There are events occurring very soon which have massive life-changing potential for your humble & obedient scribe, and which could go quite horribly wrong or astoundingly well.

I absolutely implore you to pray to all the saints in Heaven, and especially to whichever Guardian Angels may be relevant, to combine, conspire, pray, and intercede for my special intention.

Thank you in advance for all your prayers, and I will keep you all in my prayers as well.

Charles was born the son of the second son of the Emperor’s brother and so the possibility of him ever ascending to the Austro-Hungarian throne seemed distant, perhaps even remote. When the great Pope St. Pius X received the young Charles, however, he said:

I bless Archduke Charles, who will be the future Emperor of Austria and will help lead his countries and peoples to great honor and many blessings–but this will not become obvious until after his death.

One saint prophesying the future of another.

A particularly appropriate way of praying for the holy emperor’s intercession would be to say the novena composed by the Emperor Charles Prayer League for Peace Among the Nations (or Kaiser Karl Gebetsliga für den Völkerfrieden), which can be found here.

Pilgrims can also venerate his relics or pray at shrines dedicated to Charles in Australia, the Philippines, Austria, Belgium, Bohemia, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Lebanon, Canada, Mexico, the United States, Brazil, Chile, and of course on the Portuguese island of Madeira where he died and is entombed.

Index: Charles of Austria

The headline boldly states “Australian nun ‘to be made patron saint of abuse victims’” only for the sub-headline — “An Australian nun who will be canonised by the Pope next month should be made the patron saint of clerical sex abuse victims, Catholics have suggested.” — to directly contradict this.

Is Mary McKillop “to be” the patron saint of the abused or has it merely been “suggested”? The headline-writer put the ‘to be’ in quotation marks, but the article doesn’t supply a single quotation or piece of evidence showing this decision has been reached, only a quotation suggesting it would be a wise course of action.

I’ve read numerous examples of newspaper articles offering contradictory facts unreconciled, but to do so before the article has even started seems particularly bizarre.

George Hitchcock, The Annunciation
Oil on canvas, 62½ in. x 80½ in.
1887, Art Institute of Chicago

Lozano Garrido, Mr. Hooper informs us, “wrote his first article for — and went on to edit — a magazine called Cruzada (Crusade). That was a pretty loaded title for a publication of the time because, in the language of the dictatorship, ‘cruzada’ referred to the campaign Franco pursued with ruthless and bloody determination against any Spaniard who dared to hold opinions much to the left of fascism.”

Up to a point Lord Copper! For a Christian periodical — written by Christian journalists, read by Christian people, in a Christian country — to have the name “Crusade” hardly seem loaded at all, despite the Spanish state’s contemporaneous use of the word cruzada. But this is incidental and entirely beside the point.

Mr. Hooper wonders where Lozano Garrido fits in to the bigger picture of Spanish journalism at the time because, Hooper claims, “by approving his beatification, Pope Benedict is sending a message to the world about the sort of journalism that he regards as worthwhile”.

Well, in a word: no. As Hooper admits, “Lolo” isn’t being beatified because of his journalism but because of his heroic virtues exhibited in the face of suffering. In a sense, his journalism has nothing to do with it. If he had been a baker of rye bread instead of a journalist, would we extrapolate that Benedict XVI is sending a message to the world about the sort of bread he regards as worthwhile? Of course not. It simply does not follow.

In October of last year, a relic ex ossibus of Blessed Charles I was formally received at the Basilica Church of Our Lady of Mercy & St. Michael Archangel in Barcelona, the capital city of the Spanish principality of Catalonia. The bone fragment is the first relic of the last Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, and King of Bohemia to be publicly venerated in the Kingdom of Spain. It was requested by His Grace the Bishop of Solsona, Don Jaume Traserra y Cunillera, at the request of the Catalonian Delegation of the Constantinian Order. The relic has been enshrined in the chapel of St. Michael the Archangel, alongside a portrait of the Emperor.

A grandson of Blessed Charles, HIRH the Archduke Simeon of Austria, attended (with his wife) as the representative of HRH the Infante Don Carlos, Duke of Calabria, the Grand Master of the Constantinian Order and head of the Royal House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. Also in attendance were Lt. Gen. Don Fernando Torres Gonzalez (Army Inspector General), General Mainar Don Gustavo Gutierrez (Chief of the 3rd Sub-inspection Pyrenees and Military Commander General of Barcelona and Tarragona), as well as representatives of the Order of Malta, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, various guilds and corps of Spanish nobility, and lay fraternities.

After the passing of the Hapsburg empire, which had been so protective of its Jewish subjects (especially compared to the regimes which succeeded it), numerous prominent Jews were received into the Catholic faith, perhaps having come to a full appreciation of precisely what they had lost. The subject of “Literary Jewish Converts to Christianity in Interwar Hungary” is worthy of further investigation (some graduate student should write a dissertation on just such a matter). I am no longer surprised when, in my researches, I come across yet another fascinating Hungarian Jew — be he a writer, playwright, poet, or patron — and discover, usually buried in some footnote, that he died a good Catholic.

It was announced recently that Mgr. Yves Le Saux, Bishop of Le Mans in the traditional province of Maine (Pays de la Loire), France has opened the cause for the beatification of Zita of Bourbon-Parma, the long-lived wife of Blessed Emperor Charles of Austria. Charles, the last (to date) Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, and King of Bohemia (&c.), died in exile in Madiera in 1922, aged just thirty-four years. Zita Maria delle Grazie Adelgonda Micaela Raffaela Gabriella Giuseppina Antonia Luisa Agnese de Bourbon-Parma, meanwhile, was born in Tuscany in 1892 and lived a long life, giving up the ghost in March 1989, and interred in the Capuchin vault in Vienna following a funeral of imperial dignity.

“The process was opened in Le Mans,” Gregor Kollmorgen of TNLM reports, “and not in the Swiss diocese of Chur, where the Empress died twenty years ago in 1989 in Zizers, with the consent of Msgr. Huonder, the Bishop of Chur, and the permission of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, because within the diocese of Le Mans is situated the Abbey of Solesmes, well known to NLM readers for its leading rôle in the early liturgical movement in the nineteenth century, especially regarding Gregorian chant, and which was the spiritual center of the Servant of God Zita, her home among her many exiles.”

Zita’s relationship with Solesmes dates back to 1909 when she first visited its sister-abbey of St. Cecilia on the Isle of Wight in England. She became an oblate of the Abbey of Solesmes itself in 1926. Her daily life after the exile & death of her saintly husband included the Rosary, hearing multiple daily masses, and praying part of the Divine Office.

Zita was the daughter of the deposed Duke of Parma, Robert I, during his second marriage to Maria Antonia of Portugal. The Duke’s first wife, Maria Pia of the Two Sicilies, died in 1882, and Zita was the seventeenths of the Duke’s twenty-four children by his two wives. Three of Zita’s sisters became nuns, a vocation which she explored, but in 1909 she became reacquainted with her childhood friend Archduke Charles of Austria. In June 1911, they were engaged and then married at the castle of Schwarzau that October.

After the horrendous Sarajevo Assassination of 1914, Charles became heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and the empire was thrown into the catastrophic First World War. When the Emperor Franz Joseph died in November 1916, Charles succeeded to the imperial throne. Zita accompanied their son & heir Otto to the coronation of her husband in Budapest.

First as Archduchess and then as Empress, Zita proved a suitable match for Charles, happy to don the national costume of the many nations over which the Hapsburg empire spread its vast and benevolent dominion when the occasion arose.

In November 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, and the Hapsburgs were forced to flee Austria in the March of the following year. The family were first exiled to Switzerland, but after two nearly successful attempts to regain his Hungarian throne, the Swiss revoked his residency privilege and the allied powers transferred him to the Portuguese island of Madeira, where he died in 1922. Zita and the children moved to Spain shortly after the death of the Emperor, and then to Belgium in 1929 as Crown Prince Otto prepared to begin his studies at Leuven, the oldest remaining Catholic university in the world. Friendly overtures by the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuß and, following his murder by Nazis, Chancellor Schuschnigg came to nought when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938.

As Catholics, the Hapsburgs were opposed to everything Hitler stood for, and as former monarchs Hitler considered them potential rivals. When he invaded Belgium in 1940, Zita took the family through France and Spain to Portugal, where the United States government granted them entry visas. After sailing into New York, they spent varying periods of time around the metropolitan region. As the children’s English was paltry at best, they (being Francophones) eventually made their way to Quebec. In the province’s capital, arguably the most European of North America’s cities, they were so poor that the children resorted to collection dandelions from the public parks to boil into an almost tasteless soup. (I reflected up this point when I, on my visit to the grave of the holy Gen. Georges Vanier in that city, I came across the frozen remnants of a dandelion in the snow).

In 1952, however, the Empress Zita returned to Europe, first to Luxembourg before finally making her final home in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. In 1989, at ninety-six years of age, the Empress Zita died. The Austrian Republic allowed her funeral to be held in Vienna, and the former imperial capital witnessed the finest Hapsburg spectacle since the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916.

In many ways Zita’s cause is not a surprise. When Charles of Austria was beatified, October 21 — not his death day but the anniversary of his marriage to Zita (photo above) — was chosen as his feast day, which suggested the possibility that this married couple might some day be jointly praised on the altars of Christendom. The following is the official prayer to invoke the intercession of Empress Zita:

Any graces received through the intercession of the Servant of God, Empress Zita — especially those which are possibly miraculous — should contact:

More: Charles of Austria

Jan Steen, The Feast of St. Nicholas
Oil on canvas, 32 in. x 28 in.
1665-68, Rijksmuseum