Dom Prosper Guéranger's Prayer to St Clotilde for France

From Dom Prosper Guéranger's Liturgical Year:

Great is thy glory on earth and in heaven, O Clotilde, Mother of nations! Not only hast thou given to Holy Church that people of France, surnamed the most Christian; but our own England and Spain also, claim their descent from thee (in the pedigree of Faith, that is) by Bertha and Ingonda, thy noble granddaughters. Ingonda, more fortunate than thy daughter Clotilde, succeeded, by the help of Saint Leander of Seville, in bringing back to the true faith, her husband Hermenegilde, and even leading him to the crown of martyrdom. Bertha, queen of our own fair Kent, welcomed Augustine to our Saxon shores and, through her influence, was our royal Ethelbert brought from the darkness of paganism, even unto baptism and the aureola of sanctity: realizing thus that word of the Apostle, that the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife. (1 Corinthians 7:14) Since those early days, in how many other parts of Europe, and on how many other more distant shores, have not the sons of thine own nation, that nation of which thou wast mother, propagated that light of faith which they received of thee: whether brandishing the sword in defense of the right which belongs to holy Church, the bride of the Man-God, to teach freely and everywhere, the Word of Truth; or whether, becoming themselves missioners and Apostles, carrying the same to infidel nations, far beyond reach of any possible protection, and at the expense of their sweat and of their blood? Happy thou, to be first in bringing forth unto Christ, the King, a nation pure from every stain of heresy and vowed to holy Church from the first moment of her new birth! Rightly indeed the Church of Sainte-Marie at Rheims, was the one selected on that Christmas Day of the year 496, for this birth unto God of the Frankish nation; wherein Our Lady in a proportionate manner, gave thee to share her own Motherhood of our race.

There especially lies our motive of confidence in recurring to thee, O Clotilde, in our intercessory prayer this day. Alas! how many of thy sons are far from being what they should be, having such a Mother as thou! But when Our Lady gave thee a share in her own maternal rights, she necessarily, at the same moment, communicated to thee also her own tender compassion, for beguiled children deaf to their Mother’s voice. Take pity on these unfortunate sons, led so very far astray, by strange doctrines. (Hebrews 8:9).

The Christian Monarchy founded by thee is no more. Thou didst build it upon the recognized rights of God in his Christ and in the Vicar of his Christ. Princes with short-sighted views of self-interest, traitors to the mission they had received to maintain thy work, imagined they were performing marvels, when they allowed maxims to be spread in thy France, proclaiming the independence of civil power in respect of that of Holy Church; and now by a just retribution, society has proclaimed its independence in respect of Princes! But at the same time, the infatuated populace has really no other idea but that of being its own sovereign, and intoxicated by this false liberty which it dreams to have acquired, it goes so far as to contemn even the supreme dominion of the Creator himself. The rights of man have usurped the rights of God, as the basis of social compact, a new-fangled gospel, that France, now in misled proselytism, is fain to carry over the whole world in place of the true Gospel so loved of yore!

In that unhappy country poisoned by a lying philosophy, such is the excess of delirium, that many who deplore the apostasy of the mass of the population, and wish to remain themselves Christians, imagine they can do so, while at the same time, maintaining the destructive principle of Liberalism, the very essence of revolution. Let Christ have Heaven and Souls, say they, but let man have earth, together with full right of governing it as he thinks best or as suits him best. While they fall on their adoring knees before the Divinity of our Lord Jesus, in the sanctuary of their own conscience, they search the Scriptures and are too blind to see there expressed, how the Man-God is and must be King of the whole earth. In learned theses, they inform us that they have probed the very depths of history, and find therein nothing that can contradict their arguments. If indeed they must admit that the government of a Clovis or a Charlemagne, or a Saint Louis, do not correspond in everything to their political axioms, we must, they say, make allowances for those primitive ages: a nation cannot be expected to come in a day, to the perfect age attained at last by the law of progress! Alas! have pity, O dear Mother of France, on the ravings of these poor sons of thine! Arouse once more, in that noble land, the faith of the Franks! Oh! may the god of Clotilde, the Lord of hosts, the King of nations, show himself once more, leading on thy sons to victory, in the name that won for Clovis the field of Tolbiac: JESUS CHRIST!