We Have Met The Enemy

A lot of Catholic parents detest dating. According to these parents, dating encourages the participants to get used to frequent breakups, emotional roller coasters and psychologically prepares them for divorce.

Perhaps it does all of those things.
But the problem isn't with the dating.
The problem is with the Catholic parents.

Is Kellmeyer Crazy?

As I've pointed out in other posts, parents in post-industrial societies like our own infantilize their children. In pre-industrial society, 12-18 year olds were treated as adults. For centuries, canon law allowed 12-year old women and 14-year old men to marry (today, canon law has raised the age... to 14 and 16, respectively). Pagan Rome, where the average age of marriage for women was 14, had allowed the same thing, ages before Christ founded the Church. In fact, nearly every pre-industrial society on the face of the earth allowed what the Church allowed. Indeed, a recent survey of hunter-gatherer societies show the average age of marriage was 14 for girls and 21 for boys.  

Twelve-year old men were apprenticed and learned a trade - they were expected to be masters at their craft and able to support a family by age 18. For centuries, that's exactly what at least half the population did - women were married by age 16, men were married by age 18. 

Now, I know your first rebuttal, and it is wrong. Medievals weren't all mostly dead by the age of thirty.  Early marriage was not permitted because everyone died at age 30. Everyone thinks nobody made it to fifty because no one understands what "median age" means.

Any medieval who made it to age 10 was likely to live to be 50. The median age of death was in the low 20s and 30s for medievals because a lot of medieval children died in their first few years. This high early childhood death rate dragged the median death age artificially down.

In point of fact, if a person was able to survive the nutrition and health problems of medieval childhood, s/he was as likely to make it to 50 then as anyone born in modern-day Russia is today.

What changed?

Well, with industrialization, we decided to use a different kind of educational system. We pretty much scrapped apprenticeships and went for mass public schools. This new method warehouses children through age 18, keeps them out of the workforce and out of job competition with older adults. It also infantilizes them.

But it didn't used to be that way. In colonial Mexico, for instance, "More than half the Indias are married by the time they turn 16....using Nahua censuses for some Morelos villages around 1540, McCaa has built a strong case for child marriage. There were girls married before ten; mean age could stand between 12 and 14.(9) In all likelihood, the introduction of Christian marriage, with its threshold of 12 years for wedding girls, brought about a small rise in mean age at marriage for Indias.... At the age when half the girls (16) and the boys (18) were already married, both parents were alive in three cases out of four.(12) Adult mortality did not explain precocity of marriage." A Nahua source with very complete lineage and demographic information concludes, "Here, we find no unmarried individuals above fifteen years of age."

St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14 when she got pregnant with Jesus. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. They had 14 children. St. Elizabeth of Hungary married at age 13 and had her first child at age 15. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters.

Why were saints marrying and having children at what we would consider a very young age? As I point out in my book:

[Did not St. John Chrystosom say] “What greater work is there than training the mind and forming the habits of the young?” Indeed he did. But the Latin reads “Ouid maius quam animis moderari, quam adolescentulorum fi ngere mores?” (emphasis added). That is, Chrysostom was referring to the education of teenagers. This is quite clear from the context of the homily in which the sentence appears, a homily in which the saint is at pains to point out:

The fathers are to blame. They require their horse-breakers to discipline their horses, they do not permit the colt to remain untamed. Instead, they put a rein and all the rest upon it from the beginnings. But their children? These they overlook. They allow their children to go about for a long season unbridled, and without temperance, disgracing themselves by fornications and gamings and attending the wicked theaters. Before the fornication began, they should have given their son to a wife, to a wife chaste, and highly endowed with wisdom. Such a wife will bring her husband away from this disorderly course of life, and will be instead a rein to the colt…. Do you not know that you can do no greater kindness to a youth than to keep him pure from whorish uncleanness? (Homily #59 on Matthew 18).

Chrysostom knew something we have forgotten.

We all remember that marriage is meant for the procreation of children and the unity of the couple. But we rarely recall - because no one ever teaches it - that marriage also serves a third and critically important purpose. Holy Marriage is the salve for concupiscence, the remedy for our tendency towards the sin of lust.

Why do you think our society is so steeped in sexuality? It is due in part to the fact that our society does not allow teenagers to get married. Teens want what they are made for - marriage and the procreation of children - but they can't have it. So society tantalizes them with what they can't have: a stable family, a good sex life, with themselves as the heads of that family, loving their spouses.

Conclusion
You see, when your 12 or 14-year old dates, they really do expect that they are finding a mate. If society, including their Catholic parents, left them alone, and didn't push post-industrial expectations of higher education, better jobs, etc., upon them, these teens really would get married at 14 or 15, as men and women that age have for thousands of years.

They would get married as the Church permitted them to for thousands of years.
They would get married as St. John Chrysostom recommended they should over 1500 years ago.

But as a modern, responsible Catholic parent, you won't allow them to marry at age 12, 14 or 16. They cannot imitate St. Rita of Cascia, or St. Elizabeth or the Blessed Virgin. You won't allow it.

If they start getting "too serious", you will actively step in and forbid them seeing that young man or woman so often, or perhaps, even forbid them meeting at all. You will break them up. It doesn't matter if they have a true vocation to marriage to that person. You will make sure it is delayed or destroyed. Catholic parents don't want early marriage and dozens of grandchildren from their only daughter or only son. Rather than allow the marriage, or encourage the couple to stay together to get married at age 14 or 15, the parents will either provide no support or actively encourage the couple to breakup.

And so the young men and women will be emotionally overwrought, they will go through innumerable breakups, they will spend the next ten or twenty years preparing themselves for the divorce that comes from marrying the wrong person. This will not result because of dating, but precisely because we will not allow them to marry.

Now, I'm not saying that you necessarily should allow your children to marry at age 14. I'm just pointing out that the problem with dating is not dating - it is the parents. Parents don't have the same expectations for their children they had prior to the industrial revolution.

So don't go blaming the culture for corrupting our children.

If anything, we are the ones who actively contribute to our children's corruption, because we go along with society's expectations for our children. We helped set up today's currently highly sexualized culture, we keep our children from marrying young so that they have to endure the tantalization for years, even decades, and we expect them to live as celibates without a community to support them or a vow of celibacy to give backbone to their lifestyle.

Yeah, the people corrupting our children?
That would be us.

PS
An excellent article, recommended in the comments, and worth reading.

Additional references:
Treating Teens like Toddlers
Does Society Infantilize Teens
Driving Teens Crazy
The Case Against Adolescence

PPS.

Interesting stats here. According to this article, the divorce rate among teen couples has dropped to match that of adults. It's almost as if the Internet and smart phones makes teens mature faster.

2021 divorce rate for 15-25 was 19.7

2021 divorce rate for 25-34 was 19.4 

2021 divorce rate for 35-44 was 18.1

Women are now LESS LIKELY to get divorced between 15 and 24 then they are between 25 and 44.

The divorce rate for teenagers is now indistinguishable from that between 30-year olds. Either teenagers are maturing faster, are adults are becoming less mature.

Given that divorce rates dropped, it seems that smart phones and the Internet might be making teens MORE MATURE FASTER. 

That is counter-intuitive.

 

How To Start A Civil War

Homiletics and Pastoral Review has another naive article promoting adult formation.
The author is trying to promote it because his business depends on it, but he surely realizes that nobody really wants adult formation.

Look at it from the perspective of the priest and the bishop - who are the only people that really count in a parish. Nothing happens in a parish or diocese unless the priest and bishop permit it. If they don't want it to happen, it won't. If they do want it to happen, it will.

If the ordained men think something might be unpopular, they will structure it in such a way that other people take the blame for it, but those other people would never have been able to implement it if the bishop and priest didn't originally want it. The parish secretary/business manager/whatever is a witch because the pastor likes it that way. Lay employees in a parish are employed because the ordained men actively like, or at least are willing to tolerate, the way those lay people operate.

They system is designed to do EXACTLY what the system is doing.
That's why the system does what it does - it is designed to do what it does.

So, from a priest's perspective, all adult formation does is stir up trouble.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

If you do serious orthodox adult formation in the parish, there are only three possible outcomes, and all three happen simultaneously:

[Outcome 1]
A lot of adults will be upset and insulted to find out that anyone actually expects them to follow Church teaching. They will complain to the priest, to the bishop and stop throwing money in the basket.

How dare you expect them to give up their contraception, abortion and homosexuality?
How dare you expect them to make the Mass more important than their sports?
How dare you expect them to teach their own children about the sacraments?

Every parish program has one of two purposes: babysit children or comfort retirees as they approach death.

CCD is not about educational support for families, rather it is primarily meant to provide babysitting for parents who need to go shopping. 

Everyone agrees that passing on the Faith is the parish's job. How they will get it done given the family's busy recreational schedule is a mystery, but that's their problem, not ours. We're just parents. The parish staff just needs to get it done in time for the post-sacrament party we've scheduled. 

And to be fair, the lay employees don't WANT the parents involved. If the parents actually got involved, all the parish employees would lose their phoney-baloney jobs. It isn't very difficult to prepare your own children for the sacraments. If anyone realized that, the women who work at the parish would have to go find real jobs as secretaries or something.

From Father Pastor's  point of view, this would be a disaster. If the adults got educated, the lay parish staff would become superfluous, Father Pastor would lose his harem. Notice that nearly every parish in America is staffed entirely by women. The only men who survive in such an environment are ordained, metrosexual, homosexual or janitors. Sometimes even newly ordained men don't survive.

Father Pastor doesn't like men because men argue with him. Men call it discussion, but it is argument. Father Pastor knows. Father Pastor does not brook that kind of dissension. Father Pastor much prefers women, metrosexuals and homosexuals because these groups primarily complain about each other. This allows him to be the arbitrator, the impartial judge who is above their petty fights, the Father pastoring his children.

Men "discussing" things with him makes him feel small, ignorant, common.
Women and homosexuals bringing their cat-fights to him makes him feel adult, superior, special.

Father Pastor likes his harem.
The harem likes Father Pastor.

But if you teach adults, really teach them, all of this goes to hell. If the parish adults all really knew the Faith, they would teach their own children and each other. The parish staff would disappear, it would consist of Father Pastor and one secretary, maybe. Father Pastor won't feel important, won't look important to the bishop and to other priests. It would be demoralizing for everyone.

On the other hand, if you don't teach the adults, they throw money in the basket, the harem takes care of the kids, the parents can go shopping once a week, Father Pastor feels special - everybody wins. 

Why disturb this beautiful arrangement?

[Outcome 2]
Those who aren't insulted by the idea of living the Faith will actually attempt to learn something. Some will learn it badly. These people will complain to the priest and the bishop about things happening at the parish level which do not violate any tenet of Church teaching. Unfortunately, the complainers won't understand that because they don't understand the teaching. A lot of unnecessary noise follows.

Who needs that?

If you do NOT attempt to teach them, they won't get any crazy ideas. They will just pray, pay and pretend to obey, which is all that matters. A peaceful parish is a happy parish. Everybody knows that. 

[Outcome 3]
Some parishioners will learn well and will correctly understand what they are taught. These adults will notice that there are things going on in the parish which violate their rights, canon law, liturgical rubrics and Catholic doctrine.

Like the other two groups, this group will also complain to the priest and the bishop.

But this group is different.

This group is dangerous.

The earlier two groups can be accommodated because they are in the wrong. If any higher-up questions what is going on with either of the first two groups, Father Pastor can say, "Well, *I* don't like doing this, of course, but the people insist on it. They are ignorant and stupid and don't realize their error. I am wise and merciful. I indulge this little nonsense in order to keep them happy. I will eventually correct it, but it will take me time to pastor them into the truth. This little accommodation will keep them happy until the proper time for education arrives."

Of course, the proper time for education never arrives.
But the point is that Father Pastor can use the first two groups of parishioners the same way he uses his parish staff - they are CYA which allows him to do whatever it is he wanted to do to begin with. He does what he wants, they are the 'scape goats. Father Pastor likes the first two groups a lot.

But this third group - this group is pure evil.
They are evil because they are right.

They can demonstrate from Church documents and Scripture that what Father Pastor is doing is a complete violation of what it means to be Catholic. They have the goods on him. They may take it to a higher level. They must be killed before they damage the status quo.

If they are not killed, generally by assassinating their reputations, the priest and the bishop will actually have to change the way they do things in order to avoid the heat this third group will generate.

The bishop doesn't want to change how he does things.
Neither does the priest.
Lay people don't have a right to tell ordained men what to do!

Who needs this kind of dissension?

So, we can see that it is better if this third group never learn what they need to know in order to complain about Father Pastor. And if you think I exaggerate, I have personally heard a bishop publicly tell an entire auditorium full of hundreds of parishioners that he would not want St. Paul in his diocese because St. Paul started too many fights. Think about that. Take as long as you want. 

Adult formation does not take place at the parish level because ordained men fear that this third group will suborn the priest's authority. It is better that orthodox lay people be kicked out or destroyed than a priest be shown to be in the wrong. It would be terrible precedent. It cannot become established, lest Father Pastors everywhere be forced to change their lives. 

Conclusion

And this is the real problem with adult formation. 
Forcing parishioners to change their lives is acceptable. 
Forcing Father Pastor to change HIS life is NOT acceptable. 

Better that no one knows the Faith then that Father Pastor be forced - by commoners, no less! - to change HIS life. It would almost be as if some lay people knew and lived the Faith better than the priest! Absurd!

So any reasonable person can see adult formation will NOT happen at the parish level.
It cannot.
There is absolutely no up-side to adult formation, only various degrees of BAD.

Remember, real adult formation causes all three of these groups to form simultaneously. They all complain at the same time to the same people.

So, obviously, if you attempt to really form and disciple adults in what the Catholic Faith actually teaches and in how Catholics really are supposed to live, it will cause absolute CHAOS in the parish - civil war!

From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

Dissension is most certainly NOT what Christ intended!
Bishops and priests HATE dissension.

So no one is ever going to implement adult formation.

Instead, you will just get variations on Christ Renews His Protestants, because Protestants are easier to deal with than Catholics are.


UPDATE:
A reader asks a very relevant question: are FSSP parishes better than Novus Ordo parishes in this regard?

The answer?
No, there is no substantial difference between the two.
Now, there are cosmetic differences, and these are two-fold: (1) the "doctrines" the priests push and (2) who does the pushing.

Doctrinal error
For instance, the leftist heterodox priests overemphasize things like women's ordination and We Are Church nonsense.

The FSSP-types, on the other hand, overemphasize private revelation, or turn Limbo or creationism into dogma (both are really only theological hypothesis), or become semi-Feeneyite and imply that baptism of blood/faith is not really salvific.

Teaching Limbo as if it is doctrine is an excellent case in point in how FSSP priests often engage in teachings that are just as problematic as Novus Ordo priests. CCC article 1283 explicitly says, "With respect to children who have died without Baptism, the liturgy of the Church invites us to trust in God's mercy and pray for their salvation."

Now, it is a violation of the Faith to pray for those who are definitively in hell. So, if Limbo is the first circle of hell, if unbaptized infants definitively go to Limbo and if both the liturgy and the CCC "invites us to pray for the salvation of unbaptized infants," then both the liturgy and the CCC are inviting us to pray for the salvation of those in hell. That is, if Limbo is truly a dogma of the Church, then both the liturgy and the CCC are advocating apokatastasis. Apokatastasis is a formally condemned heresy of the Church. Given that both the liturgy and the CCC are promulgated by an apostolic constitution, the highest expression of the infallible ordinary Magisterium, that would not only make the Pope a heretic, it would also violate the teaching on papal infallibility.

Despite this fact, I have heard at least one FSSP priest teach from the ambo during Mass precisely the idea that Limbo is a dogma of the Church. When I privately questioned him on exactly these points, he insisted that he was correct and refused to retract his error.

How Best To Promote Error
Similarly, while the leftists have their parish surrogates push the falsehoods (thus "empowering the laity"), the FSSP has the priests push the falsehoods from the ambo (thereby promoting the heresy of clericalism - "the priest is always right"). It doesn't really matter - in both cases you have priests who are attached to doctrinal error, and in both cases any attempt to question or correct their errors is met with ostracism of the person who dares question such their teaching.

And both sets of priests, FSSP and Novus Ordo, traditionally maintain admiring harems.

But none of this should be a surprise.

FSSP priests aren't any more saints than anyone else, including me and you. We all like to have sycophants, and we all have our pet theories that we like to dogmatize.

Priests certainly aren't any more infallible, no matter how good their theological training.
Martin Luther had a Ph.D. in theology.
John Hus was the rector of a Catholic university.

The greatest, most effective heretics have always been ordained men - priests and bishops. They are better heretics than lay people precisely because they have greater knowledge, and can promulgate their errors in a more bulletproof way than those with lesser training.

So, entering an FSSP parish is no guarantee against heresy.
Indeed, one is arguably at more danger of heresy there, if only because one is less likely to be on guard against it with the FSSP than with the Novus Ordo.

Woman's Work

Elizabeth Wurtzel, a woman writing for The Atlantic, argues that raising children is not work since no one will pay you to do it.  Real feminism, according to her understanding, is to have employment that is equal in respect and pay to that of a man.

As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.

Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children.  Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.

If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.

In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it  was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.

It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.

So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations.  If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising  to a more difficult occupation.

Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.

And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.

Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.

It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.

On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.

You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way.  Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.

In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely.  Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling",  "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.

But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive.  Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.

But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.

So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.

Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist. 

Justice, Though the Heavens Fall

A federal judge has decided to allow a lawsuit against the Catholic Church.

It seems a single Catholic school teacher, an instructor of computer science, decided to impregnate herself via artificial insemination.
She was fired for this breach of protocol.
She is suing for wrongful dismissal.
The judge argued that since she is not involved in the transmission of doctrine, the court has standing to hear her case.

The Magisterial documents of the Church insist that every subject taught in a Catholic school must be infused with Catholic principles, outlook and attitude.

Is there a "Catholic" way to teach computer science?
According to the Church, yes, there is.

It's relatively easy to see how such a course might work.

Simply open each class with prayer, provide regular reminders that God is rational, His universe is rational because it reflects who He is, and Divine logic is the underlying foundation that forms the logical structure of computer programming. I could and have taught such courses.

Of course, when I did this, Catholic parents routinely complained that I was supposed to be teaching MATH, not religion, or HISTORY, not religion, or ART, not religion. Catholic parents complained, mind you.

And there's the problem. Precisely because Catholic schools now routinely employ non-Catholics, enroll non-Catholic students, and limit these kinds of "meta-explanations", precisely because Catholic parents enroll their children in Catholic schools NOT to get Catholic instruction, but to get private academy instruction that preps their children for prep school, Catholics schools are no longer Catholic.

Catholic schools haven't been Catholic for quite a while.
And a judge has finally called them on it.

So, the judge has taken it upon himself to decide what can and cannot be considered "Catholic" in any Catholic school.  The judge gets to define what constitutes Catholic Faith and the transmission of a Catholic worldview.

So much for separation of Church and state.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum - "let justice be done though the heavens fall"...

It is hard to know which side to root for... the judge who intends to tear down the facade of Catholicism in Catholic schools or the schools who may only now be realizing, too late, that they really should have stayed true to the Catholic Faith they pretended to pass on.

UPDATE: In an ironical side note, Xavier University has decided to STOP carrying birth control coverage.  It's almost as if Catholics are beginning to realize they bought a mess of pottage.

Rush is Right

Color me confused, but I don't get it.

What, exactly, did Limbaugh say about Georgetown student Sandra Fluke that was wrong?

What's that?
Oh!
Horrors!
He used the word "slut" to describe a self-admitted sexually promiscuous fornicator from Georgetown.

Hmmm....

If memory serves, Georgetown hosted a Slutwalk not six months ago.

Lafayette Square has never seen so much skin. As I wandered into this designated meeting place to march in the SlutWalk, I was relieved to note my outfit—we’ll call it a costume—fell in the mid-range of concertedly slutty ensembles. That put it just above the leopard-print-bra-and-stiletto combo and slightly below the same combo overlaid with a mesh dress borrowed from the Village People.

Two men with canes and fur coats swaggered past me, holding signs declaring, “Pimps for Women’s Rights.” They captured the sentiments of the day... My contribution to this simulated brothel was a slip, my approximation of “the morning after,” as a fellow slut deemed it.

Did anyone at Georgetown get upset about that article in Georgetown's own newspaper?
Why no... no they didn't.
Any call for an apology from the administration about the outrageous, vitriolic language used by Georgetown's own newspaper to describe Georgetown's own students?
Well, no... no there wasn't.

But now the President of Georgetown has come out in support of Georgetown's very own self-described slut. He has attacked Limbaugh for Limbaugh's "vitriolic" comment (apparently, agreeing to use Georgetown's own terminology is "misogynistic, vitrioloic and a misrepresentation").

Odd. Isn't his comment merely a repetition of Georgetown's own newspaper referrence not just to one woman, but a whole parade of its student body?

Given the popularity of slutwalks on college campuses, I thought modern intellectuals embraced the whole slut culture as an expression of basic freedoms? That's certainly what Georgetown's own article seems to describe.

So why attack Limbaugh for using the self-same terminology that Georgetown itself uses to describe its own student body as they "Take Back The Night" in their frilly costumes, waving sex toys and (now government-subsidized) condoms in the air?

Is this one more example of the kind of PC language that allows black hip-hop artists to label friends and neighbors "whores" and "niggas" while putting the "racist" label on anyone who agrees with them?

Liberal men and women can call women sluts and bitches, but conservative men and women cannot agree?

Words mean things - if someone wants to celebrate their sluttiness in order to gain subsidies for it, they can't get upset when someone else agrees with them.

The Order of Catholic Parents

I recently received a critique of Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America, from a Cistercian who teaches at a Catholic high school run by his religious community. Actually, I didn't receive the critique directly, rather, I received it second-hand from someone who had given a copy to the monk. The response to the book was quite remarkable.

The Cistercian Critique:
I did get to look at Designed to Fail for a little bit last night before bed. I liked a lot of the points and the style was lively and engaging. I think he's right about the neglected importance of adult catechesis and the importance of its "trickle-down" effects in the family, and I also feel deeply that he is correct that the "ecclesia domestica" cannot rebuilt so long as anti-child sins are not preached against -- or as long as integral family values are not preached for, more importantly -- in the Church. It's also true that parochial schools often trade-off with the resources that could be spent on adult faith-formation (although I suspect that's not the real reason why contemporary adult catechesis is so weak .).

[Editor's Note: I didn't formally respond to this paragraph in my reply below, but I found it interesting that he essentially denies Catholic schools are causing any problems in the Catholic community.]

Still, alongside the basic distaste for the importance of professional assistance/ guidance that Catholic schools can provide, I ultimately take exception to the apparent assumptions that all real Catholic parents can and should homeschool, and that all good lay Catholics should be attending didactic faith-formation classes at their parish. Maybe I'm misreading the tone, but if that's the big idea, I'm not sure I can buy into it.

As you would expect, I also don't really appreciate the implication that teaching children in schools is a misguided ministry. Although I am confident Steve would say different things about Cistercian than about most Catholic schools, the ideas that most families are equipped to homeschool, that well-raised Catholic children can reliably remain Catholic in (note I didn't say "endure") the current public school system, and that the "ex opere operato" grace of matrimony makes most parents sufficient (note I didn't say "basic" or "fundamental") catechists of their children -- these ideas I think are dicey.

The "subsidium" provided by priests, religious, and the greater lay community must be very substantial indeed in many or most cases. Professional theologians and catechists are often needed, as are professional Christian educators in secular subjects, if our children are to really go beyond the anti-modernist ghetto and become robust lay disciples in service of Church and society.

I also wonder if the idea of abruptly switching parish efforts from child-formation to adult-formation would result in grave frictions; for example, the teacher-mothers who are so comptently (or at least potentially competently, given adquate guidance themselves) able to nurture and catechize children would have to be replaced by an entire class of professional and full-time catechists (mostly male, I intuit) who would have to be the primary income-earners of households, thus inevitably promoting a dangerous kind of careerism and cutthroatness around things most sacred.

These are just my brainstorms on the topic; whether they really apply to Steve's view or not, I can't yet tell. It has certainly been a stimulating and thought-provoking book, and I look forward to delving into it again another time. My impression is that, for all of the distaste I have for bombastic Catholic lit that identifies the one "real problem" in the Church today, this book has some very important, provocative, and worthwile insights.

* On further reflection, I thought it might not hurt to explicitly mention that my concern about a full-on class of professional lay catechists has no relevance to the kind of work for parishes that people like you and Steve do now. You are of course welcome to share my thoughts with Steve; I hope he finds them helpful. (You can also paste in the second paragraph above, *if* you wish.) Like I said, I think he's on to something important, and if you think that could help him refine it, so much the better. And also I again emphasize that I didn't catch the whole context, and it's clear that he's done some important factual research. As far as further interaction about my comments, I'm open to that if he wants, because it is a topic of import to me, but maybe we can just leave that as an open question based on his wishes and my energy level! In Christ, Brother XXX

[Editor's Note: I did not respond to this paragraph in my reply either, but it is also interesting.
He is fine with having Directors of Religious Education or Adult Formation at the parish level, yet how is this not a "full-on class of professional lay catechists"? Why would his remarks NOT be relevant to work in parishes? Are parish workers immune from careerism or the need to be paid a living wage? These remarks are quite curious. In any case, my response is below.]

My Response
Thanks for sending me the interesting critique. I've noticed that the book seems to be a Rohrschach test in which different people "see" different sections of the text and fail to see other sections. As a result, it has been quite interesting to read reviews.

In the book, I explicitly point out that: 1) homeschooling is not for everyone and 2) the sacrament of matrimony does not provide the graces necessary to homeschool in every subject (rather, it provides only the graces necessary to do sacramental prep).

It seems to me quite obvious that having the grace (the power) to do a task is not identical to having the knowledge necessary to do the task. I don't have a copy of the book at my elbow, but if I recall correctly, I do have a section on the difference between grace and knowledge in the book itself. I know I certainly emphasize this every time I teach adults about sacraments.
Indeed, I believe I quote at least one papal document concerning the fact that the family is incomplete in itself in order to demonstrate to the more rabid members of the homeschool crowd that Rome does not believe homeschooling in all subjects is the answer.

Likewise, the Magisterium is quite clear on the importance of Catholic schools - my point is that very few of the parochial schools, high schools or "Catholic" higher education in the United States today actually conform to Rome's description of what constitutes a Catholic school.

In short, I agree that Catholic schools are necessary, I simply don't believe we have any (or at least, not many) in the United States.

Furthermore, I never say well-raised Catholic children can reliably remain Catholic in public schools, instead, I point out that there is little functional difference between the current Catholic school system and the public school system - rather a different emphasis. Again, if I recall correctly, I point out that public schools will crucify well-catechized Catholics. It is well-known that not every Catholic responds well to the opportunity for martyrdom.

The idea that all good lay adult Catholics should be attending didactic faith-formation classes at their parish is described in at least one Magisterial document and in the proceedings of the Council of Trent. One might argue that today's cultural circumstances call for different measures, but it's hard to see what else they would be. Thus, it is not clear why this idea is "dicey."

As for the transition to primary focus on adult formation causing grave frictions, it is not clear why that would be the case. Certainly the transition to a six-month preparation requirement in all dioceses for marriage prep went fairly smoothly, and it is not clear why this kind of transition need be any more stressful than that transition was.

Precisely because adults, especially parents, are more responsible individuals than are children, the actual investment in training personnel would be less, not more, than is currently required. As I point out in the book, if we rely on the well-catechized parents in the parish (i.e., the homeschooling parents) we have already gone a long way towards providing the necessary catechists. Even professional speakers in a year-long series would cost less than the grade school teachers.

Finally, if avoiding "careerism" and the need to pay a living wage to teachers are the objections to teaching adults (lest these attitudes grow up around things most sacred), then could not these charges be laid equally well at the door of every Catholic school in the country? Indeed, do I not lay these very charges at the door of every Catholic school? Is it not the case that the Catholic schools currently suffer from exactly the problem of careerism and the need to pay a living wage to people incapable of guarding things most sacred?

Put another way, do even the Cistercians refuse all moneys paid to the school, instead teaching without any recompense at all for their time? To the extent that any Cistercian accepts any recompense at all for his teaching, is this money, food or lodging not part of the "living wage" that comprises his ability to live in community? Is there no "careerism" among any in the community? Perhaps I am a cynic, but I do not believe religious vows strip away concupiscence, so I would find any answers in the negative in these areas rather hard to credit.

And why should the Church find the payment of "the living wage" a problem? Certainly Brother XXXX is not advocating the completely unworkable solution of staffing all Catholic schools with religious orders? The problems with doing this are laid out rather clearly in the book - it is a solution that has been tried and has been found wanting, at least in the United States.

So, while I appreciate the kind words he has to say about the importance of adult formation, I find his objections either seem to ignore passages in the work itself or seem to ignore the conditions in the Catholic schools.

The problem here revolves around enabling Catholic parents to do what they are ordained to do. If we consider Catholic parenting to be the foundational religious order of the Catholic Church, then this is the one order which cannot be allowed to fail. The Church can and has survived without Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, even without Cistercians, but She cannot survive, She has never lived life, without the order of Catholic parents.