Posted on 10/21/2014 9:21:00 AM PDT by Pyro7480
Today, 21st October, is the Feast Day of the Blessed Charles (or Karl) of Austria, beatified in 2004 by the pope Saint John Paul the Great....While devout to be sure, the young Archduke Karl von Habsburg (1887-1922) was also endearingly earnest as he studied his every sequentially-bestowed dynastic honour as though he was a medieval knight-errant preparing to seek the Sacred Grail....Over fewer than two years in power, he outlawed brutal army punishments and stopped submarines from attacking civilian shipping. Inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, he established sweeping domestic reforms including the world’s first governmental department of social welfare, ordered royal carriages to deliver food and coal to the poor, and fed himself, his family, and guests on sparse wartime rations. On the bottom-up principle of subsidiarity, he began to federalise government, empower his empire’s many nationalities, and counteract more than seventy years of divisive nationalism and extremist right-wing and left-wing ideologies. It would not last....
Christendom fell to three allied factors: First, nationalism, an ideology even when it is championed by purported conservatives....Second was republicanism, an ideology accompanied by anti-authoritarianism and anti-monarchism. Disguised as principle it was often only a coup, a lust for power. In many cases the reformists simply substituted themselves for the kings and aristocrats, and had no wish to ever again be polluted by contact with ordinary people....
Third and possibly the most lethal of Christendom’s wounds came from intentionally anti-religious secularism....Europe’s slow loss of faith, far advanced among early 20th Century elites, deprived unity of its oxygen and watched it asphyxiate like Christ on the cross. In about 1960 Dawson predicted the failure of the European Union because it lacked what medieval Europe enjoyed—a strong and healthy universal faith, and among elites the common language of Latin, shared books, and intermarriage....
(Excerpt) Read more at theimaginativeconservative.org ...
Catholic ping!
"Blessed Karl’s feast is celebrated neither on the day of his birth, nor his imperial accession, nor his death, but on his wedding day – October 21st – the happiest in his brief life. Reunited already, Karl and Zita may yet share the same Feast Day as saints."
Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
What an elegant gown.
The bridesmaids’ dresses look similar.
It reminds me of pictures of the Russian imperial family of the same period.
(I think the grinning old officer on the far right was at my wedding, too.)
An odd description. Wilson spent less than two years of his life teaching at a CT college, and was a Virginian by birth.
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Shallowly. That’s why they tended to faint.
In Europe, World War One’s victors paved the way for Hitler and National Socialism, Stalin’s henchmen and East European Communism, Auschwitz and the gulag.
It is such a relief to see this evident fact stated so clearly.
He is wrong about nationalism. Where in Austro-Hungary especially did he see "desire for separateness"? Neither Germany nor Russia were nationalistic in that caricature sense: all the three losing powers were well-functioning multi-ethnic organisms. The initial reason for the war was the desire to deny Germany the leadership of Europe; part of the propaganda effort was to portray Germans as nationalistic man-eaters.
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