With few exceptions, the quality of the posts to the Ink Desk are matched by the quality of the comments appended to them. I am, for the most part, greatly heartened by the spiritual and intellectual caliber of the people who visit the Ink Desk. Occasionally, however, a comment is made that is not only wise and insightful but brilliant in its succinct appraisal and summary of a complex issue. Such was the comment made by Thomas Banks to my post on May 17.

I am giving it pride of place as a post in its own right by pasting it below. I agree that all was not well with Catholicism in Europe, and in France in particular, prior to the Revolution and, indeed, if things had been better, the Revolution might not have happened.

Throughout history the Church is always dying and being resurrected from the dead. Whether the death is caused by persecution from without or decadence from within, the Catholic Church has often been dead but has always been brought back to life.

One thinks of the persecution of the early Church and also the many heresies that threatened to rip the early Church apart. One thinks of the decadence of certain elements in the mediaeval Church and its resurrection through the reforms of St. Francis and St. Dominic and the brilliance of Thomas Aquinas. One thinks of the rupture of the Church caused by the Reformation and the rapturous response of the Counter-Reformation, especially in great saints, such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Ignatius Loyola (to say nothing of the great cultural revival that it heralded). The same could be said of the Catholic Revival in England that followed the apparent defeat of English Catholicism, and the similar Catholic Revival that followed in France in the century and a half following the Revolution.

Enough of my comments upon Thomas Banks’s comment. Here is the comment itself:

May 17 2013 | by Thomas Banks

Naturally one should hesitate to state too confidently what might have been, but without the Revolution breaking the mold of the Gallican clergy, might not the Catholic position in Europe during the 19th century have been something far more sickly, more decrepit? What if all that dead wood-I think of men like Talleyrand and Sieyes-had been the rule rather than the exception among the higher clergy for a generation or two more? Read Manzoni. Read Chateaubriand. The Catholic cause drew considerable strength from the overthrow of the old things, as much murder and madness as the passage cost. Strange as it may seem to think of now, during the fifty years before 1789, probably the greater part of Europe could no more imagine a Catholic society unattached to the Bourbons or Hapsburgs than it could imagine that same society unattached to the Pope. But the Church does not stand or fall with the fortunes of one political form. The Revolution revealed that strength, and we should not forget it. 

The tragedy of the Revolution was not that its watchwords were Liberte, Egalite, et Fraternite, but that no one alive at that time could see that these ideals are not opposed to the ideals of Faith, Hope and Love, which outranks every other virtue.