It was an extraordinary 10 days of national mourning to mark the death of HRH Queen Elizabeth II, not only for the pomp and ceremony but for the celebration of the Christian virtues the late Queen lived by. Since the day of her death, for the first time in a long time, the values of duty and service to others were celebrated as the highest values one could aspire to. Indeed, we were repeatedly told that it was Queen Elizabeth’s sense of duty that set her apart from all others and for which she was most admired.
Queen Elizabeth came to the throne when the phrase ‘he is a God-fearing man’ was meant as a compliment, not an insult. It was a time when the very essence of respectability was to do your duty by family and country. The value of loyalty was celebrated. As the decades rolled by however, these values fell out of fashion. To some, they are held in contempt.
Today, you must be ‘true to yourself’ and ‘live by your own truth’ and if that means abandoning a spouse then so be it. Those who ‘do their duty’ are often scorned as weak people who are upholding structures of power and oppression. The mob enjoys cancelling people and whipping up social media witch hunts instead of carrying out dreary service to community and country.
Therefore, the resurrection of these values since Her Majesty’s death should give grounds for optimism. It would be easy to mock the media and country for celebrating the life of a person who represented everything that has been rejected by the modern era – including the Christian faith that sustained Her Majesty.
Instead, what this outpouring of grief and reflection has demonstrated is that people yearn for more than material goods or professional advancement. They do indeed long for higher values, for ceremony and for beauty. All of these things were on display at Her Majesty’s lying- in- state and at the state funeral.
We must reject the media narrative that faith and old-fashioned virtues such as duty and loyalty are just that – old fashioned. The truth is that the Christian values such as faith, hope, charity, humility, kindness and chastity are timeless. They can sustain a person in the darkest of times.
We can see such a revival of Christian values in Eastern Europe such as Poland and Hungary that have witnessed a revival of the family – with government support. Hungary’s birth rate has grown in the past decade at the fastest rate in the European Union while it fell in most countries, thanks to the government’s family support scheme. Just this week in Poland, more than ten thousand people walked in the National March for Life and Family in the Polish capital. Similar marches were organized in 150 localities in Poland and gathered several hundred thousand people. Participants were greeted by Polish President Andrzej Duda. The President addressed the crowd of grandparents, parents and children “you express the conviction that a strong family means a successful future for our Country. I thank you from the heart for this.”
We as Catholics must make every effort to explain the importance, necessity and joy of the Christian virtues of chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility to our children. They are part of the next generation’s inheritance and Catholic culture. GK Chesterton one commented that ‘human culture is handed down in the customs of countless households; it is the only way in which human culture can remain human.’
The greatest tribute we could pay the late Queen Elizabeth would be to embrace her legacy of service and duty in things great and small. We have a duty to do our best for our family, community and country. And above all, as the Queen knew only too well, we have a duty to do our best in the service of God.
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