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.)
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