Servant of God Zita: A Life of Exile (Guest: Charles Coulombe)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Charles, how are you today? [00:00:16] Speaker C: Very well, very well. Back in the usa, as the Beatles tell us. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Yes, very good, very good. You are our resident Habsburg expert. Unless we actually have a Habsburg on then, then you get booted the number. [00:00:29] Speaker C: Two, but definitely president. [00:00:32] Speaker B: And of course, we talked to you a few years ago about your excellent book, Blessed Charles of Austria, which is, I think the definitive work today to read. If you want to learn more about Blessed Carl, whom is getting cut off by this, I need to put him more. I'll put him like this. [00:00:49] Speaker A: He would do that. [00:00:50] Speaker C: There we go. [00:00:51] Speaker B: Okay. Normally when I have a widescreen, he, you can see him, but there you can. Blessed Carl, Blessed Charles. We can have a debate about that. But no, this is an excellent book from tan publishers we talked about before. I've talked about Blessed Carl here on the podcast. A good deal. But really today what we want to focus on is his wife, servant of God, Zita. And you have. I like how they, they match, by the way. Let me just put this on the screen. People see the matching. That's very beautiful. But yeah, I was, you had told me about this year, I think when we talked about the Blessed Carl book. You told me that you were writing a book about, about Zeta and it's taken a while to get out, but now it is out from Tan as well. And I just, I, I loved it. Of course, I love all things related to Blessed Carl and of course she was the most related to Blessed Carl of anybody and but I, I, I thought I'm fascinating because, you know, as you mentioned in the 4, in the introduction of the book, there's some overlap between two books because you can't tell Zeta's story without giving the details somewhat about Blessed Carl. But of course I'd recommend people read them both. Blessed Carl, Izita. But there's a few things I wanted to kind of focus on today when it comes to Zita. And the first one is I learned a lot about her background, of her, particularly her background before she was even born. I mean, her, her, you know, what family she came from. So, yeah, I will admit I got a little confused at times because there's so many different, I mean, families that she's involved in. But you can, I don't, you don't explicitly say this, but I feel like you make the point that she was born for this, that her life had been prepared for her hundreds of years before she was even born almost. And she was placed in this moment at that time, and that's where she was born. To, so why don't you just, why don't we just get started talking about Zita and talking about where she came from, you know, the families that she was part of, and give us a sense. Because I think this is something us moderns have a hard time, you know, really understanding, just a sense of, like that life of being part of these royal families, these noble families in Europe in the 19th century and before that. [00:03:14] Speaker C: Well, I will. One thing I do think is important, though, to bear in mind is that what's true of Zita is actually true of everybody in the sense that we've all been centuries in the making. The difference is that families like her, remember, most of us don't. [00:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:31] Speaker C: So it's important to bear that in mind because you look at these people like they're terribly different, except that you're a multiple great grandfather, I don't know, a Slovak peasant in, in, in, in Carpathia. He played a role in life and in your history, as great as hers did in here. In hers. The difference is the most of us don't know where it'll come from. [00:04:00] Speaker A: Right. [00:04:01] Speaker C: The great forgetting, I like to call it. But each of them have had as great an influence on us as first did on her. And you and I were all prepared for this moment the way she was. [00:04:18] Speaker A: Right. [00:04:18] Speaker C: We just don't know the ins and outs the way she did. So basically, the, the thing to bear in mind about the royal families of Europe is that up until the French Revolution, politics, foreign policy, all that kind of thing was basically an interplay amongst these interrelated houses. And there was some, some, shall we say, unexpected benefits from that. One of them being that warfare was considered to be primarily the work of the royalty and nobility. And it was up until the French Revolution, with the exception of the Thirty Years War in the 1600s, because that was a popular war over religion. I, when I say popular, I don't mean everybody liked it. I mean everybody got involved. I, I, I don't. We're at war, we're burning things, and we're all dying. No, I don't mean they enjoyed it, but I mean, when you say in this sense something is popular, that means literally of the people. The people are involved, the people care. That was not really the case with most wars in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century until the French Revolution. In a lot of ways, the stage was set for the French Revolution by the English Civil wars, the, and ultimately by the Protestant revolt, but they didn't. The results were manifest in the French Revolution. So now you have the idea of the nation at arms. An oligarchy takes over. We run the show in the name of the people. If the people don't like it, they'll lose their heads. So the people go into like it. And that pattern eventually gets established throughout Europe and indeed throughout the world. We all enjoy it to some degree today, as Covid will remind us. [00:06:10] Speaker A: But. [00:06:14] Speaker C: That being the case by in 1815, Humpty Dumpty was put back together again of the Congress of Yana. And they tried in what was called the Restoration, the various nations of Europe tried to go back to business as usual before 1789. But of course you can't really. The changes have been made. The. The people have been slaughtered. Well, the king of France in 1825, the one in 1815, Louis 18th was the younger brother of Louis 16th. Louis 16th and his wife having been murdered by the revolutionaries, their son having died in prison, the lost of fam. So Louis brother becomes Louis 18th. He dies in 1824. He is succeeded by Charles X Charleston. Is very important truth to the story. Why, he's the great, great grandfather of Zeta. And in a lot of ways, dealing with the revolution is what every royal family of Europe will have to do from 1815 on. In 1830, the revolution comes back in France. Charles the 10th is overthrown. He, his. His oldest son, the Duke d' Angouleme, has no children. His youngest son, the Duke de Marie, was murdered while his wife was pregnant. She had a daughter and then she was pregnant. Her husband is murdered. She gives birth to a son, the corner chamber. And he's a very, very important character in the Zeta story, the grandson of Charles the 10th. So 1830, you have revolution. Louis Philippe, their cousin, betrays them and takes the crown for himself, becomes the king of the French. They go into exile in Scotland, in Hollywood House. Well, Charles and his oldest son abdicate in favor of the little infant. And his mother, after a couple of years of sitting around Edinburgh, gets tired of it. Don't be shocked, but any Scots listening to this will find this impossible to believe, but for an Italian lady, it was too much. She was a Bourbon of the Two Sicilies. And one thing I should say at this point too, otherwise it'll get really, really confusing, but so be it. Originally, the house of Bourbon, the kings of France, one branch splits off in the 1700s, becomes kings of Spain. Two branches split off from them become the Dukes of Parma, another become the kings of the Two Sicilies. The man who was responsible for that was a very important person called Carlos iii, the most important king who ever reigned in history, why he founded the city of Los Angeles, so obviously was more important than, you know, anybody really. I mean, almost more important than Adam and Eve by this much. Yeah, but at any rate, so you've got these four branches of the Bourbon, you have a younger branch, the French Bourbon called Oron, and Louis Philippe comes from them. And then you've got the Spanish Parma, Neapolitans. Okay, so Duchesse de Be the daughter of Charles the ten's or the wife rather of Charles the ten's son is a princess, the Two Sicilies. She gets tired of waiting around for something to happen and says, I'm going back home, I'm going to raise money, I'm going to get weapons, I'm going to go to France, I'm going to lead a rising and put my son on the throne. She was pretty determined, so she goes to Naples. But something else happens while she's there raising money and weaponry. She falls in love with a Neapolitan nobleman and they get married at the Vatican secretly. But she sets off for France, leaves revolt, it's defeated. She goes to Nantes, she's in prison. And then she's discovered to be with child. That destroys her as a figure for her son's restoration. Louis Philippe laughingly releases her. She goes to Austria where the family have moved and at first Charles the 10th, her father in law, refuses to see her. But she produces the husband, she produces the paperwork and all, all. She's back in the family. But she and, and she and the Neapolitan would have children. They've got descendants in Austria today. I've been a few of them, but as far as, as, as far as being a, a fighter for her son's cause, she's destroyed. Now she didn't do anything wrong, but she sought her own happiness over her son's cause. [00:11:31] Speaker A: Right? [00:11:31] Speaker C: That was the Duchess to Biddy. So keep her in mind as I say, her son was. Was the heir to the French throne. Her daughter married her. Her distant cousin, the Duke of Parma, now the Duke of. The Duke of Parma died early after they had had a son. His name, the son's name was Robert. In 1859, the Duchess Regent and the young son are driven out of Parma by Victor Emanuel of Sedinia. They go to Austria to live with her brother. So that's very important because Duke Robert of Parma, who will become Zeta's father, is raised by his uncle. So he's very much imbued with the feelings of the Bourbon France. And I cannot help but think that the story of the Duchess of Eddie that we just related was very much on their minds. I don't have any proof of this, although people who knew her, when I suggested my theory, they said, well, it would make a lot of sense. I suspect that she was raised with the story of the Duchess to many and resolved she would not be that eventually she's going to find herself in exactly the same position the Duchesse was in, but she would not put her own happiness over her son's cause. [00:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting that the parallels between the two. So that would be her great grandmother, is that right? [00:13:10] Speaker C: Great, great. [00:13:12] Speaker B: Okay. Between the two is striking. This idea of, I mean, really is a striking parallel also because just a choice that many of these royals have between duty and happiness. I mean, it's kind of funny because we see in, I mean, modern time, modern royals are very different in a lot of ways. But, you know, there's certain modern royals, like in the English royal family, that seem, at least on the outside, to have chosen their own personal happiness, their own personal desires over duty to the crown, to the monarchy, to the country, whatever the case may be. And now I'm not saying she did that, you know, when she married, but yeah, in a way it's like, that's the thing is when you say she did nothing wrong by marrying the man, you're right. It's not like a sin. But I think when I, at least when I read the stories of the royals, the nobles and stuff, they just have to choose things that are not for themselves. Often that, that's the thing. They. They're kind of called to do things that aren't for them. They're for others. I mean, it's kind of what they're born for. [00:14:30] Speaker C: This, this is true. But herein lies the rub. Today we expect them to be democratic, and when they reflect us, we don't like it. [00:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:14:42] Speaker C: You know, I'm often, I'm often told and reminded us, getting ahead of ourselves in the story, but people often say, well, you know, it's. It's too bad we can't have kings like that. Gee, it's too bad the kings of today can't have subjects like those people had. [00:14:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:14:58] Speaker C: I mean, Carl and Zeta were the best you could have asked for. You saw the mass risings in their behalf. Well, that's right. They never happened. [00:15:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:08] Speaker C: Their people got what they deserved. [00:15:11] Speaker A: Right. [00:15:11] Speaker C: The way we do. [00:15:12] Speaker A: Right. [00:15:13] Speaker C: You see, it's a. It's Life is very symbiotic. The. The rule reflect the rulers, the rulers reflect the rules. And in our system, we pretend that that's a good thing. They should look like us, but when they do, we don't like it. I don't get it. [00:15:35] Speaker A: Right. [00:15:35] Speaker C: I mean, you know, look at the divorce rate. Speaking of choosing duty over honor, look at the, look at the clerics who don't honor their vows, which I tell you, is much more closely tied to the divorce rate than it is to any other factor. It is the modern's inability to be honorable. [00:15:58] Speaker A: Right. [00:15:59] Speaker C: Very hard for us because we have been training to be happy. We've never gotten past the nursery. [00:16:07] Speaker A: Right. [00:16:08] Speaker C: I mean that in a nice way, of course. It was good. You mean it? But seriously, moving, moving back to our. To our friends, we left them dangling in the 19th century. So what happens then is that Robert will marry twice. His first wife is a cousin, somewhat distant, but another two, Sicily's lady, she gives him 12 children. Well, she dies, so he marries again. A Portuguese princess, a branza. She gives him another 12 children. [00:16:46] Speaker A: Wow. [00:16:47] Speaker C: So they've got 24. Now, several of the kids from the first marriage had various, as we say today, developmental disabilities. But Robert Aparma made sure that both of his broods lived together, treated each other as full brothers and sisters. And part of, and apparently she was quite successful, part of her of his agreeing to marry his second wife was that she treat the first brood completely as her own. And from everything I can, I. I could find, she kept her part of the deal. She really was. Went out of her way to be everybody's mother. Now there. There's some important lessons in terms of what that made out of Zeta. [00:17:36] Speaker B: Where did Zita fall in that 24? [00:17:38] Speaker C: She was in the second half. [00:17:39] Speaker B: Second half, okay. [00:17:41] Speaker C: She was the. The Braganza. Now the other thing that enters directly into a story in France and Spain and Portugal in the first part of the 19th century, I told you, Louis Philippe betrayed. He was the younger, the younger cousin, younger line of the. The family. And he initiated what was to be initially a sort of liberal monarchy like Great Britain. That wasn't enough for some. So he. He got deposed in 1848. And that led to a dynastic struggle in the French Bal that goes on to the present. In Spain, a similar thing happened. Fernando vii, the. The grandson of Carlos iii, he had a daughter, Luceta Claw, the house of Bourbon said that, well, no, she can't inherit. It goes to your brother. He insisted on changing the law for his daughter so she'd be his heiress. The Liberals backed her, the Conservatives back the brother. And that's where we get the whole Carlist thing from, if you've heard of them. [00:18:47] Speaker A: Right. [00:18:48] Speaker C: Well, the same thing happened in Portugal. The King of Portugal had a daughter and a brother. The daughter's cause was embraced by the liberals. He changed the law for his daughter. The. The Liberals embraced the daughter. The Conservatives embrace the brother, Don Miguel and Don Miguel, justice with the Carlos in Spain and the legitimacy of France is defeated. He goes into exile. His daughter marries Robert Aparma. And the Zita's family are also close to the Carla Stairs. So basically, you've got three brands of Western European traditional Catholic conservatism feeding into this lady's background. [00:19:40] Speaker A: Right. [00:19:42] Speaker C: So her, when the cone of Chambord dies, he leaves the Chateau Chambord in France to Robert. So Robert and his family will do a lot of traveling between France, Italy and Austria. And this has the added effect of making Zita very multinational. She speaks French, Italian, Spanish, German, English. Perfectly. And in fact, she would go to school in England, the reason being her grandmother, when, after her son died, her grandmother became a nun and she was in a French house that gets exiled by the French government in 1904. So she's going to spend some time at school with her grandmother's nuns in the Isle of Wight in England. So she becomes a perfect English speaker. And all of this is by way of preparation, as you might say. So she has this background. So I think, I was going to. [00:20:50] Speaker B: Say, when you say preparation is the thought in most of these families that the daughters should, at the very least, they're being prepared to be married to some. A royal noble, something. Not necessarily, obviously a future emperor or anything like that, but just like. Is that the. Is that kind of how they're brought up, that you will likely be married off to some high, high ranking, probably not the right word, but, you know, some type of noble or royal or even maybe a monarch. Correct. [00:21:24] Speaker C: And so you have to, you know, you've got to. You've got to be. You've got to be able to deal with all kinds of people. You've got to be amenable, you've got to be tough. All of these things feed into it. Her own family history, her complete devotion to the ideals of Catholic monarchy. All of this she was brought up with. And it was known she was going to marry an emperor, of course, right. She could have married, you know, a Jew, could been a member of some court somewhere, but she would have been Part of the whole ambiance, part of the mix. Again, you know, it's rather like in 1969 and 70 when Pope Paul VI dissected and destroyed the Roman court, which is an episode that never gets nearly enough attention. It was really. I mean, if you want to see clericalism in action, that was it. The. The Roman noble families that refused to accept the new government in 1870 were called the Black nobility. And they gave up all the. Gave up any careers in the army, in. In public service, the diplomatic. All the things they used to do for the popes, they would not do for the new government, so that it kind of limited what they could do. And from 1870 to 1929, they basically gave up doing everything they were bred for for the sake of the Holy See toward them. In 1929, they became citizens of the new Vatican State. Forty years later, 1969, Paul VI strips them of this. We know the whole lay thing. We don't want laity around. But wait a minute. That's clerical. I get confused. Yeah. [00:23:26] Speaker B: Who are the clericalists? [00:23:27] Speaker C: I. I'm not quite sure. I don't know. It's. It's difficult. So we make sure that there are none of them who are citizens of the Vatican, but we have them give our communion. [00:23:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:40] Speaker C: It'S too much for me. I don't know. I'm just a stupid Franco American. I. I don't know. [00:23:44] Speaker B: So when. When Zita, then. So Zeta is. Is bred basically to be at the very least part of a noble family, to raise children in that environment, to. To understand it, all the. All the aspects of nobility, which I know today people look down their nose at. But if you really read into. Really does have a. A positive impact on society in, you know, all diplomacy and like you were just saying with wars, particularly keeping them under control and things like that. But now she ends up, of course, as we know, spoiler alert with Carl, who at the time he was. That's true. Okay. So. Because, of course, when Carl was born, I'm trying to remember, he was not very. He was not like next in line to be emperor. He was a few. There was a number of things that had. In fact, it's kind of wild when you think about it, all the things that had to happen to get him on the throne. And it was mostly tragic things that had to happen. Almost all tragic things that had to happen. But, yeah, I think he was. What was he, baby? I think he was like, fifth or sixth or seventh or something like that when he was born. [00:25:01] Speaker C: When he was born. There was first Franz Joseph, the Emperor's son, Rudolph. Okay. [00:25:10] Speaker A: Right. [00:25:10] Speaker B: That's right. [00:25:11] Speaker C: The next in line would be Carl's grandfather, Carl Ludwig. I get confused too. [00:25:23] Speaker B: I feel better than if you get confused. [00:25:24] Speaker C: Sometimes giving these things straight in your head is a little hard. But I believe it's Carl Ludwig. So Carl Ludwig has two sons. He's the brother of Francis. Now, they had a brother in between Maximilian, and Maximilian would have been the next heir, but he's murdered by Benito Juarez in Mexico. So he's out of the picture. [00:25:43] Speaker B: Of course, the idea though is that Robert, you said was his son. Right? Is that right? [00:25:47] Speaker C: Robert was the son of the Duke of Parma. [00:25:50] Speaker B: Because the assume assumption is then he will have sons and it'll just go down that line. So it's not just Robert, but the idea is, you know, you just kind. [00:25:58] Speaker C: Of assume, oh, you'd be Rudolph. Yeah, it's Rudolph, not Robert. Rudolph. [00:26:02] Speaker B: Sorry, Rudolph. [00:26:02] Speaker C: Precisely. It's presumed that Rudolph will have sons. Right. And there's no reason why he shouldn't. I mean, he's already had a daughter, Right. So sooner or later. But even if that shouldn't happen, Carl Ludwig has an older son, Franz Ferdinand, and he'll have son. Surely he's not married yet. And then Otto the second was Carl's father, and then Carl. So for Carl to become Emperor, several things would have to happen. Rudolph would have to die without sons. Franz Ferdinand would have to die without sons, neither of which seemed very likely at the time. Now, of course, France Ferdinand ended up not dying without sons, but they were morganatic so they could inherit the throne. [00:26:54] Speaker A: Right. [00:26:55] Speaker C: But again, none of that was, none of that was in the air when, when he was born. [00:27:03] Speaker B: So when they got married, though, was it 1910, 1911? I think it was. They were, they were married. Yeah. Okay. At that point, though, he was second in line. I mean, he was. Because Franz Ferdinand was the, the heir. He was going to become the Emperor. But we, they already knew at that point his children would not be. I, this is a question I've always thought when I saw this, when I, when I've read about this, and I want to ask you, since you would know better than anybody, I think if Fran Fernand, let's say the events, the tragic events that led to his death, his murder did not happen and Franz Joseph and the Emperor dies, Franz Ferdinand becomes Emperor, what's to stop him from just saying, well, actually now my children are. I'm not saying he would necessarily do this, but what would stop him from Just saying, actually, now that I'm Emperor, I'm just going to make it so my son is the heir to the throne after all. Like, I mean, honor would keep him from doing that because he agreed to something. But I'm just saying, like legally, was there anything that could have kept him? Could that have been a possibility, that he would just do that if he. [00:28:11] Speaker C: Had been someone other than Franz Ferdinand? Yes. [00:28:14] Speaker B: Okay. [00:28:14] Speaker C: One of the things you see with European history and actually, you know, it continues to haunt us today with the Bourbons, the Two Sicilies, the House of Savoy and so on. Today, when they monkey with the laws of succession, bad things happen. [00:28:30] Speaker A: Right. [00:28:32] Speaker C: Because the laws of succession are in place for a reason, you know, and you may not like them, even though they may seem unfair, but they're laws that are meant to outrank you, because ultimately the king is the servant of the law, not the law of the king. Now, mind you, when I say law, they didn't even mean by what we mean by it, because for us, law is a positive thing that is manufactured by men in their parliaments, their courts, their sewers, wherever they come up with them. But traditionally in Catholic societies, law was given by God. What man did was to discover it, to apply it, but it was pre existing. So that's why medieval legislatures primarily existed to vote money for extraordinary reasons. They didn't exist to regulate and to create law the way we did, we did it just, it was there already. So the. It's interesting that it was only in the 19th century that you began to have this, this fashion for altering laws of succession amongst the royals. That itself was a sign of modernity, if you want to call it that, creeping into their heads. [00:30:04] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:30:06] Speaker B: So whereas it's. It was theoretically possible, it goes against the more traditional views of monarchy, but more importantly, just something Franz Ferdinand himself, from everything we know about him, wouldn't have just wouldn't have done. And so Zita gets married. I think she was around 19. Let's get back to Zita. She gets around 19, I think it was 18, 19, something like that. When she marries him, knowing she will be the empress one day and thinking, of course it's going to be maybe 20, 30 years, because Franz Ferdinand wasn't that old. I mean, Franz Joseph would die soon. I think everybody kind of knew that he, he only had a few more years left, because at that point I think he was in his 80s or 70s, 70s, something like that. I want to do a skip because people can just read the blessed Carl book, go back to that podcast if they want to. But I want to skip ahead. We're going to skip the. [00:30:55] Speaker C: The. [00:30:55] Speaker B: The exciting World War I and all the bad guys involved in that that led to Carl's downfall and his noble death and all that, because now this is where I think it gets interesting for Zita, because it's now, it's a new story in the sense that it's her story now because Carl has now passed away. And I think what you were just saying, how you tied it into her ancestors. I'm trying to picture her at this time. She's the deposed, basically, Empress and queen of Hungary. She has seven children, one on the way. [00:31:34] Speaker A: Right? [00:31:34] Speaker B: Is that right? [00:31:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:31:36] Speaker B: And she has no real support among other countries or anything like that. I mean, there's. They're kind of playing a hot potato with her family. Like, I don't want her. You take her. And yet. And like, I'm just put. I'm trying to put myself in her place. Like, what would that have been like? We know the. The end of the story is that her son's never going to become emperor. Unlikely. Her grandson, great grandson, I think that's going to happen. Who knows? But the point is. But her mindset is, it appears, at least from what you write and what I've seen is, is that that is her duty is to bring Otto, their old. [00:32:22] Speaker A: Their. [00:32:23] Speaker B: Their heir, the oldest child, to the throne. And so kind of put us in that environment, the 1920s. This is when this would have been. And what was like for Zita and kind of her. What was her mission in life? What was her. What did she feel like her duties were in her life at that time? [00:32:40] Speaker C: Well, as I say, she found herself, weirdly enough, in the same spot as the Duchess of Eddie at Edinburgh with, you know, she's got an infant son who's the heir without infant, but a boy is there. Unlike her, she has no financial means of support. She. She and her husband had not been interested in restoring Austria, Hungary as it had been, but in a federation of the. [00:33:12] Speaker A: The. [00:33:13] Speaker C: Their peoples under the Hapsburgs. So in other words, he and she would have been Emperor, Empress of Austria, King, Queen of Hungary, king, Queen of Slovakia, king, Queen of Czechia, King, Queen of Croatia, on and on and on. And that idea of a Central European federation, which have been Franz Ferdinand's idea originally, he wanted to federalize the empire. He passed that on to Carl. That became Carl's goal. It remains Zeta's goal. [00:33:43] Speaker B: So each in his federation, it would basically break up the empire, which was broken up for them anyway. But, but it would become. Each one would be self governing, each of these different entities be self governing. But they'd all would have Carl and Zita as their head of state. Correct. [00:34:04] Speaker C: And, and as their affected head of state. Again, you know, we look at the current king of Great Britain, this king of Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. There's only a minimum that he can do to restrain his governments from doing crazy things. Very, very little intact. If he did, it would be a revolution against the very revolution of 1688. [00:34:26] Speaker A: Right. [00:34:27] Speaker C: That he's sitting on the throne from. So it's a real catch 22 position for him. [00:34:33] Speaker B: So this would be a more real authority they would have over these countries. [00:34:38] Speaker C: Indeed. And it was best summed up by Franz Joseph to our own President Teddy Roosevelt when he came to visit him in Vienna in 1905. And he asked, he asked Franz Joseph, what do you consider your, the role of a modern monarch to be? And he said, protecting my people from their politicians. And I, I really can't think of a better definition than that as to the job that Carl and Z had set themselves in a future federation. So in other words, apart from a common military and foreign policy, which would be essential, these places would all be self governing. But what does self governing mean? We, we've learned, if Covid taught us nothing else, it's that when left to themselves, politicians really own you. They need an apolitical element to hold them by the throat and say bad touch. You don't get to do that. You look at the wall and then you come back when you're ready. Which oddly enough is how Francis have actually ran Austria, Hungary. His parliaments would get crazy and he'd have to dismiss them. I mean they'd be fist fighting in the, you know, in the parliament building. So he basically said, okay, you're obviously a little too upset right now. And he dissolve parliament and wait until, you know, give them a timeout, get their little selves together. Because I mean, and this is actually part of the story, I think we have to remember what, what a politician is for the most part. I mean they're the people the, the British call backbenchers tend to be, tend to be much more there for the common good. They're the front runners. But the front people, they're there for power. And they're there for power in the sense that an athlete is there for sport or a great artist or a great actor, for art or the theater. You see, they're not like regular people. They're not like you and me. They're not like normal folks who are born really, not unlike the royals, not like the nobles. We were all born where we were born. And we generally don't have a kind of drive or savvy that a politician has. And there is a useful place for it, but it has to be monitored, it has to be controlled. I mean, could you imagine a country run by athletes or a country run by artists? No, insane. Well, that's what a country run by politicians is like. [00:37:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:37:25] Speaker C: And that, that of course, is what we've come to accept as the norm, which my late father used to say that modern life is like a giant asylum with no staff but many wards. And that was exactly what the Habsburgs dedicated themselves to fighting. In other words, within the context of the modern world. What does a monarch do? It keeps the politicians in their place, administering their departments, choosing policies within their specific realms. High policy is beyond them. Why is that? Because they're only there as long as they're elected. It was funny. The current heir to the throne, the Archduke Carl, he made the comment that the press conference that it used to be that politicians look no further ahead than the next election, now they look no further ahead than the next press conference. But obviously people like that are not really keen on surrendering any of their power at all. So what Zita was facing was a dedication to a cause that had very few effective proponents, no means really of advancing that cause that she could see at the. In the immediate. But she would do her best to accomplish it or die trying. She would not be the duchesse, she would not be deflected, she would not allow her son to be deflected because she kept true to the cause that her husband had given her. [00:39:08] Speaker B: And so she is basically, her whole family is exiled. They're not able to return to Austria, to Hungary. In fact, they make laws to that effect in those countries that, no, you may not come here unless you agree to send out the dotted line and give away everything and anything. [00:39:28] Speaker A: But. [00:39:28] Speaker B: So she is. Then what's interesting is, and I thought was very good in the book, is her life after Carl. It really is a life of exile that she has to. She goes. She lives in multiple places at one point. I want to talk about this in a second. She's in America for a number of years. But at what point do you think so Otto born in 1911ish or 12, I think it was very soon after their wedding, about a year or so. And so he is in his 20s in the 1930s. And this is, of course, in Europe. A few things are happening in Europe and I think this is one of the great, like, how did I put it? You know, the Habsburgs were. They were right. You knew they were. They were noble. You. This is where they kind of shine because they lost all their titles, they lost everything as far as, like, they have no power in the eyes of the world and yet they stood against the Nazis. And they did it because they. Just because they knew. I mean, I'm willing to bet because we saw this with the. The. Oh, my gosh, Prince of Wales getting cozy with the Nazis. And I would think that if they had cozied up to them, they might have thought there was a chance that could have restored them to power in Austria, potentially. Right. I mean, because if they didn't care about things like, you know, nobility and truth and charity and justice and all that, but yet they stood, Otto in particular, and Zita, of course, they stood very much against Hitler and the Nazis. So why don't you kind of talk about that a little bit? [00:41:22] Speaker C: Well, I mean, firstly, Hitler hated. Hated the Habsburgs from the be. From get go. He put a price on Otto's head. They couldn't get them, so he got Franz Ferdinand's sons and he threw them in Dachau. [00:41:36] Speaker A: Wow. [00:41:38] Speaker C: They survived. The. The. The. Also one. One point after that, you were thinking of the Duke of Windsor. [00:41:50] Speaker A: Sorry, thank you. [00:41:51] Speaker B: Not Prince of Wales, Duke Windsor. [00:41:52] Speaker C: Thank you. Yeah. And actually, there are two things you got to remember about him. I just said this parenthetically. It's just that it's a myth that gets repeated all the time and should be addressed number one. Edward VIII had actually says he was king. He had served on the front in World War I. He saw a chauffeur killed in front of him. So he had a really like Carl, like Victor Emmanuel iii. Like he. Out of the Belgians, he'd actually served, unlike the politicians. So he was not keen on another war with Germany. Then, as king, he had seen what the depression had done to Britain and in Germany, what he saw was that the country had pulled itself together in a very short period of time. He thought that was amazing. But here's the kicker. You know where he and his wife were living when France fell? [00:42:41] Speaker B: Where is that? In France. [00:42:42] Speaker C: Right, in France, yeah. If he had wanted to work with the Nazis, all he had to do was sit put right outside Paris. They'd come to him and they wanted him, but instead, you may remember from the book, the hair raising Adventures. The Habsburgs racing through a collapsing France. Well, the Duke of Windsor and his wife did the same thing. [00:43:03] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:43:04] Speaker C: And they. They managed to escape, but the way they did it. He was very popular when he was a playboy prince in the Riviera. So he figured because now the roadblocks going up there, people try to catch him. He figured that if he went to the Riviera and then Spain, he'd be able to do it. And sure enough, every time, when they get down to the Riviera, every time, because he had been Prince of Wales, every time they come to a roadblock, he would shout, and they'd immediately open up for him and throw you wet. But he and he and his wife had the same adventure getting into Spain that the Habsburgs did. And once they had. They did the same thing. They all went to Lisbon, and then he and his wife were picked up and taken to the Bahamas, where he became governor. The Habsburgs were picked up by a ship and went to the US But I. I really need to point that out, because people always say, oh, it was pro Nazi. Well, not exactly. [00:44:03] Speaker B: Okay, good to know. [00:44:05] Speaker C: I mean, it's. It's. Bear in mind that until Mussolini broke with Britain and France over Ethiopia, Roosevelt was a great admirer of Mussolini. [00:44:13] Speaker A: Right. [00:44:14] Speaker C: A good piece of the New Deal is based on what Mussolini did in Italy. So, I mean, these things, they're a little more. A little more complex than we like to think of them. [00:44:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:23] Speaker C: But there was no such ambiguity with Otto because he had read Mein Kampf and he knew what Hitler was about. And then he went to study agronomy in Berlin in late 33, early 34, and he found out for himself what it was about. [00:44:41] Speaker A: Right. [00:44:41] Speaker C: Hitler tried to speak to him. And Otto said years later, he's one of the very few interesting conversations I've never had. He said, usually I'd be happy to speak to anybody, but I did not want to talk to that man. And he actually left. Left the country just a few hours ahead of the Gestapo. Wow. So then he was in touch with a lot of resistance groups in Germany. They gave him a ton of information about the Nazi plans and so forth. He brings this to our ambassador in Paris. Ambassador bullet. It was 1934. Well, Mr. Roosevelt is now president. And he tells the ambassador, tell Otto, who continues, because Otto continues living in Belgium and continues to get a steady stream of this information. He feeds it to Bullet on a steady basis. So Roosevelt tells Bullet, you tell that young man that if he ever needs to come to the United States, he and his family have a place to stay. Well, they didn't really expect it to come to pass, but it did. In 1940, King Leopold III, as soon as the Germans invade, he calls them at the castle. They're living in Belgium. They've been in Spain eight years and then they came to Belgium. So they flee through collapsing Belgium and collapsing France, finally make it to the Spanish border which is sealed. And like Edward viii, they, they've got to go through. Unlike Edward viii, as they were going through France, they began picking up parties of refugees, Austrians, you know, stateless persons, Jews etc and so on. Heavens, it's the Habsburgs. We'll go with them. So by the time they got to the Spanish border, they had about 250 or more people with them. [00:46:39] Speaker B: Oh my goodness. [00:46:40] Speaker C: So now the border is closed, what are they going to do? They can't leave these people there. But luckily for them, the fellow in charge of that segment of the border had been the chief of police in the town that they lived in in Spain. They knew them. So he let everybody in Nice and the whole, the whole Bob comes in. So they go to Lisbon, we come to the States. Otto goes to work as an advisor to President Roosevelt. After a year or so in the States, Zeta decides to bring her younger children to Quebec. As it happens, Otto had studied philosophy at Leuven under the famous Thomas Charles. Well, he had by, in the meantime moved to Quebec to Laval University. And so the younger Habsburg boys studied under him there. In 1944 they finished and the younger ones went back to Austria and joined the resistance in the Tyrol. And that's kind of important because one of the evil genie of the, of the both books is the terrible Carl Renner, who was the right the first transfer of the Republic of Austria in 1918. He betrayed his emperor in 1918. In 1938 he sold the country to the Nazis. In 1945 he offered himself to Stalin, who had a made chancellor. Well, Auto comes to 45, auto comes to Innsbruck, which is the French zone where his brothers are having fought in the resistance. And then now Chancellor Renner invokes the Habsburg law that he himself had put in in 1919 and they're expelled from the country. So you understand the Habsburg princess who had fought with the resistance, they have to leave. The collaborator gets to stay on as chancellor. [00:48:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:51] Speaker C: Isn't that nice? [00:48:52] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Justice. [00:48:54] Speaker C: Now he's defeated. To be fair, Renner was defeated in the next elections in 45. So Stalin insists to his allies that Renner be made president and so he died as president of Austria in 1950. Who says virtue isn't its own reward? [00:49:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. [00:49:14] Speaker B: So Zita is in Canada, then she is in America for a while. And after the war, after World War II, that is what is. I mean, is there. Is. Is the dream of a federation basically dead in their minds? Are they basically like, okay, we got to move on and just, I mean, at some point they had to realize they're smart people. The handwrang on the wall was that there's no restoration coming anytime soon. And so for Zito and for Otto, like by the 1950s, what were they thinking? Were they just like, okay, we're going to give this up or was it. Or is it something else? [00:49:57] Speaker C: Well, it was something else, really. The question for Otto and certainly the. With the Soviet American diarchy over Europe, the eastern half, which comprised most of what happened, Austria Hungary was simply a no go zone. [00:50:13] Speaker A: Right. [00:50:13] Speaker C: Western half, we're dominated by the United States, which in time, since we made all the major decisions, would kind of infantilize Western European leadership. Yeah, which is why they are the way they are now. Well, I mean, everything has consequences, you know. And one of the things you find with American foreign policy is that we don't do well with independent allies. We can only really take dependence. So what happens? Well, if you look at European conservatism as it had been prior to 1945, the inter war years and pre World War I, you think of the Carlos in Spain, the McGillis in Portugal, Legitimists in France, etc. Etc. Etc. All these people had five basic points in common. The altar, meaning the preeminent place of the church in civic life. The throne, meaning a monarch who had the sort of effective power, was spoken of what we would call subsidiarity and what they would call local liberties, provincial rights, etc, what we would call solidarity and with a. Would call class collaboration, corporatism, solidarism, even distributism and deal socialism. It's all vaguely the same kind of idea. And lastly, the idea of some sort of overarching Christendom, the Reid Abed Land, the Occident, the idea that all nations rule according to those first four principles, somehow form part of a larger whole. Okay, in mind of these varied the, the direct applications varied tremendously per country, per thinker and so on. But that was five basic. Well, there was no way that the United States would tolerate three of those five points. But subsidiarity and solidarity were fine if it kept you happy. And those. That's why Those two are the basis of Christian democracy as we know it today. [00:52:24] Speaker A: Right, okay. [00:52:26] Speaker C: Subsidiarity and solidarity. Right now, there's nothing really to hang those on, no framework, some kind of free floating ideas. But you know, they're better than not. They're better than their opposites. [00:52:37] Speaker A: Right. [00:52:39] Speaker C: They're just not very effective without anything else. So what should happen? But the Carl or not Car, rather, Otto and his mother were faced with a Europe where, as you say, there was not going to be a restoration anytime soon. To Otto fell the task of trying to figure out how do I fulfill my family obligation, my family vocation in a very different circumstance. And this was where his interest in Panel Ropa came about and in the European Union. Okay, now, now when we look at these things today, we look at the EU and we see this monster super state not unlike the United States have become. But just as, I think it's fair to say, the founding fathers of the US would be somewhat, slightly disappointed in what they see now. The primarily Christian Democratic founders of the EU, whom auto knew and worked with, Schumo of France, DiCasperi of Italy, Adenauer of Germany, De Gaulle, even to a degree, Churchill, they had something very, very different in mind for an eu, just as the. The Panoropo movement did, which was the idea of a united Western Europe based on the ideas of, well, a Christian era, invoking Charlemagne as its founder. Now that was about as close as Otto thought he could get. And so he became very active in it. Okay. And mind you, you know, was he right, was he wrong? Well, none of us know the future, right? [00:54:31] Speaker B: Was Zeta basically supportive of him at that point? [00:54:35] Speaker C: Primarily, the one thing that they had a fight over was he gave up his own rights to the throne in order to be able to re enter Austria. Okay, now, to be honest, nobody really took that seriously. And he continued his head of the Golden Fleece and all of the other things the head of the House of Habsburg does, right, which are quite a few. But he was able to enter eventually, he was able to enter Austria freely. She refused to give up anything, as two of her sons refused. And the two sons, with some restrictions they were. Each of them was able to come to the country for their mother's funeral, but other than that, nothing. And I believe at least one of them was one of those who fought in the resistance for all the good it did them, right? A grateful nation offered a slap in the face. So. [00:55:33] Speaker A: Right. [00:55:33] Speaker C: But Zita, she was allowed to re enter in the 80s several times without giving up anything. And Then had a state funeral, which would have been unthinkable, but she'd become so popular, you said. [00:55:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So Zita, she lived until 1989, right? In 1989. And so her last years, really last decades there spent. Am I right? They're spent in a convent. [00:56:02] Speaker C: Yes, basically. [00:56:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I thought. And so she left America finally. And by the 60s and so then the last couple decades were spent there and. And did she basically retire from the public life, from political life, or was she still going. Going out and getting talks or anything like that or. She mostly just retired. [00:56:23] Speaker C: She still gave talks, especially in the 80s. [00:56:26] Speaker B: Okay. [00:56:26] Speaker C: She was interviewed a great deal on Austrian television. And one of the interesting things, she sparked a bit of controversy because she declared that she believed that the arch Rudolph, the son of Franz Joseph, whose suicide alleged had paved the way for Franz Ferdinand. She believed it was a murder. [00:56:53] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:56:54] Speaker C: And that. Well, see, the thing is that he and his father, Franz Joseph had been at loggerheads for years and years, but then they reconciled, they went on a hunting trip. That was one thing the two of them had in common. Her theory was that. And she actually looked at the Freemasons in France and the French government. I don't know if that's true or not. I have no, no way of knowing. But she believed that they had counted on using him as a. As a cat's paw against his father and then eventually as a puppet when he should become emperor. The reconciliation with his father destroying that. They bump him off. Okay, now that was her. There was all sorts of jumping up and down about that that flew in the face of what his father had said. It, you know, flew in the face of all sorts of scholars, blah, blah, blah. Well, when I moved to Austria in 2018, I found out something interesting. The monks in the abbey of Heidelgen cards were the ones who received the bodies of Rudolph from Ireland. It's their tradition that all of his fingers were broken. Now, if that were the case, there's no way he committed suicide. [00:58:25] Speaker A: Right. [00:58:27] Speaker C: Now, of course, the obvious thing to do if one what really wanted to find out the answer would be to open up his sarcophagus at the Kaiser Gro to look. But the archdu caro has said that's not happening. And I think he's right because at this late date, I mean, if his fingers are intact, then it means he is wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but it certainly lends credence to the official you. If they're broken, it opens up a Huge can of worms. The family are never going to be able to do anything but deal with myelin for another 20 years. And who's going to benefit? Exactly. It's not like they could try Kemo. So, yeah. [00:59:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:16] Speaker B: So Zita dies at the state funeral in 1989. What is. I mean, her legacy as a model of just a Catholic woman is obviously great. She's a servant of God. Right now, her process for beatification is happening. You know, it is going through the process and all that. And of course, we're still praying for the canonization of her husband, blessed Carl. But the. The question is, are there any. Is there any political legacy, I guess I could say, or beyond. There's a spiritual legacy, it's clear, but is there any political legacy that you can see from Zita's life for us today, or is it more just like this is just an interesting figure from history and now we just have to move on? [01:00:10] Speaker C: Well, no, I think, number one, I think in this level in particular, you have to put her and her husband together because their visions were inseparable. [01:00:18] Speaker A: Right. [01:00:20] Speaker C: When he was dying in Madeira. And I think this certainly reinforced her resolves. He said, I am suffering that my peoples might come back together. Now, that's a hard saying. That's a very hard saying, because personally, I find it very hard to believe that that prayer will not, somehow or other, Beyonce. If we look at things as they are today in Central Europe, you have Hungary, which led by Prime Minister Orban, is putting itself to a great degree at the forefront of, you know, Christian values and some sort of sanity. And to a great degree, the other countries around it, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia, etcetera, Are somewhat in the same mode. The problem is that they're all too small to maintain it against, shall we say, Putin on the east and Soros on the West. [01:01:32] Speaker A: Right. [01:01:33] Speaker C: So it does seem to me that if they ought to maintain themselves the same and not go join either Ireland or Belarus, the only way they can do that is to pull together. But the only way they could do that is to overcome their mutual hatreds, which, believe me, are very, very strong, very intense. The Hungarians hit their neighbors, and the neighbors hit the Hungarians. And there are historical reasons for that, which, you know, that's a whole other episode. But suffice to say, only two things have ever been able to overcome those hatreds in the past sufficiently for them to work together. And those two things have been, number one, Catholic faith and number two, the House of Habsburg. So, basically, what I would say is that If Central Europe is to survive as itself and not be transformed into something, as Samwise Gamshe would say, something unnatural, kind of like the rest of us are there to avoid that fate, then I think the House of Habsburg has a very important role to play now, whether or not they want to play it, given what happened to their forebear. [01:02:54] Speaker A: Right. [01:02:55] Speaker C: It goes back to our original question. You know, I wrote a piece for the European Conservative called the Aragorn Option. The thing is, any Habsburg or any monarch today who wants to follow in Carl's footsteps would run a huge risk of ending up as he did. Now we can say they should. But you see, we can't demand heroism out of other people. [01:03:23] Speaker A: Right. Right. [01:03:24] Speaker C: We can men out of ourselves. Would I follow a man like Carl to the death? Would I? Hard question for me to answer. And the second thing is I can do the first. And this goes back to their relevant. We are not used to leaders like them who would be willing to die for us. We have become used to leaders for whom they're perfectly willing to have us die for them that, that we know about. And if not die, at least milk us like cows, which after all, while, so we hear, really taking up space and, you know, breathing their air. [01:04:05] Speaker A: I. [01:04:06] Speaker C: This is parenthetical. When I got a real kick at Easter, when Secure Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, wanted to thank, this is his Easter message, the Christian communities, for their contribution to our country. [01:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you got that backwards, brother. [01:04:25] Speaker C: Who's this? R. Who are we? You. At any rate, I digress. So the, the long and short of it then is that we're not used to that kind of leadership. We need to be, but to have that kind of leadership, we need to be worthy of it. [01:04:45] Speaker B: Do you think in the Habsburg family, I mean, I know you're not an intimate with them or anything like that, but you have a lot of knowledge of, of the family. Do you think there is still that spark of, of duty and obligation that, okay, we might not be on any thrones, we might not be part of any courts anymore, but our family heritage is that we need to serve. We need, we have a duty to, to the people. Who are those people? Might be to, to, to make it a better world, a better countries or better federation, whatever the case may. Do you feel like that is still alive in the Habsburg family? [01:05:30] Speaker C: Absolutely. I, I Very, very definitely. I mean, it's. It's kind of tough not just to them, but I mean, if your name is Habsburg or Bourbon or Braganza or Savoy, or any of these things, you immediately get all sorts of abuse. You know, it's, it's constant, it never ends. But yes, I, I would say it's, it's silver is strong in them. They're very, they're very much concerned in the various causes they've embraced and they're all, as I say, very much oriented toward public service. It would be nice. Of course, they'd give us the kind of active leadership that we would like. [01:06:25] Speaker A: Right. [01:06:25] Speaker C: But to do that would be to invite the fate of their illustrious forebearer. [01:06:32] Speaker A: Right. [01:06:33] Speaker B: Well, I think we can hope and pray, like you said, for some type of unity among the Central European powers because they do seem to be the ones that at least, especially Hungary, that are at least trying. We'll give, I want, you know, that's about as much as we can give anybody at this point in comparison, at least to the west. They're at least, you know, Orban and others are trying. And so let's hope that maybe the Habsburgs will have a role in that, whatever that might be. But I think, I was gonna say for us, I think what we can do is who aren't going to be involved in any of these high level geopolitics like that. I think just the example of blessed Carl and servant of God Zeta are a real, a reminder of our own duties. We don't have these duties like they have of, you know, but we do have a duty. We have a duty to our family, to our name, you know, to our area and things like that and putting our own happiness. I mean every movie made is about like, oh, find yourself and, and your, and you know, make self fulfillment and happiness is all that matters, be happy and all that stuff. But like seeing Zita, I mean, because Carl did obviously saintly, I mean that, that's very, that's been obvious. Saintly. But what Zita did is like that quiet saintly. I feel like where she's behind the scenes most of the time and, and she has to spend. What was it, 60 years, is it about. No, almost 70 years as a widow. As a widow, as a, as a former empress queen. And she has to live basically a life of a nomad in exile. And because she puts duty first, she could have gotten married, remarried. Nobody would have begrudged her and said, you're a terrible person doing. Of course not. [01:08:31] Speaker C: No, I mean would make perfect sense. [01:08:34] Speaker B: Yeah, but she didn't. She raised her eight children. She, she instilled in them duty and she. Yeah, so I think just a model That I think we can all take a lot from. [01:08:46] Speaker C: And, and indeed there's one other thing too to bear in mind, and that is stealing a, A note from Father Aiden Nichols. OP Let us dare to exercise a Christian imagination, right? Let's pretend for a moment that Central Europe did pull itself together. Rather, Habsburg was Emperor, Austria, King of Hungary, came Czechia, etc at nausea. It would be for the rest of Europe and not just Europe in the mother continent, Europe over the sea, where you and I live. Not just America, the Americas, but Australia and New Zealand. It would be a symbol and I think a catalyst. Because if we had a concrete example anywhere of some indication of the way things should be, the rest of us might begin to demand it. Right? And one thing we should bear in mind about the Habsburg is that from 1826 to 1914, when something happened, I'm not quite sure what, I don't know, I don't know. Whatever it was, they put $26 million in 19th century dollars into the Church of the United states. They founded 400 Latin Rite parishes and a bunch of Eastern rite parishes. It funded 300 missionaries, including Sir John Neumann and Venerable Bishop Baraga. People forget, you know, the money for these things didn't come out of nowhere. The double eagle was all over it. And the interesting thing too, one of the arguments you often hear in universities about the Catholic governments backing missionaries. Oh, well, it was for political advantage. Believe me when I tell you the Habsburgs couldn't get anything in political advantage out of the United States. If anything, we paid them back in 1918. [01:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [01:10:50] Speaker C: So they have a connection to us. And it's interesting to me that devotion to Blessed Carl has had so far 31 shrines in his honor. [01:11:02] Speaker B: Did you include our new one? I thought we were 32. Are we 31? [01:11:07] Speaker C: Well, let's see. [01:11:10] Speaker B: We're number 31. [01:11:11] Speaker A: Okay. [01:11:11] Speaker B: I couldn't remember if we were throwing 32. Okay, so we're the latest. I think we were just. Yeah, there might, yeah, true, there might be a 32nd one by now. [01:11:19] Speaker C: You know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're growing so fast that I, I, it's. [01:11:24] Speaker B: Like, by the way, I just prayed at that shrine this morning and it's, it's just so great to have in the parish because every time I go to mass, first stop, go over the Blessed Carl shrine, say my prayers for peace, for the canonization of Blessed Car. I gotta add in for beatification of Zita. I don't do that. I need to. I'LL add that in. [01:11:43] Speaker C: That would be good. The headquarters for beatification is Clear Creek Abbey. [01:11:48] Speaker B: That's right. [01:11:50] Speaker C: And the reason for that, for those who are wondering, is that because she was an oblate of the Benedictines. We didn't touch on that. She was an oblate of Salem. The Diocese of Le Mans in France are the ones who ended up introducing her cause. And Clear Creek is a daughter house of Salem. So that's why that's headquarters. The headquarters for Carl, of course, are in D.C. the Gates League. Suzanne Pearson. [01:12:17] Speaker A: Yep. [01:12:19] Speaker C: So, you know, again, I can tell you that 30 years ago, see, because I was active in these things then, long before the beatification, this would have been unthinkable. [01:12:36] Speaker A: Right. [01:12:37] Speaker C: So when we look at all the difficult and unpleasant things in the world, we should remember that that's. There are always signs of hope, you know, and not to. Not to get too markish, but when my father died in 1996, it was impossible to get a Tridentine Mass, a requiem mass on the east and west coast in a parish church. When my mother died in 2015, we had solemn high requiems in parish churches in LA and New York. So, yeah, things are awful, things are dreadful, etc. [01:13:21] Speaker B: But yeah, I think the momentum for blessed Carl and for servant of God, Zita, it's. It's a sign to me, there's a reason for it. It's not just happening. Happenstance. No, what that. What we. What that eventual reason is, we don't know. We just know, though, it's providential, it's happening. And so we just have to get on board the train. Right? [01:13:46] Speaker C: Yeah. And, you know, and. And hope again, since we can't expect heroism out of anyone else, we all need to try to be ready for it if it comes calling. [01:13:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:13:59] Speaker B: I'm going to wrap it up there. This has been great. I want to recommend everybody the book Zita, Empress of Austrian Queen of Hungary, from by Charles Colomb, of course, and from Tan Publishers. And I will put a link to it. I will also. I'll find a link to something about her canonization cost, Clear Creek, so people can find out more about that as well. So thank you, Charles. This has been great. I really appreciate this time with me. [01:14:24] Speaker C: Well, you're very welcome. It's certainly been a lot of. I always. I always love talking about Zeta and the Hapsters. [01:14:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's always. It's always enjoyable. Absolutely. So, okay, everybody, until next time. God love you.