Chevalier Charles Coulombe's Monarchy FAQs

This is quite a lengthy document so I have continued it on a separate page. The link is at the bottom.

Chevalier Charles

Coulombe's

Monarch FAQS

1. Is monarchy evil?

Certainly not! Was St. Louis evil? Charlemagne? All the many saints who occupied thrones? How about King David, or his descendant, Jesus Christ? Why do you suppose that the Bible tells us in the first Epistle of St. Peter (2, 13), to honour the King? Or that the Church composed ceremonies for the anointing and coronation of Kings, and declared that they ruled "by the Grace of God?" The Catholic concept of Monarchy was well defined by Archbishop John Healy of Tuam, Ireland, who wrote before his death in 1919:

The character of Kings is sacred; their persons are inviolable; they are the anointed of the Lord, if not with sacred oil, at least by virtue of their office. Their power is broad---based upon the Will of God, and not on the shifting sands of the people's will...They will be spoken of with becoming reverence, instead of being in public estimation fitting butts for all foul tongues. It becomes a sacrilege to violate their persons, and every indignity offered to them in word or act, becomes an indignity offered to God Himself. It is this view of Kingly rule that alone can keep alive in a scoffing and licentious age the spirit of ancient loyalty, that spirit begotten of faith, combining in itself obedience, reverence, and love for the majesty of kings which was at once a bond of social union, an incentive to noble daring, and a salt to purify the heart from its grosser tendencies, preserving it from all that is mean, selfish, and contemptible. (P.J. Joyce, John Healy, pp. 68-69).

C.S. Lewis put the problem very well:

Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach---men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Indeed, indeed!

2. But what about all the corrupt monarchs who ruled in the Middle Ages?

But what about all the saints who also ruled? As Catherine Goddard Clarke put it in her Our Glorious Popes (p.59):

We have been slowly and deliberately taught that monarchies and kings are bad things, and papal supervision of any kind in government, even over its morals, is a very bad thing… …

Scarcely anyone is ever told any more that France, Spain and Portugal, Poland and Hungary, England and Sweden, all had kings and queens who ruled their lands gloriously and brought untold happiness and well-being to their subjects.

Indeed, the pages of both Dom Gueranger and Alban Butler, whose respective Liturgical Year and Lives of the Saints are true classics, are filled with accounts of Royal Sanctity.

There were, to be sure, corrupt Kings, just as there were and are corrupt clerics. But that does not change the fact that the institutions these fallible humans represent are capable of producing greatness in a way their alternatives cannot.

Examine the history of any republic you like; with the exceptions of such men as Garcia Moreno in Ecuador, Lucas Alaman in Mexico, Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, and Heinrich Bruening in Germany (all of whom, coincidentally, were Monarchists who thought the time of restoration as yet unripe for their particular countries), it is a record of mediocrities at best, and monsters at worst. Hitler was elected, after all. Given its track record, perhaps the adherents of republics should stick to theory, and leave history be.

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