Saints Who Disobeyed Their Parents

Must children always obey their parents?

Saint Alexis did not. He refused a marriage his parents had arranged.

Saint Catherine of Siena did not. She likewise refused to marry despite her parents urging.

St. Francis of Assisi did not obey his parents. In fact, he refused his father's patrimony.

St. Rita of Cascia disobeyed her parents - "what may have seemed disobedience on the part of little Rita were in fact mild reproofs, prompted, no doubt, by God, against that vanity which alas too often is planted by indulgent parents in the hearts of their young children....From the Augustinian breviary we learn that Rita Mancini was twelve years of age when she made her choice".

St. Thomas Aquinas refused his parents' will for his life.

Joan of Arc disobeyed her parents, choosing instead to walk 40 miles to meet a local lord.

St. Clare of Assisi secretly left her home and parents when she was 18.

And, while technically not his parents, St. John of the Cross suffered similar travail:
"On the night of 2 December 1577, St. John of the Cross was taken prisoner by his superiors in the calced Carmelites, who had launched a counter-program against John and Teresa's reforms. John had refused an order to return to his original house." "He managed to escape nine months later, on 15 August 1578, through a small window in a room adjoining his cell. (He had managed to pry the cell door off its hinges earlier that day)." St. John of the Cross disobeyed his superior's order because it was unjust, therefore, immoral. For disobeying he was imprisoned, but then escaped since he knew the actions of his superior was not God's will for his life."

As I've noted before, until 1917, the canon law of the Catholic Church considered anyone above the age of 12 capable of marriage. The 1917 Code raised the minimum age for marriage in the church to 14 for girls and 16 for boys. This is still the law in the 1983 Code. Though any minister considering marrying someone under 18 is supposed to consult with parents or the bishop, once a the individual turns 18, that consultation is no longer necessary.  

Children have a duty to obey their parents.
Parents have a duty to recognize their children's maturity and consider it in their decisions.

CCC 2253 Parents should respect and encourage their children's vocations. They should remember and teach that the first calling of the Christian is to follow Jesus.

Much as they would like to be, parents are not dictators, nor are their children - especially their teen children - always bound to follow a parent's dictates. 

God gives us children so that we raise them in sanctity. He also gives us children so that we may become more holy. We have to submit to the will of God not only in our lives, but in our children's lives. The children may know a call that the parents do not fully see or fully comprehend. Subsidiarity is one of the bedrock principles of Catholic Faith.  Subsidiarity requires that, just as small children must learn to trust their parents, so parents must, to at least some extent, learn to trust their children.

Pray God that we can.

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.