Boyd Cathey, Chronicles:
(T)he ideals and principles of Christendom remained a real and accessible model and guide for the inheritors of (Western) civilization and culture for well over 1,000 years.
That civilization held up first and foremost the Faith as the necessary beacon and as essential for all men. It set boundaries and dictated manners and a standard of allocution and communication, it instructed our ancestors on what it was to be a true Christian gentleman, and it was the source and nourishment of the greatest and most sublime culture in all of history, producing great art, architecture, music, literature that glorified God and through that glorification and through the belief of the Faithful truly defined what it was to be elevated as “children of God” above the lower animals...
(L)ike most current ruling monarchies today, the catch phrase is “relevance,” getting “with it,” so to speak, with all the current fads, breaking with tradition, basically turning a backside to the past and its critical importance in the survival of the nation. And if that means bringing in a flamer like Elton John and inviting a whole slew of disreputable Hollywood types, not to mention pseudo-celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, into the great halls and chapels that once beheld the noble figures of a King Charles the Martyr or Victoria Regina, then so be it.
And then there was the ungracious spectacle of the “Presiding Bishop,” Michael Curry, of what is called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Curry a few years back was the Episcopal bishop in North Carolina and distinguished himself for his leftwing social and religious views—he would much rather preach the gospel of “Saint” Martin Luther King than St. Paul: too many inconveniences and prohibitions in the Pauline message!
And he did not disappoint in St. George’s Chapel: jumping around like a jack-rabbit, pretending he was sermonizing to a group of illiterate Yazoo bayou dwellers in Mississippi, he brought, as gushing Fox commentators Shepard Smith and airhead Ainsley Earhardt fawned, “a wonderful and inspiring American element” to the wedding.
For thirteen minutes he basically said just one sentence: “How great is love!” But he managed to mix in bits of MLK (yes, King, that expert on conjugal love!), civil rights, and a social gospel totally extraneous to the supposed occasion.
The Windsors, for the most part, set stony-faced and amused, enveloped by the tide of nonsense and relevance that has overwhelmed them. Oh, certainly, it was said that the ceremony “combined the best of British tradition with a new and fresh ‘American’ approach.” But what it actually did was point out sharply the truth of my friend Ignacio de Orbe’s observation about monarchy and monarchs in the modern world: “They are increasingly a ‘sign of contradiction’; this must be their role in our world. If they fail in this—if they embrace all the tawdry excesses and excrescences of our times—they will forfeit that historic role, and rightly so”...
The awe and reverence, the understanding that the past is never really “past,” that it is always potentially within us, and that it can inform our steps and continue to inspire us and anneal us in its grace, is a precious legacy, an invaluable gift from our ancestors and Christendom. We forfeit it, and the blackness of despair and death awaits us.
When the traditional champions of our culture and civilization quit the field, as the Windsors have done, only Evil smiles.
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