Sometimes when sancrucensis is writing a paper he comes to a point where he has to take a break and do something else to take his mind of it, but then that something else becomes a kind of projection screen on which the paper takes new form. Read the rest of this entry »
If Virgil is in some ways a follower of Plato, Plato would certainly not have agreed with him on the need for world empire. Like most of the Greeks Plato thought that a limited population was necessary for a good political community. The Greek view seems to have been formed by the experience of the war with Persia. In book VII of Herodotus’ Histories Demaratus famously tells Xerxes that the Greeks will win for, Read the rest of this entry »
Virgil is a very philosophical poet. In his famous essay on the Aenead[1] Jacob Klein quotes the following note from an early life of Virgil:
Although [Virgil] seems to have put the opinions of diverse philosophers into his writings with most serious intent, he himself was a devotee of the Academy; for he preferred Plato’s views to all the others.
I am going try to show something of Virgil’s political philosophy, and how it responds to Plato, but before doing that I ought to do a post on Virgil as a poet. Let me begin with the famous lines that are supposed to sum up the whole spirit of Virgil: Read the rest of this entry »
The causes of the French Revolution are complex; nothing of what I wrote in my last post on them is uncontroversial. Take the influence of Rousseau for example. Here is Belloc’s view of Rousseau’s influence on the Revolution: Read the rest of this entry »
To attack the French Revolution as a Catholic might seem a bit too easy. But then Hillaire Belloc was famously a great defender of the Revolution, and even Aelianus of Laodicea seems to agree with him up to a point. The French Revolution, it would seem, is a bit complicated. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday I was in Vienna for the funeral of His Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduke Otto of Austria, Royal Prince of Hungary etc., eldest son and rightful heir of Bl. Charles of Austria, the last Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary.
One of the the most striking things about the solemn and elaborate ceremony was how joyful it was. From whence came that joy? What could be more calculated to plunge us once again into all the piled-up sadness of the 20th century – that most ruinous of all periods in the history of Central Europe – than the funeral of the head of the House of Austria who lived through practically all of it? Otto von Habsburg was still a child when the the World War shattered the “clay pot” of Austria-Hungary into dozens of unstable fragments, but he was then quite an active behind-the-scenes player in the following decades which saw the Anschluss, the Second World War, the establishment of Marxist dictatorships in almost all of the former crown lands, and the astonishing spiritual and moral decline of the West. Read the rest of this entry »
My confrere Pater Johannes Paul and I went to Rome with a group of pilgrims for the beatification of Pope John Paul II. It was tremendously moving and all that sort of thing, but the trip was also kind of exhausting and so I actually fell asleep during the sermon at the Beatification Mass. Reading the sermon when I got back, I was struck by the following passage, in which Pope Benedict gives a remarkably pithy summary of the center of his predecessor’s teaching: Read the rest of this entry »
Gloriosus apparuisti inter principes Austriae, sancte Leopolde, ideo diadema suscepisti de manu Domini; ora pro nobis ad Deum qui te elegit. (Magnificat Antiphon for the Feast of Saint Leopold)
Earlier this month the Austrian Bishop’s Conference met here in Heiligenkreuz. By some chance the first day of the Conference coincided with the Feast of Saint Leopold, the great Margrave of Austria and founder of Stift Heiligenkreuz (November 15th). These are, shall we say, challenging times for the Church of Austria, and one could not but be struck by the contrast between our times and those of Saint Leopold. But perhaps there is more illusion than reality in the contrast.
Certainly the impression that one gets from the liturgical texts etc. for Saint Leopold is of a kind of golden age in which everything went right for the Holy Prince. The antiphon for the Dixit Dominus at vespers goes, “Dominus confregit in die belli inimicos Leopoldi”! But this impression must be largely mistaken. Man is fallen from Paradise so it is natural to look back to a pre-lapsarian age, but one is inclined not to look back far enough and to project pre-lapsarian perfection on very lapsarian times. Saint Leopold’s greatest contemporary, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, thought that his own times were the worst times in the history of the world. To us they only seem great because the people we remember from them are the great exceptions: SS. Bernard, Leopold etc. The extreme example of this is of course the time of Our Lord, the fullness of time, but the generation which our Lord Himself says will be condemned on the Day of Judgment by Sodom Gomorrah.
The opposite error is equally natural: to look forward to a coming generation which will set everything right. This is all very well if one looks forward to the Second Coming, but I’m afraid even Catholics have the tendency not to look forward far enough. How many times have we heard so-called “conservatives” say that soon the present unfortunate generation of “liberals” will die off and their places be taken by the rising generation of “traditionalist” churchmen who will reverse the excesses of the past decades? But every generation of churchmen is full of heresy, pride, cowardice, envy, and folly; all we can hope for is a occasional saint to keep our hopes up till the eschatological solution to all problems.
In Heiligenkreuz we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the 
Cross twice every year. On the Feast itself we have a monastic celebration, in which practically only the community itself takes part. On the Sunday following there is a more exoteric celebration to which lots of pilgrims come, with a solemn procession in the afternoon with our relic of the True Cross. Among the pilgrims on “Kreuzerhöhungssonntag” are always a group of ladies from the so-called “Sternkreuzorden” (Order of the the Starry Cross). The Sternkreuzorden comes in the morning and listens to some spiritual conferences (i.e. talks), before taking part in the celebrations of the afternoon. As I have been asked to give the conferences this year, I have done a little research on what the Sternkreuzorden is. The secretariat of the Order sent me a summary of its history and the latest version of its statutes, and I have also checked a few reference works. Here is what I have discovered.
The Sternkreuzorden is what is called in German a “Damenorden,” that is a chivalric order for ladies. In his rather curious book The Orders of Knighthood, British and Foreign, Rajah Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore (ah, British India…) describes its founding as follows:
The Imperial House of Austria is said to have been in possession of a small piece of the Cross of Christ. The Emperors Maximilian and Ferdinand were accustomed to bear with them constantly in war and peace this relic inserted in a Cross of Gold. After the death of Ferdinand, his successor Leopold, presented it to the widowed Empress Eleanora, a daughter of Duke Charles of Mantua in order by its means to soften the sorrows of Her widowhood. She kept it very carefully locked in a small box, adorned with crystal and enamel and covered with silk. It happened that in the night of the 2nd February 1668, a fire suddenly broke out in the Imperial Castle at Vienna, just below the apartments of the Empress Eleanora, and it soon reached the Imperial apartments, from which she escaped with considerable difficulty before they were entirely consumed. On the following day search was made for the relic, and it was
discovered amongst the ruins, fortunately untouched by the conflagration, with the exception of the metal The Empress was so rejoiced at the incident, that She ordered a solemn procession, and resolved to found a Female Order, not only, as the Statutes say, to commemorate the miraculous events but also to induce the Members to devote themselves to the service and worship of the Holy Cross, and lead a virtuous life in the exercise of religion and works of charity.
The relic in question is now kept in the Schatzkammer in Vienna. According to the Kurzgeschichte sent me by the Order, the empress had canonical court examine the preservation of the relic, and it came to the conclusion that the preservation of the wood, while the metal casing melted was miraculous. The Order’s statutes were approved by Pope Clement IX in the Bull Redemptoris et Domini Nostri (August 2, 1668).
The badge, [Rajah Sir Sourindro writes] which has undergone four
alterations since the time of Maria Theresa, is an oval medallion, with a broad blue enamelled border, inclosing a black enamelled Eagle with two heads, and claws, both of gold, on which lies a Gold Cross, enamelled green, and bordered with brown wood. Over this, on an intwined wreath in black letters, on a white ground, is the motto of the Order, “Salus et Gloria”— (Hail and glory.) It is worn, pendent to a strip of black riband, on the left breast.
Originally members of the order had to prove sixteen noble great-great-grand parents (and if they were married they had to prove the same for their husbands), but the current statutes (approved by the Archbishop of Vienna in 2007) only stipulate that the members be Catholics and not living in invalid marriages, though in the first article it does say that the order is a association of “hochadelige Damen,” that is, they have to be duchesses, princesses or countesses.
The members are appointed by the guardian, who is always a member of the House of Austria. Since the death of Princess Regina the guardian has been Archduchess Gabriela. Her Imperial and Royal Highness recently gave an 
interview to the Tagespost in which she says the following about the Order:
At the centre of the order is the orientation toward the cross of Christ. We also support some great works of mercy, for example in Albania, but the most important [part of our mission] is the contemplative [part].
Sunday, being the long-awaited day of Card. Newman’s beatification, I shall be using two of Newman’s sermons for my conferences: Order, the Witness and Instrument of Unity and Omnipotence in Bonds, I shall use them, and the beggining of S. Ignatius’s Excercises to talk about the epistle of the Exaltation (Phil 2:6-11), but more on that later.
A scan of the entire January 1864 number of Macmillan’s Magazine, with Kingsley’s famous review of Froude’s History of England, Vols. vii. – viii. (211-224) is available from archive.org. The slander of Newman that lead to the writing of the Apologia is on page 217.
It is remarkably fitting that Kingsley’s controversy with Newman began with his review of a History of Tudor England. Oddly enough, the history in question was by J. A. Froude, the violently anti-Catholic younger brother of Newman’s friend Richard Hurrell Froude. Kingsley begins his review with fulsome praise for the newly awakened historical consciousness of his generation. He even praises the Oxford Movement for contributing to knowledge of history. (212) But the effect of the praise is short lived as the rest of the review is concerned with attacking the view of British history which the Oxford Movement – and especially converts from it to “Romanism” – had developed. He analyzes the reign of Queen Elisabeth, which he reads as the story of the shaking off of the evil influence of Catholicism. He closes with an appeal to remember that Elisabeth’s cause was “the cause of freedom and of truth, which has led these realms to glory,” and a warning against the anti-English attitude of “those who have lately joined, or are inclined to join, the Church of Rome,” and are teaching the young to prefer “the cause of tyranny and of lies,” which Elisabeth opposed. “After all,” he closes, “Victrix Causa Diis placuit. ” It was a thought dear to his heart: the successful cause is right! (224)
