Tag Archives: The Great War

A Requiem for Old Austria: 100 Years Later

12 Monday Nov 2018

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I have had no country since November 1918… That was the time when Austria was literally carved into pieces. Mangled. Quartered. One shred they held up in sheer mockery and called it Austria. That’s what you children have been taught to call Austria… Heaven my young man, is like Austria, the old, real Austria…

-Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Black Banners

One hundred years ago today the last bastion of Catholicism and patriotism was brutally torn apart by famine, revolution, and military force. And just yesterday, this very year, a major world leader proclaimed that in fact that very Patriotism was right all along, and that the nationalism which replaced it was the betrayal of all nations. One hundred years ago the symbol of the ideal of government which served the universal Common Good was lowered from the flagstaff for the last time. How many hundred years more must we wait before it is raised again? Now when we fear the loss of our civilization more than ever, the very embodiment of the West lies forgotten and mourned only by a few. And we few who mourn cannot seem to find her memorial anywhere on this earth, and as the shadows lengthen around us, we seem to hear as if a far-off whisper, “Why seek you the living among the dead?”

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The Queen and the Emperor: 1917

21 Saturday Oct 2017

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In a world of broken promises, the Mother of God had kept her promise. It remained to be seen how many, even yet, would hear and heed her words and help her by their prayers, and by lives more pleasing to God, to change the course of history…

Charles [of Austria] explained that he sought peace not only because of a “military condition”- the strain and losses of war- but above all “as his solemn duty before God, towards the peoples of his Empire and all belligerents.” In a tempestuous ocean of aggressive and intolerant nationalism, here at last a concern for all Christendom from someone other than the Pope- most fitting in the heir to the Holy Roman Emperors who had been responsible for the temporal welfare of Christendom as a whole…

Generally condemned in consequence of these actions[¹] as a disturber of the peace, Charles- the only sovereign of the powers engaged in the First World War who had conscientiously sought peace- was banished to the Portuguese island of Madeira,  without a source of income… Madeira was Portuguese territory, Fátima not so very far away. Had Charles and Zita heard of Our Lady’s coming there? 

-Warren H. Carroll, 1917: Red Banners, White Mantle 

On the 12th of April in 1918, the last chance of a peaceful resolution to the First World  War was destroyed by French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Nearly a year before on the 13th of May in 1917, Our Lady appeared to three shepherd children at Fátima in Portugal, calling upon all who would listen to pray the Holy Rosary for the end of the war and the return of peace, which the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XV, had been advocating since the start of the war. No one among the great powers would heed the Pope’s call to peace, save for one devout son of Our Lady, the Most Catholic Emperor whose peace offers the Entente would utterly reject, Karl of Austria.

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The Emperor is Dead! Long Live the Emperor!

21 Monday Nov 2016

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franz-josef-in-prayerOn this day (November 21) one hundred years ago (in 1916), His Majesty Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Jerusalem (etc.), and heir of the Holy Roman Emperors, entered Eternal Life after a reign of sixty-eight years. He came to the throne amidst the fires of revolution, and died amidst the ashes of the Great War, and yet for the long years of his reign, his peoples were at peace and contented. So long as he ruled it, this last remnant of Christendom in Europe seemed as though it would last into the far distant future. And yet his own life was fraught with tragedy that might have brought lesser men to despair, the murder of his brother, of his only son, of his wife, and finally of his heir, and through it all he held firm to his God-given duties to his peoples.

However, the death of the old Emperor was not only a time of mourning, for it was also on this day that Archduke Karl ascended to the throne of the war-torn Empire; Emperor as was foretold by St. Pius X, and though most of his reign would be spent in exile, he was certainly a worthy successor of his great-uncle Franz Josef, blessed with same courage and devotion.

Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem sempiternam

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Churchill on the Destruction of Austria-Hungary

03 Thursday Mar 2016

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The second cardinal tragedy [of the Great War] was the complete break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon. For centuries this surviving embodiment of the Holy Roman Empire had afforded a common life, with advantages in trade and security, to a large number of peoples none of whom in our own times had the strength or vitality to stand by themselves in the face of pressure from a revivified Germany or Russia. There is not one of these peoples or provinces that constituted the Empire of the Hapsburgs to whom gaining their independence has not brought the tortures which ancient poets and theologians had reserved for the damned.

Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm

The War that made the World unsafe for Catholicism

05 Saturday Dec 2015

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It must be said in all candor that it is impossible to make a correct historical evaluation of World War I while disregarding the fact that Austria-Hungary began the war, that she was the real issue of the war, and that the most important result of the war is the new order in the Danubian area as established in 1919. Everybody who denies that the World War I is “about” Austria-Hungary, understands neither history nor Europe.- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd

What was the point of the seemly pointless bloodshed a little over a century ago? What started the war in which the last remnants of old Christendom were dismembered and forgotten? I hope to write more on this important subject, but for now I’ll let the words of Freiherr Hengelmüller (the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the United States) explain:

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