"La Commune": the humiliation French soldiers had experienced at German hands helped to fuel the Versaillais’ terrible vengeance

‘Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune,” by John Merriman

By Mary McAuliffe 

MASSACRE

The Life and Death of the Paris Commune

By John Merriman

The uprising that Victor Hugo so vividly commemorated and romanticized in “Les Misérables” was in fact a small affair, overshadowed by other eruptions that shook the City of Light during the 19th century. The last of these, the Commune uprising of 1871, was by far the bloodiest and the most dramatic. Yet despite the deaths of thousands of Communards and their supporters, this bloodbath has slipped into the shadows of history. John Merriman, the Charles Seymour professor of history at Yale University, impressively rescues this revolution from obscurity in “Massacre,” his devastating account of the Commune uprising.

Merriman, whose many books include the classic “A History of Modern Europe” and the more recent “The Dynamite Club,” featuring turn-of-the-century French anarchists, provides the reader with welcome context, from the ignominy of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War to the miseries of everyday life for Parisian workers. By the time the Commune uprising broke out, Paris and Parisians had suffered enormously, and those who suffered the most were, as always, the poor.

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Piketty, le successeur de Marx ?

Thomas Piketty, l’enfumeur magnifique

par Richard Hanlet

Le grand œuvre de cet ego boursouflé, l’ouvrage centennal censé en faire le successeur de Marx et lui assurer l’immortalité, c’est Le Capital au XXIe siècle.

On dit que l’on n’est jamais trahi que par les siens ; à preuve le refus de Thomas Piketty d’être enrôlé dans l’ordre de la Légion d’honneur par un pouvoir qu’il a contribué à installer. 

À une époque où cette distinction ne se distribuait pas encore comme des Tickets-Restaurant au premier chien coiffé, Louis-Ferdinand Céline disait déjà : « Jadis, on pendait les voleurs aux croix, aujourd’hui on pend les croix aux voleurs. » 

Mais soyons juste : à notre connaissance, M. Piketty n’a à ce jour volé que sa réputation. 

Économiste socialiste – ce qui est déjà une contradiction dans les termes -, il a d’abord pondu une plaquette proposant modestement un impôt « pour le XXIe siècle », où il estime bien sûr que la fiscalité française n’est pas assez progressive, et que Bercy pourrait faire beaucoup mieux contre les salauds qui se sont saignés pour posséder leur logement vers la cinquantaine, plus un petit portefeuille d’actions ou d’assurance-vie dix ans plus tard… 

Mais le grand œuvre de cet ego boursouflé, l’ouvrage centennal censé en faire le successeur de Marx et lui assurer l’immortalité – et, qui sait, un Nobel d’économie -, c’est Le Capital au XXIe siècle.

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Lirela suite: www.bvoltaire.fr

The witness of heroism is always instructive. And sometimes, perhaps, even contagious.

The Witness of Heroism

by Regis Martin 

“In my beginning is my end.” ∼ T.S. Eliot

In a passage often cited from the Pensees, which the author sets down in grim and graphic detail, Pascal summons the reader to reflect on the awful finality of death. “The last act is bloody,” he tells us, “however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”

And the reader is properly horrified. But is Pascal’s account entirely accurate? Surely there is more to be said. At most, Monsieur Pascal is holding only half a loaf here, the other having fallen onto the floor, where, lying unbaked between the flour and the yeast, it simply won’t rise. That is because, while it is certainly the case that the last act is bloody—and, yes, in the end they do throw dirt over your head—it is precisely the end that determines the overall quality of the play. Respice finem, the ancients tell us. Look to the end. For that is the prism through which everything else is to be seen. What else have we got to make the performance worthwhile if not the outcome? “Until death,” as Cervantes would say, “there is life.”

And everything in that life leads inexorably to the hour and the moment of death. How we take leave of our life, the truth and authenticity with which we assume our death, determines how well we have lived our life. Not to mention, of course, the final trajectory of the journey on the other side. Concerning which, by the way, there are no charts or maps pointing the way back. Poor Lazarus, for example, did most certainly die, and thereupon travelled somewhere into “the undiscovered country,” of which Shakespeare speaks. But upon his return, he tells us exactly nothing. Gerald Vann, O.P. suggests that at supper his sister Martha would often need to remind him, “Oh, Lazarus, do get on with your food!”

Death, then, is not simply a disaster that sooner or later overtakes us all; it is at the same time an event so profoundly and irreducibly personal that it can only happen to you or to me. It is not transferable to any other. You cannot deputize your best friend to take your place in the queue; it is your death that you await, and you alone must come forward to take ownership of it. And, to be sure, it happens only once. “A man may,” as Montaigne wisely reminds us, “fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.” And so each of us goes out to meet his own death, taking possession of it as though it were being offered uniquely to each one of us, and not to any other.

It may become then the supreme moment of my life, an unrepeatable interval of being into which I insert myself, placing myself front and center in a drama of which I am wholly the protagonist. In life I carry it before me at all times; in death it carries me across the threshold of eternity. Or, put it this way: death, my death, represents the singular and necessary vessel into which I am asked to empty out everything of myself. All that I have, all that I am—one day I shall be forced to forego everything.

“Old and young,” writes Robert Louis Stevenson, “we are all on our last cruise.” Isn’t this why, for us Catholics certainly, the sacrament of the present moment is so important? That it is nothing less than an indispensible exercise in the cultivation of the soul? We are enjoined thus to see, in each fleeting instant, the complete summation of all that has gone before; and so we signify by the stance we take, the choice we make, at that decisive moment of death, a meaning to be distilled from its sudden and, not infrequently, shocking appearance. It is really a gift, this grace of the present moment, beckoning us to make optimal use of the time allotted us by God for our salvation. And because grace, as Hopkins puts it, “rides time like a river,” it is necessary that we not merely skim the surface of all our days and ways, but instead plunge right down into the very depths in order to reach that mysterious Christic center where real and permanent meaning abides. It is here, in this place of heightened intensity—“the still point,” T. S. Eliot calls it, “of the turning world”—where all the essential collisions occur: time and eternity, nature and grace, flesh and spirit, history and heaven.

“But to apprehend,” says Eliot,

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

Alas, for most of us, “there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time, / The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight….” In short, we miss the point of intersection, having failed either to see it coming or, once apprehended, to execute the necessary steps pursuant to that “lifetime’s death in love” which animates the life of the saint.

Saint Thomas More, for instance, who, amid circumstances most unwelcome, found his“still point,” and from the abundance of grace given him was enabled to go out and meet his death. It was not an end he sought out on his own, by the way, even as he would not shrink from facing it. But as Robert Bolt writes in A Man For All Seasons, his riveting account of More’s life, and his death, “More knew where he began and left off, what area of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved. It was a substantial area in both cases, for he had a proper sense of fear and was a busy lover.”

And it found its climactic, if paradoxical expression precisely in More’s willingness to die, which showed the world in an utterly conclusive way that his life stood for something worth dying for. Which was his defense of the Catholic Thing, yes, even to the point of shedding blood on its behalf. There was simply no other way, in his mind, to validate the things he knew to be true. Only in death could he consummate the witness of a life long consecrated to God. 

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Read more: www.crisismagazine.com

If liberalism is to survive, it must be grounded in right anthropology.

Theology, Anthropology, and Economics

by Nathaniel Peters

Every economic system is based upon an implicit vision of the human person. Maciej Zieba’s new book provides an introduction to Catholic social thought that examines the anthropologies of Catholicism, liberal democracy, and the free-market economy.

Some of the greatest misunderstandings of the Catholic Church arise from trying to fit it into the political and economic categories we use to analyze figures and organizations. Is the Catholic Church liberal or conservative? Is the pope a libertarian or socialist? Documents are pulled out, and the proof-texting begins. In truth, the Catholic Church cannot fit into these categories. The pope is not a politician but a custodian of truths. Yet popes do speak on many of the most contested topics of our time. How, then, should we understand their words, and what contribution do they offer to the discussion?

In Papal Economics: The Catholic Church on Democratic Capitalism, fromRerum Novarum to Caritas in Veritate, the Polish theologian Maciej Zieba, OP provides good answers to these questions. A physicist who became a Dominican priest, a member of the Solidarity movement that peacefully overthrew the Polish communist regime, and a close friend of John Paul II, Zieba approaches this topic with experience and learning. His book is partly an introduction to Catholic social thought (CST) and partly a study of CST’s engagement with liberal democracy and the free-market economy, particularly in John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus. Zieba could have drawn clearer lines between those two parts, but, on the whole, his book succeeds on both counts.

Before examining what CST says, we first need to understand what kind of thought it is. The first example of CST is Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which was written in 1891 to address the political and economic crises of the industrial revolution. Since that time, subsequent popes have sought to apply the theological truths of Catholicism to a rapidly changing world. Because CST attempts to apply unchanging principles to changing circumstances, it is more contingent on historical circumstance than dogmas such as the Trinity or the human and divine natures of Christ. Yet CST is not a policy white paper. It specifies ends and goals, leaving the question of what means to employ open for debate. CST also eschews utopianism for meliorism, which Zieba defines as “the gradual perfection of existing structures and institutions.”

Perhaps most important, CST is not an ideological program that purports to have the ability to solve all of society’s problems, if only it were implemented fully and correctly. Christianity, Zieba argues, is not an ideology, no matter what its critics claim. Following John Paul II’s understanding in Centesimus Annus, Zieba writes:

ideology maintains a concept of truth and goodness that captures all of reality in a simple and solid schema, and its advocates believe that this concept can be imposed on other people. Christian truth, the pope observes, does not fulfill this second condition and therefore is not an ideology.

To further the point, Zieba argues that Christians cannot impose their own concepts because, in a sense, they are not their own. The Church is not the owner of Christian truth, “only its depository”—an idea Pope Francis echoed recently when he said that it is not so much that Catholics possess the truth as that Catholics are possessed by the truth. One must acknowledge, of course, that this is more a statement of principle than of history: examples of Christians using their faith as an ideology abound. But Zieba and Francis are right: an epistemological humility should lie at the heart of Christian thought. Maintaining that humility makes CST all the more powerful as a tool of analysis and critique.

The subject of CST is the human person in all his fullness. As now-Cardinal Carlo Caffara put it, “Neither homo technicus, nor homo oeconomicus, nor homo politicus is the pastoral object of the Magisterium, but rather homo humanus.”

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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

Pope Leo is sometimes called the founder of Catholic social teaching. He would have been appalled by the credit.

Revisiting Pope Leo XIII and 

Reclaiming Catholic Social Doctrine

by Gregory J. Sullivan

Anthony Esolen's new book is a lively defense and erudite explanation of "first principles and human realities"

Anthony Esolen, a professor of English at Providence College and—among a multitude of other scholarly and intellectual accomplishments—a translator of Dante, is one of the most appealing Catholic thinkers of our time. He writes on Catholic matters with remarkable lucidity and applies the transcendent truths of the Church to contemporary questions with the deftness of a master. In his work, Esolen shows again and again the thrill of orthodoxy that Chesterton famously celebrated.

With his newest book, Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church’s True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State (Sophia Institute Press, 2014), he turns to the vital area of Catholic social doctrine at a moment when it is both very salient and utterly misunderstood.

Characteristically emphasizing what he calls “[f]irst principles and human realities,“ Esolen relies almost exclusively in this act of reclamation on Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), whose estimable corpus of writings—including, most prominently, the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum—he has thoroughly absorbed and uses to explicate the Church’s teaching on marriage, family, and the state in our time.

Esolen’s concentration on the prolific and influential pontiff forms the essence of this book. In this study, he brings to Pope Leo XIII—a man who was a prolific genius of the sort the nineteenth century produced in abundance—a proper understanding of what makes his work so enduring. There is real insight in Esolen’s subtle depiction:

Pope Leo is sometimes called the founder of Catholic social teaching. He would have been appalled by the credit. He intended nothing other than to apply to current concerns what Jesus taught. His Apostles and what they handed down to their successors. He intended to teach nothing new. He is blessedly free of the mercurial ingenuity of a vain scholar and the meddlesome pride of an innovator. His thoughts derive not from the nature of the spanking-new modern State, nor from social advances sometimes more apparent than real, but from the changeless nature of man, discoverable by reason and frank observation, and by humble attention to the revealed word of God. Leo never supposed that one could devise any social teaching without understanding what a society is to begin with, which requires that we understand what human beings are, and why they are – for what end God made them, male and female, in His image and likeness. Leo surveys the world from a mountaintop. He possessed a manifestly keen mind, but it was not that mind that gave him the vantage. It was the Faith.

Esolen’s study of the Church’s social teaching does not, as would be the case with any number of lesser writers, result in a dry theological treatise.

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Read more: www.catholicworldreport.com

Catholic marriage preparation and pastoral care of the family in light of human nature

Rome Conference on Catholic Family Life 

by CNA/EWTN NEWS 

The March 12-13 conference at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross will reflect on the Catholic vision of humanity and its relevance to the evangelization of the family.

Catholic marriage preparation and pastoral care of the family in light of human nature will be the topic of an upcoming Rome conference that takes inspiration from the Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family.

The conference, hosted at Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, aims “to make a constructive contribution to the reflections of the Church on marriage and the family,” a brochure said.

The event will take place at the Opus Dei-affiliated university March 12-13. It is organized by the university’s School of Canon Law, with participation from the university’s other schools.

Speakers include Cardinal Carlo Caffara of Bologna, who will speak on the topic “Faith and Culture in Marriage.” In addition to lectures, there will be presentations from experts on practical initiatives that have produced “abundant fruit” in marriage preparation and support for married couples.

The conference comes after the October 2014 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family, which laid the groundwork for the October 2015 bishops’ synod on the same topic.

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Read more: www.ncregister.com

When two men asked her to design flower arrangements for their wedding, she politely declined ...

Great-Grandma Florist Could Lose Livelihood for Saying No to This Wedding

by Kelsey Harkness 

A florist in Washington state is being sued for adhering to her Christian beliefs in declining to make flower arrangements for one couple’s wedding.

Before the lawsuit, Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Wash., had employed workers who identify as homosexual and sold floral arrangements to gay and lesbian customers.

One such customer turned out to be one of the men who would sue her for not being willing to be hired for their same-sex wedding.

Unlike businesses that face similar lawsuits for refusing to provide specific wedding-related services to gay and lesbian couples on religious grounds—among them bakers in Oregon and farmers in New York—Stutzman is being sued in both a professional and personal capacity.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDETkcCw63c



Read more: dailysignal.com