I wanted to share another excerpt from an article by Orestes Brownson called "The Worship of Mary" from 1853. It is a defense of Catholic veneration of the saints, but most specifically Our Blessed Mother. What is striking to me is that this excerpt could've been written today. As it has an almost prophetic tone about it showing that the ills present in the mid-19th century have only become more pronounced in our age 170 years later. And still worship (e.g. veneration) and devotion to Our Lady is the only remedy for these same ills.

In its bearings on Christian faith and worship, then, we cherish the worship of Mary, and are anxious to see devotion to her increased. But we are also anxious to see it increase, as the best preservative against the moral dangers of our epoch. Mary is the mother of chaste love, and chaste love is that which in our age is most rare. The predominating sin of our times is that of impurity, at once the cause and the effect of the modern sentimental philosophy. All the popular literature of the day is un-chaste and impure, and it boldly denounces marriage as slavery, and demands that loose reins be given to the passions. Catholic morality is scouted as impracticable and absurd; law is regarded as fallen into desuetude; intellect is derided; reason is looked upon as superfluous, if not tyrannical; and the heart is extolled as the representative of God on earth. Feeling is honored as the voice of the Most High, and whatever tends to restrain or control it is held to be a direct violation of the will of our Creator. Hence passion is deified, and nothing is held to be sacred but our transitory feelings. Hence everywhere we find an impatience of restraint, a loud and indignant protest against all rule or measure in our affections and all those usages and customs of past times intended as safeguards of manners and morals, and a universal demand for liberty, which simply means unbounded license to follow our impure or perverted instincts, without shame or remorse.
The sentimental philosophy taught by that impure citizen of Calvin’s city of Geneva, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions and Nouvelle Héloïse, and which is popularized by such writers as Goethe, George Sand, Eugene Sue, Thomas Carlyle, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and, to some extent, Bulwer Lytton, consecrating corrupt concupiscence, has affected an almost universal dissolution of manners and depravation of morals. All bonds are loosened, and the very existence of society is threatened by the fearful and unrelenting warfare waged upon the family as constituted by Catholic mortality. The terrible revolutions which for the last sixty or seventy years have shaken society to its foundations, and which have been repressed and are held in check for the moment only by the strong arm of arbitrary power, are only the outward manifestations of the still more terrible revolutions which have been going on in the interior of man; and the anarchy which reigns in society is only the natural expression of the anarchy that reigns in the bosom of the individual. In the non-Catholic world, and even in nominally Catholic countries, impurity has gained a powerful ascendency, and seeks to proclaim itself as law, and to denounce whatever is hostile to it as repugnant to the rights both of God and man. Chastity is denounced as a vice, as a crime against nature, and the unrestrained indulgence of the senses is dignified with the name of virtue, nay, is denominated religious worship, and we may almost fear that fornication and adultery may again be imposed as religious rites, as they were in ancient Babylon and other cities of the East.
The last, perhaps the only, remedy for this fearful state of things, is to be sought in promoting and extending the worship of Mary. Society is lapsing, if it has not already lapsed, into the state in which Christianity found it some eighteen hundred years ago, and a new conversion of the gentiles has become necessary. Christian society can be restored only by the same faith and worship which originally created it. Jesus and Mary are now, as then, the only hope of the world, and their power and their good-will remain undiminished. The worship of Mary as mother of God redeemed the pagan world from its horrible corruptions, introduced and sustained the Christian family, and secured the fruits of the sacrament of marriage. It will do not less for our modern world, if cultivated; and we regard as one of the favorable signs that better times are at hand, the increasing devotion to Mary. This increasing devotion is marked through the whole Catholic world, as is manifest from the intense interest that is felt in the probable approaching definition of the question of the Immaculate Conception. Nowhere is the change in regard to devotion to Mary as the mother of God more striking, than among the Catholics of Great Britain and of our own country. This devotion is peculiarly Catholic, and any increase of it is an indication of reviving life and fervor among Catholics; and if Catholics had only the life and fervor they should have, the whole world would soon bow in humble reverence at the foot of the cross. It is owing to our deadness, our lack of zeal, our lack of true fervor in our devotions, that so many nations and such multitudes of souls are still held in the chains of darkness, under the dominion of Satan.

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