www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Blessed Karl of Austria

EWTN posted a story of a woman in Florida cured of cancer by the intercession of Blessed Karl of Austria.

What's a Baptist woman doing praying to an early 20th century Catholic emperor is the question! LOL. Good for her.

Alexis

Shlomo,

I too have prayed to Blessed Karl of Austria. I was a history major, and one of my favorites was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I have always felt, that if the Empire had not been broken up, Hitler could not have risen as he had. If one looks at the history of the Empire, you would have seen what today is called the EU decades earlier.

The parliament was representitive of the peoples of the Empire. Further, here is what the Constitution stated:

Article 19:

All races of the empire have equal rights, and every race has an inviolable right to the preservation and use of its own nationality and language. The equality of all customary languages ("landes�bliche Sprache") in school, office and public life, is recognized by the state. In those territories in which several races dwell, the public and educational institutions are to be so arranged that, without applying compulsion to learn a second country language ("Landessprache"), each of the races receives the necessary means of education in its own language.

They even had an Irishman serve as Prime Minister. Wilson, with his stupidy destroyed the center of Europe and gave rise to Hitler and his mad dogs.

Poosh BaShlomo,
Yuhannon

I read an article v�a the blogosphere that told more. Apparently the woman has a Catholic relative who visited Europe and mailed her a prayer card.

Dear Friends,

Let's remember that even atheists are writing to the Vatican to say they're prayers to Pope John Paul II have been answered - what is a Baptist or two?

But Alexis raises another fascinating historical point with respect to hagiography.

If one receives a miracle from a holy person belonging to another Church or tradition, does that mean the individual who received the healing/miracle should convert?

In fact, this has often been the case. At the back of the Orthodox Pochaiv Lavra in western Ukraine are paintings of various individuals receiving healings, including an RC woman who was cured of her blindness there. She converted to Orthodoxy. And vice-versa.

In Philadelphia, there is the amazing story of a woman in hospital who was frequently visited by a young boy who encouraged her and told her not to give up hope. She got through her serious operation and then just as she was about to leave the hospital, the boy came by and took her by the hand into the next room. There lay a woman who, as it turned out, was that woman's long lost daughter whom she gave up for adoption years before and had lost all track of!

The boy left and that was the last she saw of him, never even knowing his name.

As she was leaving the hospital, she collected her things, including the devotionals sent to her by family and friends. Among them was a picture of St John Neumann CSsR a friend had put by her bedside.

As she looked at it, she turned it over to see the prayer to the Saint. But there, incredibly, was a picture of St John Neumann when he was a boy.

Yes, it was the same boy she had come to know while in hospital and who had taken her to see her long-lost daughter.

Sorry, but I didn't bring any Kleenex with me . . .

P.S. our Monarchist League up here is promoting the Cause of Bl. Karl of Austria.
Alex

I think Empress Zita was saintly as well.

Yuhannon,

You're right, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was awesome! So Baroque, so Catholic...it's everything good about Germanic culture (with a lot of other cultures in the mix, too) with none of that bad northern German Protestant yuckiness.

Alexis

Dear Alexis,

And the Habsburgs were among the most humane of all Royal families.

There was one Habsburg who fell in love with Ukraine, "Vasil Vyshyvany" since he liked to wear embroidered Ukrainian shirts who led a Ukrainian division in World War I. He was well-esteemed by Met. Andrew Sheptytsky (who was a monarchist in any event) and there was even a movement to have him declared "King of Galicia" which he said he would be if a referendum on the subject was ever held and he was wanted as such.

The West should have left the Habsburgs on their thrones and promoted the enthronement of further Habsburgs - would have been a better 20th century for Europe.

Alex

They were also unfortunately the people who established and ran Talerhof.

The Habsburgs were probably no better or worse than any of the other European dynastic families when looked at on the whole. I'm not one for historical recriminations, and the Habsburgs certainly were responsible for many good things. If you were a religious or national minority in the Austro-Hungarian Empire however, or an advocate of political reform or representative government, you were probably no fan of the Habsburgs. They did good things, they did a lot of bad things.

Let's ammend this to be a little more historically accurate. "If you were a religious or national minority in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire..." The Austrians were generally (but not without exception) very kind to the minorities in the empire. The Hungarians, however, are a different matter...

Certainly, no one is without sin!

Emperor Franz Joseph was very well esteemed by many among the minorities of that empire. The Russians didn't like the Habsburgs but then again it was "empire eat empire." And frankly, those with a decidedly "European Catholic" bent saw Russia as a "foreign danger" and there is the conflict with the Russophile Orthodox AND Eastern Catholic clergy (St Maxim Sandovich, St Alexis of Carpatho-Rus' and the like).

In Ukrainian areas where there was too much of an assimilationist pull toward RCism, Russophilism became one way to counteract this. And in other places where Russophilism became overwhelming, Austrophilism was the norm.

As they say, "One cannot understand this without some vodka!"

Alex

Habsburg history goes back much longer than the dual monarchy (would you have wanted to be a Czech Protestant in the 17th century for instance?). The dual monarchy itself was one system that existed with both sides as participants and supporters, even if many of the policies as exercised in the Hungarian were much worse for minorities (and indeed they were, though both sides played the minorities off against each other at times). You can't absolve one or the other of responsibility for the whole system. They both benefited and maintained it for their own selfish reasons at the expense of others; and both at times would employ the most brutal forms of repression when they felt they needed to. That is what an empire is about.

Dear AMM,

Or the Czech that was burned on July 6, 1415 . . . His Goose was truly cooked . . .

Also wanted to say that I enjoy your insightful and also refreshing (and intellectually satisfying) analyses.

You defy predictability from an intellectual standpoint - which is a great testimony to your versatility and dedication to critical thought, yet within a committed religious perspective.

Alex

How can I join this Monarchist League? After all, I am a Christian Monarchist!

Dn. Robert

We have in our Eparchy several Basilian priest/monks from Hungary (who have ties to the Greek Catholic shrine at Mariapocs). One of them, a friend for quite some time, puts the blame for the collapse of Christian Monarchy in Europe after WWI squarely at the feet of Freemasonry. I am told that most of the politicians who grabbed power after the collapse were, in fact Masons. Jan Masyryk, for one, was a Mason. I believe that this was also true of Woodrow Wilson, since American Presidents who were not Masons are the exception to the rule (JFK was one exception).

Dn. Robert

The Masons are about as much responsible for the current state of world affairs as the Elks Club.

Christian monarchies failed because in the end they weren't very Christian, and one of the primary problems of apostolic Christianity has been its identification if not outright fusion with autocracy, monarchy and absolutism. The Christian monarchies of Europe came crashing down not because of a nefarious mason plot, but because of their own failings; failings that unleashed a bloodbath in Europe and launched us in to the modern world as we know it.