Tea at Trianon: The Liturgy and Society

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

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

The Liturgy and Society

From The Josias:

The public profession of religion is as much a duty of society as it is of the individual man. Society “owes gratitude” to its Creator for His Goodness and Providence. Thus, “it is a public crime to act as though there were no God” and to neglect the public practice of the one true religion which God Himself enjoins upon us and by which “we are bound absolutely to worship God.”

Religion is the highest duty of justice and includes our due worship of the Almighty “as the first principle of all things.”[5] Since He is the “author, sustainer and end of their being,” God must be worshipped by individual men. But God is the “author, sustainer and end” of society as much as of the individual, so this duty applies to man’s common life as much as it does his private life.[6] Religion is a debt owed to God in justice not only by individuals, but by every community as well.

Cardinal Ratzinger speaks of this duty of society toward God in his Spirit of the Liturgy, when he treats the worship and social order which obtained in the Old Testament. He writes about the necessary interconnection between “the three orders of worship, law, and ethics.” Human affairs which are ordered without proper recognition of God lead to a belittling of man. That is why, in the final analysis, worship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response from man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together. (Read more.)