Tea at Trianon: Dom Guéranger: A Prophet

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 1, 2013

Dom Guéranger: A Prophet

I love Dom Guéranger's fifteen volume masterpiece, The Liturgical Year. Father Mark quotes the following prophetic words of the holy abbot:

One must study that people's degree of fidelity to the laws of the Church. If its public law is based on the principles and institutions of Christianity, a nation may carry some germs of sickness, but its temperament will be robust. Revolutions make shake it, but will not bring about its dissolution. If the greater number of citizens are faithful to the observance of the Church's exterior precepts; if they keep, for example, the Lord's Day, and the Lenten discipline, there will be a moral foundation that will preserve such a people from the dangers of dissolution.

Gloomy economists will see [in these things] no more than a childish and traditional superstition, good only to retard the onward march of progress. If a nation, hitherto simple and faithful, has the misfortune of listening to these prideful and silly theories, not a century will pass before it realizes that, in emancipating itself from the ritual law of Christianity, it has seen the decline of public and private morality, and that its destiny is beginning to slip away. (Read entire post.)