Praising the work of Mother Angelica against the advance of 'materialism and secularism' in the Church, Cardinal Raymond Burke stated that the first attack by 'servants of the culture of lies and death' was against the liturgy.
HANCEVILLE, Alabama (LifeSiteNews) -- Praising the work of Mother Angelica against the advance of “materialism and secularism” in the Church, Cardinal Raymond Burke stated that the first attack by “servants of the culture of lies and death” was against the liturgy.
“With all the guile of Satan, the servants of the culture of lies and death, attempted to relativize and erode the truths of the faith.” So stated Cardinal Burke, during a Mass he celebrated late December, to mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama, established by Mother Angelica.
The well-known founder of EWTN, Mother Angelica became loved by numerous Catholics for her straightforward attitude in teaching the faith, and similarly feared by liberalizing prelates who opposed her unwavering and firm adherence to the fullness of the Catholic faith and tradition.
Burke has also been an outspoken critic of the liturgical and doctrinal upheaval that has taken place in recent decades, with the cardinal regularly decrying the loss of understanding and practice of the Catholic faith following the Second Vatican Council.
READ: Cardinal Burke urges Catholics to stay in the Church even if the ‘highest’ leaders commit ‘apostasy’
Enemies of the faith attack liturgy firstMarking the presence of the religious community in Hanceville since 1999, after Mother Angelica established it there within easy reach of EWTN’s headquarters, the December anniversary Mass also provided an occasion for Burke to highlight the crises that Mother Angelica battled in the Church at the time.
“Mother Angelica understood that the monastery chapel and shrine church as a holy place of pilgrimage, sacred to the truth of the Most Blessed Sacrament, had to be built and furnished in the most beautiful and enduring manner possible,” Burke said.
Drawing from the dictates of Sacred Scripture, the American cardinal highlighted how churches must be entirely ordered to “its true identity as the House of God, the temple in which God the Son dwells with us to save us from sin and to save us for eternal life.”
But he noted that principle was lacking during Mother Angelica’s life, prompting her to become more zealous in her public ministry:
Mother Angelica was a faithful, courageous, and tireless defender of the truths of our Catholic faith at a time when a lethal materialism and secularism, the work of Satan, 'a murderer from the beginning' and 'the father of lies,' had crept into the life of the Church. With all the guile of Satan, the servants of the culture of lies and death, attempted to relativize and erode the truths of the faith.
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The “work of Satan” in the Church, commented Burke, was focused chiefly on the Mass:
As one would expect, the first line of the attack was the Sacred Liturgy, particularly the Holy Eucharist in which is 'contained substantially,' as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches us, 'the common spiritual good of the whole Church.'
Reducing and eroding faith in the Most Blessed Sacrament by reducing and eroding the teaching regarding the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, the beauty of churches and chapels and of the Roman Rite itself, and the richness of Eucharistic devotion as it had developed along the centuries led naturally to the reduction and erosion of faith in the hypostatic union of the two natures – human and divine – in the one Divine Person of Christ and of faith in the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.
The liturgical revolution following the Second Vatican Council has been well documented by many scholars (such as Michael Davies and Roberto de Mattei), as has the accompanying loss of practice of the Catholic faith.
READ: Pope Francis’ Latin Mass restrictions are rooted in the flawed ecclesiology of Vatican II
Burke himself is a firm champion of the Church’s traditional liturgy – a liturgy the Vatican’s liturgy chief currently argues is against Vatican II’s spirit – but, unlike others who similarly champion the traditional Mass, has generally refrained from strident criticisms of the Council.
‘False teaching endangering souls’Mother Angelica was especially publicly active from the late 1970s to early 2000s, and her regular shows reached thousands via the medium of EWTN which she established. Burke, a longstanding friend of the Catholic TV channel, noted that “Mother Angelica saw how the false teaching was endangering the eternal salvation of souls.”
“She did not spare herself, notwithstanding her physical and spiritual suffering, in defending the faith,” he praised.
READ: Cardinal Müller: 'A Church that no longer believes in Jesus the Christ' is no longer His Church
The monastery and shrine church were built thanks to a "deal" which Mother Angelica had made with God in the 1950s. When an accident left her with a high likelihood of being unable to walk, she recounted that she told God that if He helped her to walk then she would build a monastery “in the South.”
The resulting Monastery of Our Lady of the Angels which she founded bore testimony to the fulfillment of her promise, and has since become a place of pilgrimage, as attested to by the clergy serving the community – similar in many ways to Burke’s own Shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin.
Burke recently celebrated the conclusion of a nine-month Novena to Our Lady of Guadalupe at the Shrine, a spiritual endeavor which he had invoked in response to the amassed “crises of our age.”
