood soaked into the ground has been crying out ever since. The ruins of the monastery are hauntingly beautiful. It is also the purported site of Arthur and Guinevere’s graves, although this is one legend that I think may have been fabricated in the Middle Ages. On the abbey grounds still live the last of the Holy Thorns, the sacred trees that bloom on Christmas Day, that are said to have been brought to the isle of Avalon by St. Joseph of Arimathea.

 On our way up to the Tor we stopped to drink from the Chalice Well, also known as the Red Spring. There are two versions of the legend of this holy well. One claims that St. Joseph buried the Holy Grail inside the Tor, and from it sprang the well. The other claims that he buried two vials, one filled with Christ’s blood and the other with His tears, and from these sprang the Red and White Springs respectively, the White Spring being another holy well just across the street from the Chalice Well garden. Whatever the truth is, the water is full of iron and indeed tastes like blood. Inside the chalice well garden at the foot of the Tor we were met by another one of our companions, Jake, which seemed like a fitting and symbolic place to meet on a spiritual quest. Together we prayed and drank from the well, and then ascended the Tor together. As we began our ascent a rainbow broke out across the sky, crowning St. Michael’s Tower. (Read more.)

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The Tortured Soul of Léon Bloy

 From Angelus:

Although he is considered the father of the “Catholic” novel, Bloy is more famous for quotations extracted from them and from his brilliant and controversial journals published during his lifetime.

One journal was titled “Pilgrim of the Absolute,” which also became Bloy’s honorary title. Another, called “Bloy Before the Swine,” included a harsh depiction of his life in a Paris suburb. Those whom he’d turned to in his abject poverty and helped him probably agreed with another honorific, “The Ungrateful Beggar,” which was the title of another volume. His thought was that he could not compromise his writing or vocation, and expected others to support him in what publishers and the public refused to do.

It is a cliché that a prophet’s mission is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But that seems to have been Bloy’s modus operandi.

France had responded with enthusiasm to the 1846 apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to two young visionaries in the hamlet of La Salette. Its message of repentance was embraced by many but became controversial, even though the local bishop and the Vatican supported the claims.

But one of the visionaries, Melanie Calvat, felt that the message of Our Lady was not being correctly reflected and prophesied a coming disaster for the French Church. Her ideas resonated with Bloy, who became Calvat’s advocate and challenged the French hierarchy and the congregations who served as chaplains on the mountain where pilgrims visited the shrine built to mark the apparition. In his typical absolutist style, he said what had started with the charism of repentance associated with La Salette was now a matter of “hoteliers and merchants of soup,” because of the guesthouses run by the congregation on the “holy mountain.”

His identification with the cause of Calvat was a reflection of Bloy’s sympathy with those who were on the losing side of life. He also published defenses of Columbus and Napoleon, both of whom he judged maligned by historians.

Perhaps most quixotically, he believed, or wanted to believe, that the son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, known to history as Louis XVII, had somehow survived imprisonment by Jacobin revolutionaries and lived in the Netherlands, missing all the action of the Napoleonic regime and the Bourbon Restoration. Bloy was fascinated with the idea that the powers of Europe knew the true heir to the French throne was alive and feared his possible restoration. (Read more.)

 

My novel about Louis XVII, HERE.

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The Coventry Carol

Christmas is tinged with sorrow. From A Clerk at Oxford:

Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child.
By, by, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight,
All young children to slay.

Then woe is me, poor child, for thee,
And ever mourn and may,
For thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

The Coventry Carol is among the medieval carols most often heard today, and I find the popularity of this profoundly sad song at Christmastime intriguing. As John of Grimestone's lullaby suggests, there are actually a considerable number of medieval lullabies which share the mood of the Coventry Carol: somewhere between lullaby and lament, full of melancholy and pity for the child being comforted, whether it's Herod's victims, the Christ-child, or any human baby born into a weeping world. (Here's another beautiful example.) I wonder if the popularity of the Coventry Carol today indicates that it expresses something people don't find in the usual run of joyful Christmas carols - this song of grief, of innocence cruelly destroyed. Holy Innocents is not an easy feast for a modern audience to understand, and I'll confess I find the medieval manuscript images of children impaled on spears just horrible - but then, they are meant to be, and they're horrible because they're all too close to the reality of the world we live in. The idea that this is incongruous with the Christmas season (as you often hear people say) is largely a modern scruple, I think. It's our modern idea that Christmas is primarily a cheery festival for happy children and families - our images of Christmas joy, both secular and sacred, are all childlike wonder and picture-perfect families gathered round the tree. This is very nice, of course, for those who have (or are) children, or happy families, but for those who don't - those who have lost children or parents, who face loneliness or exclusion, who want but don't have children, family, or home - it can be deeply painful. (Read more.)

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A Renowned Medievalist, Poet, and Fencer

Professor Rachel Fulton Brown from the University of Chicago. From The European Conservative:

Conservatives need to stop letting the Adversary define the terms of the debate, starting with the concept of sin. The very concept of sin is anathema to modern feminism, convinced as it is that men are to blame for all the woes of human existence. I exaggerate, but only slightly. The gender debate, such as it is, is a debate about where to place blame for the differences between the sexes, with women claiming that they should be able to behave like men sexually while at the same time blaming men for behaving like men. The upshot is that everyone is unhappy, blaming each other for not being empathetic enough to anticipate each other’s every need. There is no antidote because nobody is willing to acknowledge his or her role in creating the situation, famously encapsulated in that moment in a certain garden when, convinced it would give them power to overcome their own nature, the first woman and the first man ate of the fruit they had been forbidden to eat thinking it would make them “as Gods” (Gen. 3:5). This original sin of disobedience has, according to Christian teaching following the Apostle Paul, defined human nature ever since: women being persuaded that God lied to them about who they are, and men going along with the women like so many Macbeths.

And yet, into this tale of sorrow comes the Virgin Mary, our second Eve, who rather than fighting God’s will for her, consents to become the Mother of God. Mary’s obedience presents modern feminism with an insurmountable challenge. Was this not rape, as so many have argued; after all, how could Mary have possibly said, “No”? Everything hinges on this question. In the 12th century, Mary’s consent would become axiomatic for the sacramental definition of marriage: just as God would not have taken flesh from the Virgin without her consent, so both the bride and the bridegroom must make verbal consent (“I do”) to their marriage. Ironically (our story is filled with irony), from a Christian perspective, the feminist rejection of patriarchal marriage is a rejection of the one institution founded on a woman’s God-given right to say, “No,” precisely because God did not rape the Virgin Mary, but rather sent his messenger to obtain her consent (“Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum,” “Let it be to me according to your word,” Luke 1:38).

But why did Mary say, ‘Yes’? ‘She was special, alone of all her sex; nobody could be as perfect as she,’ reply her feminist sisters. ‘She sets an impossible ideal.’ To me, as a daughter of Eve, this has always sounded like envy: ‘I wish I could be as beautiful and beloved as she.’ Modern women will deny it, but their taste in romance literature suggests otherwise; likewise, the sorrow they express at not being able to find the man of their dreams who will treat them like the queen they know (and tell each other) they are. As I have tried to show in my scholarship, what they fail to appreciate is how much their fantasies depend on stories told about the Virgin Mary, specifically, stories told about the Virgin Mary through commentaries on the Song of Songs in which stories Mary is given the role of the bride pursued by the bridegroom to become his beloved queen. “You are all beautiful, O my love, and there is no spot in thee,” the bridegroom tells her (Song 4:7). “My soul melted when he spoke,” she tells her companions (Song 5:6). “One is my dove, my perfect one is but one, she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her,” he tells his associates (Song 6:8). Every modern romance novel that casts the hero as elusive, strangely powerful, ancient and brooding draws on this tradition; every woman who imagines herself pursued by a loving God-man is heiress to the medieval tradition of mystical longing. (Read more.)

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Jesus Christ the Apple Tree

It is St. John's day, which is the name-day of my late father. This early American carol was one of his favorites. It invokes images of Eden and the lost earthly paradise, while bringing to mind the Tree of Life which is the Cross. From Hymns and Carols of Christmas:

1. The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.
2. His beauty doth all things excel:
By faith I know, but ne'er can tell
The glory which I now can see
In Jesus Christ the apple tree.
3. For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought:
I missed of all; but now I see
'Tis found in Christ the apple tree.
4. I'm weary with my former toil,
Here I will sit and rest awhile:
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the apple tree.
5. This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the apple tree.

From The Thinking Housewife: "The lyrics were written by an unknown poet in the 18th century and call to mind the tradition in the Middle Ages of decorating Christmas trees with apples, symbolic of the Tree of Knowledge." (Read more.)

The Tree of Life and Death

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The Sacred Earthiness of Christmas

 From George Weigel at First Things:

Christianity begins in a real place, at a specific point in time in which real men and women met an itinerant rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth—and after what they had thought to be the utter catastrophe of his degrading and violent death, met him anew as the Risen Lord Jesus. The lives of those real men and women were so transformed by these encounters that they, in turn, went out and got to work on the task the Risen One gave them: to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). 

The earthiness of the Christmas story—the manger, the stable, the “swaddling clothes,” the stolid oxen and lowing cows, the bewildered but kindly shepherds, the exotic Magi from the East and their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the child’s circumcision—underscores this core Christian conviction: The Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the “Word” through whom “all things were made” (John 1:1, 3), entered history through the cooperation of a Jewish girl and her overshadowing by the Holy Spirit, and was born at a precise moment in time at a precise place. Whether “the first cuttings of His infant hair” really are in Rome’s Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem may be beyond historical verification; the real point being made in such claims is that the incarnate Son of God really was at one point in his life among us, an infant who had an infant’s hair and all the other attributes of a weak and defenseless child. 

Ditto for what is really being proposed by the “napkins,” the cradle, St. Joseph’s blanket-cloak, and all the rest: He whom Christianity proclaims as Lord and Savior, the One who fully reveals both the truth about God and the truth about our humanity’s dignity and destiny, was not a character in some virtual reality “metaverse” constructed by Mark Zuckerberg. He was here, on this third planet of the solar system. And he is still with us: in the Scriptures proclaimed, and above all in the holy bread broken and shared. (Read more.)

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