Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

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‘How many presidents of republics have been canonized?’

At Will’s suggestion, Rob and I went to the solemn high mass for Blessed Karl, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary last night at Old St. Mary’s. It was very beautiful, many thanks to Fr. Bradley.

Afterward we were treated to a speech from His Imperial and Royal Highness, Prince Bertrand of Orléans-Braganza  — apparently his first in English — about the life of Blessed Karl. It was probably the most reactionary speech I’ve ever heard in person. Regular readers of this blog need not be told that that is in no way a detraction. Here it is transcribed:

Holy Mother Church gives us the saints not only as intercessors to whom we can have recourse but as examples to follow.

In what ways should Emperor Karl, recently beatified, be seen as a model? He should certainly be seen as both a model Head of State and as a model head of a family.

Emperor Karl is the latest in a long series of heads of state elevated to the honor of the altar.

  • St. Louis, King of France
  • St. Ferdinand of Castile
  • St. Stephen of Hungary
  • St. Henry of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
  • St. Vladimir of Russia
  • St. Olaf
  • St. Casimir
  • Empress Zita, already declared a Servant of God
  • Princess Isabel, my great grandmother, for whose beatification the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro has taken the first steps. During the absence of her father, the Emperor Dom Pedro II, when she was Regent of the Brazilian Empire, Princess Isabel signed the law abolishing slavery in Brazil. Brazilians started to refer to her as The Redemptrix and wanted to raise a monument to pay homage to her. She said: “I do not want a monument in my honor, but for the real Redeemer, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and on the Corcovado mountain top.” Today, this world famous monument, symbol of Brazil, is a World Heritage monument, Christ, The Redeemer.

I could name several other saints.

How many presidents of republics have been canonized? As far as I can recall, only Gabriel Garcia Moreno, President of Ecuador, could one day be raised to the honor of the altars. Upon hearing that the Ecuadorian president participated in Good Friday processions, barefoot, German Chancellor Bismarck ordered Garcia Moreno’s death. He was, in fact, brutally assassinated on his way from the Cathedral in Quito to the Presidential Palace.

According to Cardinal Pietro Palazzini’s Biblioteca Sanctorum, published in 1988, 21.7% of canonized saints were kings or nobles. If we consider that the percentage of kings and nobles was 1.5% of the population, we see how these data flatly contradict the black image of the nobility spread by revolutionaries.

Indeed, Prof. Plinio Correa de Oliveira, founder of the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, always stressed that, according to Church teaching, compliance with the Ten Commandments is required not only of men individually, but also of States.

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Ben Bradlee and Mary Pinchot Meyer

R.I.P. Ben Bradlee:

Benjamin C. Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.

From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.

The most compelling story of Mr. Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history. …

Two deaths in 1963 altered Mr. Bradlee’s life. The first was Philip Graham’s suicide that August, after a struggle with bipolar disorder. Then in November, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. A fortnight before his death, the Bradlees had spent a glamorous weekend with the Kennedys at their new retreat in Middleburg, Va. On Nov. 22, 1963, “life changed, forever, in the middle of a nice day, at the end of a good week, in a wonderful year of what looked like an extraordinary decade of promise,” Mr. Bradlee wrote.

There was a third Bradlee was connected to from around that time that remains fascinating:

On a perfect October day in 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer—mistress of John Kennedy, friend of Jackie Kennedy and ex-wife of a top CIA man, Cord Meyer—was murdered in the rarefied Washington precinct of Georgetown. …

That October day rests in a corner of my mind, a vivid and mysterious curio. I pick it up from time to time and examine it in different lights. I have not figured it out, though I have theories. I thought of Mary Meyer’s murder again during the presidential campaign, when the drama of a black man, Barack Obama, and two women, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, in a race for the top places in American government took me back over a distance of time to a city that was then, for black people and for women, a different universe.

When Mary Meyer died, no one knew about her affair with John Kennedy, or about her ex-husband’s job managing the CIA’s clandestine services. In newspapers, Cord Meyer—wounded World War II hero and young idealist who helped found the United World Federalists—was identified as an author, with a vague government job. The papers noted that Mary, 43, was a Georgetown artist, born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, daughter of Amos Pinchot, the Progressive lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester. Her younger sister, Tony, was married to Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek, later of the Washington Post. It was Bradlee who identified the body at the morgue.

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