[Land of the Irish]

As Hans Küng declared: "… the motto of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – have come to play a singular role in the Council’s texts." Which is cause for rejoicing according to religious commentator Henri Fesquet, who wrote: "This liberation of Catholic thinking, long a prisoner of the negative current of the Counter-Reformation, somehow permitted it to work together with the trilogy of the French Revolution, which turned around the secular world before it was taken up by Catholicism, which had long deformed it. ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’: this glorious motto was, after all, that of Vatican II."

[Land of the Irish]

Ping

[escapefromboston]

ping

[derheimwill]

I disagree with the secular humanists for all the reasons you mentioned. I disagree with Rome for what I believe to be its' errant Mariology and Christology and for its errant doctrines concerning Purgatory, Sanctification, Transsubstantiation and a host of other things totally unrelated to revisionist accounts. You seem to be implying, however, that, since Secular Humanism is of the devil, that its' enemies must be of God.

[dsc]

...
more interested in the creature comforts of episcopal office than finding out what is really going on beyond the narrow confines of their cosy liberal enclaves;

content to swagger about having their boots licked and being told what they want to hear;

contemptuous of Catholic truth, law and tradition;
untrustworthy and lacking all self-awareness;

wedded to their socio-political standing as ‘reasonable men’ who favour realpolitik over stubborn moral principle;
utterly devoid of courage and leadership;

more at home with the homosexual lobby than the Latin Mass;

illiberal and bullying towards priests who won’t toe the liberal party line;

increasingly despised by laity sickened by all the duplicity, the systematic deceit and wanton waste of their money on the sort of heretical and scandalous activities mentioned herein.

Vapid and deluded, gaily unpacking the foundations of the Faith laid by the Catholic giants who went before them, these Modernist pygmies are able to manipulate past and present realities to suit and vindicate themselves...

Gee, does that sound like anybody we know?

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP - Survive

[livius]

Curiously, one of the problems we face now is that we have a heirarchy which itself has abandoned obedience (or perhaps, in the new Church of Fuzzy Theology, can be claiming to obey some new set of vague teachings), but invokes it to crush traditionalists and push through its latest Modernist ideas.

Lay Catholics used to be very obedient to their pastors and Church teaching, which was the reason we had a high birth rate, high church attendance rate, etc. But the obedience we had been trained to was used against us when the shepherds went astray, and all of a sudden we found ourselves following them out of the Faith.

No one has the obligation to obey someone who is in error simply because that someone is a bishop or a priest. Yet we are living in strange times, when more are in error than not, and members of the flock are forced to pick which shepherds they will follow, hoping that the Holy Spirit will guide them to the right choice. Even Rome seems to wobble and offer a multitude of messages, from which we have to determine the one that is closest to what we recall of the Truth.

I think order has been undone by heterodoxy and sin, and I think its restoration is going to be very, very difficult, because the acceptance of order also requires trust. And who among these dubious shepherds can you trust?

[royalcello]

Excellent article; thanks for posting.

L'Anglaise et le Duc is one of the few movies I own; I highly recommend it. Here's an article from 2001 describing the controversy referred to above.

Search For

    Saturday 1 January 2005

 telegraph.co.uk

 News home

Breaking news

Business news

Crossword Society

Factfiles

Law reports



Obituaries

Opinion

Picture galleries

Text alerts

Weather

Week at a glance

Your view


About us

Contact us

An 'Englishwoman' in Paris sparks a revolution among cinema audiences
By Julian Coman in Paris
(Filed: 16/09/2001)

A DAMNING film portrait of the French Revolution has scandalised audiences more used to tales of Jacobin heroism than images of drunk, stupid and sadistic peasants waving heads on spikes.

The film, released last week and entitled, inaccurately, L'Anglaise et le Duc (The Englishwoman and the Duke), is directed by one of France's best-loved film-makers, Eric Rohmer.

Based on the testimony of Grace Elliot, a young Scottish countess living in Paris during the Terror, it presents a trenchant view of the Revolution as nasty, bloody and anarchic. Until last week, Republican France had never seen anything like it.

As indignant Parisians watched sans-culottes (revolutionary zealots) commit a series of unspeakable atrocities on screen, and bridled at the royalist sympathies of Miss Elliot, film critics began to launch their own revolt.

Within the space of a week, Mr Rohmer's film has been variously described as "revisionist", "heretical", "neo-monarchist" and "counter-revolutionary".

Mr Rohmer has previously been the darling of the French cinema-going public, following successes such as Claire's Knee and The Green Ray. Yet his current unpopularity cannot have surprised him.

In highlighting the horrified reactions of an Anglo-Saxon monarchist as she watches the bloodthirsty Paris mob, Mr Rohmer has thumbed a nose at previous tub-thumping French blockbusters.

Films such as Jean Renoir's classic, La Marseillaise, have depicted the Revolution as a triumph of Jacobin courage over aristocratic arrogance. In French schools, the crimes of the Terror are glossed over as a necessary if unfortunate stage in the birth of the Republic.

Seen through the eyes of Miss Elliot and Mr Rohmer, however, the Jacobins are anything but a collection of virtuous freedom-fighters. Most revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious and sadistic; the majority are stupid, and nearly all are drunk.

Innocents are arrested and executed on a whim; homes are looted and the streets of Paris witness an unceasing parade of heads on spikes.

As Miss Elliot travels through central Paris, she is confronted by an alcohol-fuelled Jacobin who forces the bloody head of an aristocratic friend through the windows of her carriage. Later she weeps as she hears the mob howl with delight at the execution of the king.

In her diary, which forms the basis of the film's script, she remembers the day as "the most horribly sad that I have ever lived. The clouds themselves seemed to be in mourning".

She also charts the decline and fall of her one-time lover, the Duc D'Orleans, the cousin of the king, who voted for his death but then followed him to the scaffold.

Sophie Guichard, film critic for France Soir, said: "How can one not be shocked by this portrait of the typical revolutionary? How can one forget that this period also gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, from which we still benefit? The film lacks all balance."

Mr Rohmer is unapologetic. Claiming that L'Anglaise et le Duc "could have been an awful lot more violent", the director said: "I am showing mass murderers, the pits of society, people who killed for pleasure and under the influence of alcohol. I think Grace Elliot was mostly right about the Revolution - it was the end of a world, of a refined civilisation."

In Paris, cinema audiences are split between royalists and republicans. Sophie Boutin, a teacher, said: "This is a film made by an intellectual who is a Catholic and in all probability a monarchist. It's just a polemic against 1789."

But Jacques Ferney, a 24-year-old language student, disagreed. "It was about time someone looked at the Revolution from a different perspective," he said.

"As we grow up, there is so much pompous rubbish talked in school about how liberty, equality and fraternity arrived in 1789, but no one bothers to remember all the innocent people who were butchered. I think it's a good film."

	L' Anglaise et le Duc - tf1.fr [in French]
	The Englishwoman and the Duke - Upcoming movies.com
	Eric Rohmer - Foreign films.com

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms & Conditions of reading.
Commercial information.   Privacy and Cookie Policy.

[TradicalRC]

Bookmarked. Thanks. Sounds to me like the mass apostasy that Scripture warned about.

[Francisco]

Thank you for posting the article. Looks like it's about time I paid for a subscription to Christain Order.