"A Gripping Portrait"

A magnificently insightful review of Madame Royale by author Catherine Delors. To quote:

Thérèse alone lends dignity, and legitimacy, to these surviving Bourbons. Her allegiance to her uncle Louis XVIII silences those who raise questions about the fate of her brother, who may, or may not, have died in the grim embrace of the Temple prison. But this does not quell the demands of her conscience nor her the longings of her heart. She is racked by doubt and never abandons her quest for her lost brother.

We see Thérèse from the inside, and also as her contemporaries perceived her: a handsome, majestic woman, but also one whose demeanor is outwardly aloof, whose voice is hoarse and croaky, maybe from her long silence during her years at the Temple.

Some passages in the novel make an unforgettable impression, in particular Thérèse’s meeting with Jeanne Simon, the widow of the cobbler Simon, who had been appointed “tutor” to Louis XVII at the Temple. One could have expected a hateful description of the old lady, but Vidal, in addition to doing impeccable research, never lets us forget that revolutionaries too are human. In Mère Simon, she shows us an outwardly harsh, but uncannily perceptive woman.  She and Thérèse, across the chasm that sets them apart, are united by their love of the lost child.

There are other highlights, in particular Thérèse’s almost nightmarish return to Versailles after the Restoration, when she finds the ghosts of her loved ones haunting the gilded palace of her childhood.

The novel is a work of utmost subtlety, a quality that is nowhere more apparent than in the evocation of Thérèse’s union to her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, heir to the throne. Like every marriage, this one is a mystery to outsiders, but we feel Thérèse’s ongoing struggle to breathe life and love into it. Readers looking for romance or lurid bedroom scenes will be disappointed, but I found the complexity of the couple’s relationship entrancing.

 Madame Royale available HERE. Share

John Zmirak on Lying and Mental Reservation

I think this is one of the best posts of all on the Lila Rose/Live Action story over which Catholics are picking each other apart. To quote:

 When we speak to each other, conveying accurate information back and forth is one legitimate goal, but it is neither exhaustive nor absolute. When a wife asks her husband, "Do you think I look fat?" she isn't always even asking for a literal answer to her question. What she wants to know is often, "Do you still love me? Am I still attractive?" A puritanical, legalistic answer to such a question is often an act of cruelty, masked by self-righteous "honesty."

If we viewed information as a good, one that must be traded fairly like any other, we would see that a question asked by someone with no right to the truth -- like a Nazi murderer, or a professional abortionist -- is like a demand made at gunpoint by a robber. If someone holding a gun in your face insists you write him a check for your life savings, is it wrong for you to sign the check "Mick E. Mouse"? He has no right to your money, so you've no business signing it over to him. There is no legitimate expectation of honesty in that context, so telling the truth in fact is a violation of justice on your part. A sin. If silence isn't an option, you have an active duty to confuse, mislead, or say something untrue. It doesn't amount to lying, any more than killing a robber in self-defense amounts to murder. Such literalism is as much, and the same kind, of heresy as pacifism.

So police officers interrogating criminals, spies infiltrating conspiracies to fly airplanes into skyscrapers, soldiers using deception (rather than torture -- which Aquinas, alas, allowed) need not emulate the subtlety of the Serpent in the Garden in order to deny the truth to those who don't deserve it. We don't need to pervert our image of God such that we believe He is pleased at our Pharisaical observance of the law, even when it results in the death of the innocent. To picture God that way really is a lie, of the kind that kills the soul.

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Wye House

Wye House is the Talbot County, Maryland plantation which figured prominently in the memoirs of author Frederick Douglass as one of the places where he lived as a slave. Lately, Wye house and the slaves who lived there have figured prominently on the news, due to excavations at the old orangerie and at the site of the greenhouse. According to Discovery News:

In his eloquent autobiographies, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass described the cruelty he experienced as an African-American slave in Maryland during the early 19th century. But Douglass' descriptions may have been missing some important details about the richness of slave culture at the time.

In a greenhouse on a centuries-old estate where Douglass lived as a young boy, archaeologists have dug up a variety of both mundane objects and strategically placed symbols of spirituality. These artifacts show for the first time that slaves lived in the greenhouse and that they sustained African religious traditions, even as they probably outwardly practiced Christianity.

By analyzing grains of fossilized pollen from the site, researchers were also able to show that the slaves used a corner of the greenhouse to experiment with plants for food, medicinal and household purposes -- beginning what would become an African-American gardening tradition.

Together, the wealth of new discoveries paints the broadest picture yet of the people who slaved away on a well-known plantation for centuries. "African-American religion in the form of African traditions gave this building a second identity, one that was not described or not known by Douglass," said Mark Leone, an archaeologist at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"This is African-American culture here, both in terms of religion and agriculture, that has traditions that are still alive today," he said. "There was a whole set of concepts, ideas and practices that kept the community whole. That isn't something that could be destroyed through brutality."

The greenhouse, known as the Wye Orangery, was built in 1785. Today, it is famous for its architectural beauty, its rarity and its notable history. It is the only 18th-century greenhouse that remains in North America. It sits on a plantation, which was founded on Maryland's Eastern Shore by the Lloyd family in the 1650s and has been passed down through nearly a dozen generations of the same family since.

The plantation has been immortalized by the writings of Frederick Douglass, who lived there for a few years around the age of seven. In his 1845 book "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," the author, an ex-slave and famous orator and abolitionist, describes his time on the Lloyd plantation as full of fear and outrage. With horror, the young Douglass witnessed beatings and bloody whippings.

Now more than 150 years later, Leone and colleagues are trying to gain a deeper understanding of the slaves who kept the plantation running. For six years, the researchers have been digging on the land and probing its buildings. In their latest endeavor, they plunged into the greenhouse. As well known as the structure is, its secrets have been long hidden.

"This building has always been known to be a greenhouse and anybody could guess that slaves probably ran the heating system, but nobody could tell if slaves lived in the building or what they did beyond stoking the fire and being the laborers for the enormous surrounding garden," Leone said. "That was how we started."

As they dug below a north-facing back room, the researchers found dishes, teacups, cutlery, buttons and other objects. Those objects identified the area as a slave quarter that was occupied between about 1785 and 1820. About two inches beneath the doorstep outside the quarter's threshold, they also discovered two projectile points and a coin -- signature objects used in African religious traditions to control the coming and going of spirits. Inside, they found another religious symbol: A stone pestle mortared into the framework of the furnace by the slaves who built it.

In addition to the religious and everyday objects, the researchers were able to document an extensive series of agricultural trials conducted by the slaves who lived there. Their experiments began with medicinal plants, including Seneca snakeroot, ginger root and buckbean. They also grew broccoli, bananas and wild greens, as well as shrubs and flowering plants. By the 1820s, they were cultivating more exotic plants, including lemon and orange trees, irises, lilies and members of the rose and nightshade families. As they labored with seeds and clippings, the slaves gained a wealth of gardening knowledge that they held onto as they gained freedom and left the plantations....

The greenhouse at Wye House

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Charm School for Delta Agents

An airline has finally admitted that their employees need to learn basic social skills. According to The Wall Street Journal:

In its training program, Delta emphasizes these five ways to 'wow' fliers with customer service:

• Make it personal. Focus on the person in front of you, not the long line of people. Greet each one memorably.
• Be empathetic. Put yourself on the other side of the counter.
• Listen, ask, listen again. Customers tune out routine announcements. Agents tune out customers.
• Solve together. Involve customers in solutions by offering choices.
• Be there. It's a lot easier to check out than check in. 'If you don't remember your last three customers, you are just processing,' said Delta facilitator Michael Hazelton.

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Lila Rose: Is She Lying?

Fr. Angelo has compiled most of the key posts which both critique and defend the methods of Lila Rose and Live Action. I am flabbergasted that anyone could accuse Lila Rose of "lying" because members of her organization pretend to be pimps and prostitutes in order to entrap Planned Parenthood workers who are aiding those involved in child exploitation. By such rationale, it would be a mortal sin for undercover policemen to pretend to be drug dealers or teenagers on the internet or all the other things they have to pretend to be in order to catch criminals.

And what about spies? Even the Vatican has employed a number of spies over the years, some of the better spies, I might add. And what about all the Jesuits who went to England in disguise in order to minister to the English Catholics? Was St. Edmund Campion supposed to walk up to the local magistrate and say: "I am a Jesuit priest and I am here to convert you." NO. He pretended to be a jewel merchant. Why? Because St. Edmund, like Lila Rose, was dealing with unjust laws and criminal behavior, albeit the criminals had (and have) government approval. In a Catholic Church in southern Maryland there are several priests buried under the sacristy floor. They had come in disguise in the 16 and 1700's to help the Maryland Catholics who under British law were not allowed to practice their faith. Some of the priests are buried under their aliases because no one knew their real names. They had come pretending to be merchants and traders.

What about the brave souls who work in the underground in Communist countries? You can be sure a lot of role-playing and mental reservation goes on there. What the Live Action people do in order to entrap murderers and child abusers is brave and should be commended. I do not see how any pro-life Catholic person could think otherwise. I think there might be is a bit too much hair-splitting going on in some quarters. Scrupulosity is not a virtue. It never ceases to amaze me what Catholics will find to pick on each other about.... Share

Princess, Bastard, Queen

Stephanie Mann reviews a new biography of Queen Mary I. More on Mary from Stephanie, HERE. To quote:

Anne Whitelock does much to address some of the commonplace characterizations of Mary and her reign. The biography comprehensively covers Mary's life beginning with the circumstances of her conception and birth, the marriages arranged for her while still a little child, her education, and all the trauma of separation from her parents, the years of tension over "The King's Great Matter", culminating in Katherine of Aragon's death and later the oaths Mary was forced to swear, her conflict with Anne Boleyn and relations with other stepmothers up to Henry VIII's death (Part One: A King's Daughter). In Part Two, A King's Sister, Whitelock focuses on Mary's determination to practice her Catholic faith freely in spite of pressure from her much-loved half-brother and his council--and then covers her tremendous victory over Northumberland, demonstrating her determination and her ability to rally supporters to her cause.

In Part Three, A Queen, Whitelock even more dramatically depicts Mary's achievement in becoming the first Queen Regnant of England, dealing with a council of men who doubted her ability as a female to rule, who had supported Northumberland's coup against her or who even had bullied her to give up the Catholic Mass. Mary's courage and rousing rhetoric to persuade Londoners in support against the rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt are clearly a high point in this section, as she wins her people over again to defend her. She clearly states that her first loyalty is to her people and that she would not marry if she thought such a relationship would endanger England. They rally round her and support her, based on her expressed care and concern for them. After Wyatt's rebellion is defeated, Mary cannot afford the mercy she had shown Jane Dudley and her spouse, especially when Jane's father had taken part in the attempted coup.

In Part Four, A King's Wife, Whitelock covers the most delicate territory: the heresy trials and subsequent burnings at the stake of bishops, preachers, lay evangelicals, those who committed sacrilege in their opposition to Catholicism, heretics (by any Christian standard), and Thomas Cranmer, Mary's bete noire. She also addresses one of the saddest episodes of Mary's life when she believed, in error, that she was pregnant, preparing to deliver a child, having prayers said, anticipating that she would have an heir to succeed her. Chapter 58 is a remarkable chapter, describing Mary's wholehearted participation in bathing the feet of 12 poor women and touching the ill. Otherwise, Whitelock effectively presents details about Mary's relationships with Reginald Pole, her cousin and Archbishop of Canterbury--whom she protects from the Pope; Elizabeth, her half-sister--whom she does not completely trust and yet, preserving orderly succession, must acknowledge as her heir; and Philip, her husband--to whom she would not submit as Sole Queen of England, even though he wanted to reign equally with her.

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The New Statism

Jeffrey Tucker on the economics of Keynes. To quote:

Keynes is like Marx in that he has been refuted again and again, and every generation of thinkers declares the body of ideas dead from the neck up. It was this way with Marx in the 1890s, when German thinkers were already dismissing his ideas as defunct. But it was all premature. So with Keynes: Economists in the late 1930s wrote him off, and again in the 1940s. By the late 1950s, economists were already apologizing in advance for refuting him yet again. And yet here we are, 75 years after the General Theory appeared, and Keynes is still the man.

It's about time that someone with a voice in the Catholic world actually spoke about Keynesian theory, for this is indeed the source for just about every crazy scheme of governments to wreck the functioning of markets throughout the world. The naming of Keynesianism here falls in a great tradition, too. Popes from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI have condemned Marxism time and again, but it is not Marx who is the muse behind the current fiasco among developed economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Keynes was neither Marxist nor socialist but rather a pragmatist who had an upside-down way of viewing the functioning of markets. He saw all problems of recession as reducing to a single problem: Resources were still instead of active. This was true for labor, capital, and even money, which is why he was so intent on schemes that get people off their feet and work, get consumers spending instead of saving, and get factories coughing up products rather than waiting it out.

W. H. Hutt had it right in 1939 with his book called The Theory of Idle Resources. He argued that there are rational reasons for consumers to save and not spend, rational reasons for factories to pull back rather than squander their resources, and even rational reasons for people to hold high cash balances. Even unemployment masked an underlying rationality: Businesses might not be hiring at present wage rates, and workers are either not inclined or not permitted to lower the asking price for their labor.

Keynes would have none of it. He wanted action, busyness, production, labor, spending -- these were the key. If the public wouldn't do it, his prescription for prosperity involved a vast increase in government control over economic life using fiscal and monetary planning to "stimulate demand" and discourage saving, while believing that prosperity could be generated out of a printing press if necessary. In other words, Keynes wanted a vast coercive apparatus to goad markets into doing what he believed they should be doing, and never mind the cost.

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Ratcliffe Manor

The sign above can be seen along St. Michaels Road in Easton, Maryland. I heard that it pointed the way to one of the few "baronies" to be found in America, one of the earliest land grants on Maryland's eastern shore. I decided to explore a bit more. The "Robert Morris of London, Mariner" mentioned in the sign was a sea captain who was the great grandfather of Robert Morris the financier and signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Morris family eventually settled in Oxford, Maryland. The land grant was from Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and that is when Cecil Calvert began to make land grants again. The land grants were begun by his father, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, who was so highly favored by Charles I that he was on the Privy Council yet not required to take the Oath of Supremacy, which as a Catholic Calvert could not in good conscience do. King Charles gave George Calvert a patent in America called "Mary's Land" in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria. And so in 1659, Robert Morris received a patent of land from George's son, Cecil Calvert. Such are the origins of Ratcliffe Manor.

An Old Postcard of Ratcliffe Manor

In 1749, the Morris family sold the land to Henry Hollyday who built the manor house for his bride. As described in Hammond's Colonial Mansions of Maryland and Delaware:

It is situated in Talbot County, on the banks of the beautiful Tred Avon River, and is not far from the busy little Eastern Shore metropolis of Easton. The site of Ratcliffe Manor is such that it has a charming outlook. One sees the windings of the Tred Avon and the fine farms of this rolling, fertile country. To approach the house one drives through a long avenue of trees set in rows about one hundred feet apart, and this avenue is bounded by white bar fences of oldtime appearance. The home grounds are encircled by a fence of this same fashion and in back of the house the land is terraced, falling away to the river in graceful green sweeps. Here, too, are shrubs and flowers, while giant trees give a grateful shade from summer's sun. In exterior view, Ratcliffe Manor has a great atmosphere of comfort and content. It is not large but very well proportioned. In design it follows the Maryland convention, consisting of a central building with a wing, and the middle of the central portion is distinguished by a simple and beautiful portico and doorway.

In the interior of the house, one is again impressed with an air of comfort and good taste. The hall is small and does not continue to the back of the house. To the right of the door as you enter is the stairs. In the back of the house are two rooms,—a dining and a living room,—the latter of which opens upon the terraced garden, its avenue of ingress and egress being a doorway of exactly similar design to that in front of the house. To the left of the front door as you enter, is a little office, or study, wherein the master of the plantation in the old days interviewed his overseer and attended to the many small details of management of the place.

The rooms downstairs are panelled in hardwood and the fireplaces are very prettily carved. In the living room is a very beautiful old shell cupboard and an alcove window of rare charm. The wing of the house contains the kitchen, the servants' rooms, and the pantry.

Ratcliffe Manor, the house, takes its name from Ratcliffe Manor, a survey made in the early days of the Maryland province and part of which was purchased with other lands by Henry Hollyday, the builder, when he was making a home for himself. In his will of 1789, this Henry Hollyday leaves to his wife (Anna Maria Robins) during her life "the plantation and lands where I now live and all my lands adjoining or contiguous thereto being part of Ratcliffe Manor, part of Tilghman Fortune, Part of Discovery and Turkey Park."

Ratcliffe Manor remained in the Hollyday family into the twentieth century. The house still stands although the surrounding lands are the site of housing developments. I have not been to the house yet since it is down a wooded lane and not open to the public, but I have not given up hope of seeing it.

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Egypt and the Revolution

Professor Walter R. Newell examines the patterns of past revolutions as exemplified specifically by the French and Russian Revolutions. He points out that Revolutions usually occur when conditions are improving and makes some predictions about what will happen next in Egypt. To quote:

Since the French Revolution in 1789, revolutions have shown common features that are directly relevant to what is happening in Egypt right now. Since the final outcome in Egypt after Mubarak’s ouster– a new regime — may be weeks, even months or years, away, it is worth pausing to take the long view.

In general, the initial reformist phase of such revolutions focusing on individual rights and opportunity is swept aside by radicals who want an egalitarian and collectivist political order. Thus, liberal reformers like Lafayette and Mirabeau inspired by the American Revolution with its emphasis on individual liberty were followed by true collectivists like Marat and Robespierre. In the same manner, Kerensky was followed by Lenin; BaniSadr (if not exactly a liberal, a technocrat bent on secular modernization) by Khomeini.

The second, truly revolutionary phase is usually preceded by the delusion on the part of the liberal reformers that they can form a partnership with the radicals, harnessing their populist energy to help bring about the transition to free elections,economic modernization and individual rights. The radicals, for their part, always look on these alliances as purely tactical, to be overturned when the time was right to take over. We can predict a similar outcome for Mohommad El Baradei’s and other reformers’ opening to the Mulsim Brotherhood’s leaders.

Another consistent feature is that revolutions take place, not in the most repressive of tyrannies, but more typically in despotisms whose grip is already loosening, and where both a degree of economic prosperity and liberalization are already taking place. The administration of Louis XVI was the most liberal and reformist ever known in France; it attempted to introduce a free market system and break the economic hold of the aristocracy over the masses. Similarly, Tsar Nicholas II alternated between harsh repression and encouraging the Duma to share power with the crown; during his reign, the Russian economy was one of the fastest growing in Europe, reaching levels in agricultural production that Nikita Krushchev conceded in 1956 had still not been equaled.

In the case of Egypt under Mubarak, the outbreak against his rule was preceded by a period in which modest progress was being made in Egypt’s economic prospects and standard of living, due to a small amount of oil, a lot of tourism, and increasing foreign investment. This year the economy grew by a robust 6%. Ditto in Iran, where the Shah was committed to political and economic Westernization and secularization. Ditto in Russia, where Gorbachev’s toppling of the Soviet regime was preceded by the Brezhnev era in which Russians were finally tasting some solid economic benefits.

Common to these cases is Toqueville’s thesis of the revolution of rising expectations. Fitful and semi-effective autocratic reformers whet people’s hopes for a better future, but cannot satisfy the expectations they arouse. Their own semieffective reforms unleash the forces that overthrow them. Then the liberal reform regime is in turn swept away by the true revolutionaries, who do not want a liberal “bourgeois” revolution like the American revolution, but want to revoke both traditional authority and the half-completed modernization in favor of a populist collective.

During the flash point that signals the downfall of the autocrat, there is often a moment of truth when it becomes clear that the autocrat’s own allies, especially the military, will not take the extreme measures necessary to crush the revolt, and tell the autocrat they will not fire on the people. This happened with Louis XVI, the Tsar and the Shah....

I predict that, within a few months of a transitional reformist regime taking over, headed by a coalition of largely secular reformists, we will see enormous demonstrations in the streets by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, far better organized and militant than the ones that drove out Mubarak, a sea of banners shouting for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of all American and western influence. Let’s make good and certain we know what we’re wishing for in Egypt. Authoritarian regimes can transition to liberal democracy, but it is an infinitely complex and potentially dangerous process.

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