Blessed Karl, a Light for Our Times

Two excellent books on Bld Karl are Blessed Charles of Austria: A Holy Emperor and His Legacy by Charles Coulombe and A Heart for Europe – the Lives of Emperor Charles and Empress Zita of Austria-Hungary by James and Joanna Bogle.

From The European Conservative

By Fr Benedict Kiely

Blessed Karl was permeated with piety and imbued with that virtue.

This is a lightly edited transcript of a speech given at a conference entitled “Blessed Karl – A Light for Our Times,” held October 18th-20th in Washington, DC.

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The title of this weekend conference is: “Blessed Karl – A Light for Our Times.”  Why would an anachronism—an Emperor who lost his Empire—be a light for our times? I am tempted to say, not only, ”What is wrong with anachronisms?” but also “Make anachronisms great again.”

I think the answer to both those questions—why Bl. Karl is a light, and why he is so for our times—can first be found in the traditional reasons for which the Church beatifies and canonizes men, women, and children. We pray fervently that not only will Bl. Karl be Saint Karl soon, but also that Servant of God Empress Zita, his wife, will soon be St. Zita. In fact, their double canonisation would confirm the point I am making.

Traditionally, the Church proposes people for veneration for three or four principal reasons: because they have lived the Christian life in an exemplary manner, a life of holiness, virtue, charity, suffering, and possibly martyrdom. However, there are many (millions perhaps) of men and women who live, and have lived, holy lives and are not canonised: we remember them all on November 1st. Chesterton, a man who should be canonised (we need a fat, beer and burgundy, cigar-smoking saint—the perfect patron for journalists), said that, “The true saint or the true hero only differs from humanity in being, as it were, more human than humanity.” As so often with GKC, those simple words are very profound. Being “more human than humanity” actually means being as humanity was intended to be before the Fall, being closer to God’s original intention, which is clearly what a saint is, and a hero. The saints are the heroes of the Church. Therefore, the first reason the Church proposes someone for public veneration, after their holy life, is to be an exemplar. That is why the Church has saints for every occupation, every role. It is not possible, as long as the occupation is honourable, to say that you cannot be a saint if you are, say, a soldier, or a blacksmith, or a busy mother, or, indeed, an emperor.

Aligned with being an exemplar, the person canonised is worthy of imitation. There are some saints who, as it were, ‘pass the test of time.’ In other words, they are still venerated centuries after their life on earth. Yet, often a saint does answer a particular need at a particular time, even though their veneration may then continue for centuries. Here, perhaps, we can speak of Bl. Karl as a light for our times. Lastly, and very importantly, the saint is a heavenly intercessor; they pray for us, they are part of the Church Triumphant aiding us, the Church Militant on earth. They are most certainly our friends in heaven, helping us, whether it is securing a Fidesz victory in Hungary, or, like St. Anthony, helping us find our lost car keys.

Bl. Karl is and was an intercessor, an exemplar, and most certainly worthy of imitation, although it is unlikely that many of us will become an Emperor or Empress, unless we are residents of the local lunatic asylum. But we are, or will be, family men and women, leaders, politicians, and soldiers. We are all, in some way, or we should be, peacemakers, whether at the highest level or the very lowest.

With those reasons for public veneration understood, I would propose a few ways that we can see Bl. Karl’s life as both a light and as a light for our times.

I found, in trying to prepare for this talk, two documents in particular, and a few words of the saints, which gave me much food for thought. The first document is an astonishing work. Written sometime between his coronation (in A.D. 1000) and the death of his son (in 1031), it is a document entitled “Libellus de institutione morum – Instruction in virtuous conduct.” It was written by King St. Istvan I (King St. Stephen of Hungary), the first king of Hungary, around 1,100 years before Bl. Karl became king of Hungary. It is, as the title suggests, a set of instructions in ten short chapters, addressed by St. Stephen to his son, Prince Imre, on the virtuous conduct that he must practice to be a good king and a good leader. Although a thousand years old, much of what King St. Stephen recommends could be a guide for our professional politicians (would to God that they did follow some of them!), but also, the instructions were followed by Bl. Karl, and can still be practised, in imitation of him, in our own lives.

King Stephen is telling his son that he must be virtuous in order to be successful, not only in the eyes of men but, more importantly, in the eyes of God. He must practice one virtue above all others, as he says in the tenth instruction. He must be “imbued with piety.” Bl. Karl was a man who followed that instruction. But piety as understood by King Stephen one thousand years ago, and by Bl. Karl over 100 years ago, should not be confused with how it is popularly understood today. If we understand more of what St. Stephen meant, and as Bl. Karl lived it, he will be not only an exemplar for us, worthy of imitation, but also a light for our times.

Piety, as it is presently understood, is almost a synonym for being prayerful, holy, or religious, as in, “She’s a very pious woman, she says 15 Rosaries a day.” That is not what St. Stephen meant, although that is most certainly part of it.

Piety, as we know, is a pre-Christian virtue, essentially regarding the right valuing of, and respecting properly, one’s responsibilities. Other sources say that piety stresses the obligations which are both natural and fundamental, what even might be called our duties. Our primary duty and obligation, which is both natural and fundamental, is to obey the First Commandment, and to give due honour and worship to God. Yet those other natural and fundamental duties and obligations involve the virtue of piety. Family, society, and charity are all as valid today as they were 1,000 years ago. St. Stephen told his son that he must be “imbued” with piety. My natural love of etymology made that phrase worthy of investigation. To be imbued is to be suffused, to be permeated by something. From the Latin imbuere, it meant to dye or to stain, developing into the Old French for saturation. That wish of St. Istvan for his son—for Bl. Karl, and for us, becomes clearer. He must be stained, soaked, saturated, and permeated with piety. His natural, fundamental, and sacred duties must be the essence of his being, almost his raison d’etre.

Blessed Karl was permeated with piety and imbued with that virtue. His duty to his empire, his peoples, his family and, profoundly, to his faith, was his raison d’etre. His quest for peace, to end the horrors of the Great War, was an expression of his responsibilities. His exile and the ill-treatment he suffered, and his enduring dedication to his family, was an expression of his natural and fundamental responsibilities. We can and must do the same. It is possible and it is practical in all stations in life to be pious. Following Christ’s directive when asked which was the greatest commandment, duty to God must be first. What a message, a light for our times! How often today are politicians compromised by failing in that first pious practice; how often are we compromised in our work, family or societal life? Bl. Karl is a light for our times, leading us to the truth.

King St. Stephen tells his son, in the fifth instruction, that to have his kingdom honoured he must “favour justice,” a cardinal virtue. “Patient kings,” he said, “reign, but the impatient tyrannise … Pass judgement with patience and mercy.”

This image of patient, merciful, and pious leadership—as valid for a king or a congressman, for an emperor or the father of a family—was anticipated in a homily of St. Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century:

People in positions of authority must work more strenuously than others, but be more humble than those who are subjects; like slaves, they should place their own life at the disposal of others, regarding those who have been entrusted to them as a charge given to them by God.

Here is not only piety revealed, but the virtue of humility, scarcely a virtue one immediately thinks of with regard to a monarch, a president, or a prime minister. Bl. Karl saw his role as monarch as the servant of his people. They were indeed the charge given to him by God. His service was, in its very essence, truly Christian leadership, following the words of Jesus to His disciples. His servant leadership led him from the coronation to the Cross, from imperial glory to sickness and semi-destitution in Madeira. Humility, service, duty and putting one’s life at the disposal of those we are called to serve—is this not an example, a model of leadership for all times, a light for our times?

The second document which inspired me to draw a comparison with Bl. Karl for this talk was slightly more modern than the thousand-year-old instruction by St. Stephen of Hungary. It was the sermon, preached by Monsignor Ronald Knox, for the Feast of St. Edward the Confessor in 1922. According to Fr. Phillip Caraman, SJ, the editor of Knox’s sermons, Knox was fascinated by the recurring theme of adversity and the apparent failure of so many English saints and martyrs. He saw in this, Caraman said, a profound echo of the life and suffering of Christ, with that glorious Christian paradox of life and suffering, and even failure, not being the end but rather the entry into eternity.

King St. Edward the Confessor was the penultimate Anglo-Saxon King of England before the Norman Conquest in 1066. We too had our war of Northern aggression, the late unpleasantness; but, as yet, we have not initiated a demand for reparations from the French for their reprehensible colonialism. King St. Edward—called the “Confessor” after his death, because he lived the Christian life without dying a martyr—practised all the virtues, most completely the virtue of piety as described by St. Stephen. It is not a fanciful conjecture to wonder if he had read the document; it is quite possible. Knox says that Edward being driven into exile as a boy at the age of ten was a “fortunate catastrophe” which had “robbed him of the terrors of royalty.” This “fortunate catastrophe” gave Edward the sense of eternity and the mystery of divine providence. How often must one suffer in order to see reality, and through suffering, come to both humility and equanimity? Bl. Karl’s short reign was not glorious; it could be said to have been a series of catastrophes. Yet Karl is a blessed, soon to be saint. The way he understood divine providence, and the way his faith did not fail, teaches us a great lesson.

Knox continues his reflection looking at Westminster Abbey, founded and built by St. Edward, and completed shortly before his death. Westminster Abbey, through the last thousand years, is where the so-called great and good of England have been buried or commemorated. St. Edward is still there, miraculously having survived the destruction and the iconoclasm of not only the so-called Reformation, but also the horrors of the tyrant and regicide, Oliver Cromwell. Knox speaks of St. Edward as having no great achievements compared to many commemorated in the Abbey, but, he says, there is “another side of the picture … a side to which historians, full of great world movements and the fortunes of dynasties, pay scant attention.” That “other side,” is the same as the other side of Blessed Karl. “When we venerate St. Edward,” Knox says, “we venerate a failure;” and when we venerate Bl. Karl, we venerate a failure, at least in the eyes of the world. But, says Knox—and this applies as much to Karl as to St. Edward—the Confessor was a “successful man … because in his simple piety, in the unaffected generosity of his nature, he set himself to serve the men about him by easing their burdens, by relieving their necessities, by confirming them in their allegiance to the faith.”

Blessed Karl, intercessor, is most certainly and most powerfully worthy of imitation by all who lead, for his suffering, his faith, his charity, and his acceptance of the will of God. He is an exemplar of Godly statesmanship, imbued with piety, a role model, and a light for our times.