Tea at Trianon: The Latin Liturgy Appeals to Catholic Youth

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

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

The Latin Liturgy Appeals to Catholic Youth

From Crisis:

Washington D.C. is no stranger to making history. This past Saturday was no exception. You would not have found throngs of people marching with angry placards, but hundreds of Catholics on their knees. They were not assembled at the National Mall, but at the Basilica Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. They were not participating in political activism, but fervently adoring Christ at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Hundreds and hundreds of twenty-somethings were not participating in any ordinary Mass, but in a Pontifical Solemn High Tridentine Mass celebrated by one of America’s most exceptional Ordinaries, Archbishop Alexander Sample, who governs the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon. It was nothing less than a spiritual earthquake.

Not only was the nave crowded with young people, but the sanctuary was filled with rows and rows of young priests and seminarians, vested in cassock and surplice. It was a stunning snapshot of, what many thought, was a long buried past. But what was really stunning is that is the wave of a pulsating dynamic future. It was Catholic springtime in the 2018 springtime of Washington, D.C. While the bursting apple blossoms vied for attention, they couldn’t compete with the stirring beauty of Catholic young people hungry for God.

Make no mistake, this past Saturday in Washington, D.C.’s Basilica was, in Karl Jasper’s portentous phrase, an axial moment. A turning point, from which future ages could mark a pivotal change in perspective, a tectonic shift in cultural movement. In Archbishop Sample’s sermon: “Maybe the experience of these young people growing up with the ordinary Form did not carry within it the beauty, reverence, prayer, and fullness of the sense of mystery, transcendence and awe that the Traditional Mass has provided for them.” Though the archbishop couched his words demurely, words of agreement must be shouted loudly. (Read more.)