Tea at Trianon: Cardinal Burke on the Sacred Liturgy

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

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Cardinal Burke on the Sacred Liturgy

From The National Catholic Register:

Cardinal Burke also looked at the Sacred Liturgy, defining it as “the highest and most perfect expression of our Catholic faith, and the Sacred Liturgy, when it’s celebrated correctly and with great dignity, we see the order of creation and we approach God himself with worship, and we receive from him not only the truth, which he teaches us through the Scriptures and through the homily of the priest, but also we receive truth itself in the sacraments and in direct encounter with Christ.”

Referring to Vatican II, he said that “what happened, sadly, after the council, and it certainly was not part of the teaching of the council, was there was a tremendously man-centered approach to the Sacred Liturgy, to the extent that the idea that this was worship offered to God according to God’s commandment was completely lost, and the liturgy became something we created, and I remember people saying well, we have to make the Sacred Liturgy interesting, and it was all of this experimentation. But all of it completely blurred the essential encounter between heaven and earth, which is the liturgy, the essential encounter between eternity and time.”

He observed that when the Sacred Liturgy, especially the Holy Mass, was reduced this way, many people, stopped attending. “They didn’t find anything there that they couldn’t find in other human activities. And those that were coming were not being nourished with the truth, or were not seeing in the Sacred Liturgy this wonderful, what we call the mystery of faith, God’s plan for our salvation. And so it strikes me that there’s an exact correlation between the abuses in the Sacred Liturgy and the breakdown of the moral life, and especially in these very serious questions regarding the protection and nurture owed to every human life from the moment of its conception to the moment of natural death.” (Read more.)