‘Where a Crown shines, the courage cannot fail…’

H.M. the Queen visiting Hitchin on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee in June, 2012.

Strange though it seems to write for the second time in a week in honour of a great person’s birthday  (after Pope Emeritus Benedict’s on Saturday), nevertheless I feel that the occasion calls for it: Elizabeth II, our Queen for sixty-three years, has reached her ninetieth birthday. 

I hope soon to try to write a defence of the monarchy in principle, but for today it is Elizabeth herself who matters.  I feel all the more keenly a duty to mark her birthday because she has been such a just monarch and good example, made all the more radiant in an age with infrequent regard for justice and goodness.  This is the ninetieth year of a life that she herself vowed at the age of twenty-five to give, and ever since has given, to her kingdom.  It might not have been so.  She has reigned unfalteringly, making a deliberate decision to understand the verb ‘to reign’ to be very close in meaning as the verb ‘to serve’.  Neither did this have to be the case.  She chose goodness, similarly to Benedict XVI, and has prevailed.

Three women, I think, deserve most of the credit for the British crown’s continuity since the early nineteenth century.  Queen Victoria is the first, Queen Mary of Teck the second and our present Queen the third.  Queen Mary, wife of George V and Elizabeth II’s grandmother, taught her grand-daughter the importance of duty, something that Elizabeth has taught us in turn, mainly by example.  She has shown us that the greatest strength is often proved not in impressive activity or energetic deeds, but in endurance and steadfastness (and I might add that she is echoed by her husband).  She is also unembarrassed to be a woman of faith, and an ordinary, simple faith at that, and it is clear that her sense of duty is bound up with an awareness of vocation.  Her duty is not only to her subjects.

Elizabeth is strong, and knows where her strength comes from, in a weak age unaware of the source of its weakness.  Long may she reign, and may her subjects strive in loyalty to her and to follow her example!

This post’s title is taken from a poem written by John Masefield (1878–1967) for Elizabeth’s marriage when Princess in 1947; the music is by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958).

Geburtstagsglückwünsche…

…für den emeritierten Papst Benedikt XVI, der heute sein neunundachtzigtes Lebensjahr feiert!

Yes, today is the great Pope Emeritus Benedict’s eighty-ninth birthday.  I say ‘great’ and mean it because, as I explained in one of my first posts on this blog, I think he is one of the most important public figures to have appeared on the world stage since the millennium (and he had been doing mighty work long before then).  Not only did he hold the Church’s tiller steady against wave after wave in this age of tumult, but he went out to do battle with the forces of secularism and relativism: not with sound and fury, as they expected, but with lucidness of intellect and steadfastness of goodness.  He dedicated his intellectual gifts to the cause of goodness and truth.  He reminded a world unwilling  (especially in the West) to acknowledge its burden of disillusionment, cynicism and selfishness that it is, in fact, possible to speak of such things as absolute truth, intellectual faith and authentic love: “I have come,” he once said, visiting Berlin, “to speak about God".  He was undaunted when the apostles of secularism scoffed, “Truth?  What is that?”. He continued to use old words like ‘beauty’, ‘love’ and ‘faith’ with a straight face, and yet without raising his voice.  Having witnessed evil for himself, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, he taught my generation that goodness and gentleness are not the same as blandness, or even as kindness, but often have to be proved with moral courage and honesty before God.  Above all, he gave us a tremendous example, itself founded on the example of Christ.  He (along with St. Peter) has a magnificent successor in Pope Francis, but his writing and example remain a rich treasure-trove for the Church and for the New Evangelisation.  It is as much a gift as a challenge to number among the ‘Benedict generation’, and so I here express my gratitude for his long life, pray for his good health, and propose a Bavarian ‘Prost!’.

Pope Benedict toasting last year’s 88th birthday (It is right and just)

(Photo: The Ratzinger Forum, possibly ultimately L’Osservatore Romano)