A Martyr for Marriage

 "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.'  So they are no longer two but one.  What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder."  (Mark 10:7-9)

   

"Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the Temple"
by Luca Giordano, before 1690

When I observed in my recent post "Sins of the Fathers . . .and of Kings" that "one of the greatest  contributors to poverty and other debilitating social ills today is the break-down of sexual morality", one reader commented: "It is enough to watch the news or TV for two minutes to realize that our miseries are not due to lack of dollars but to lack of morals." The connection between our sexual conduct and our societal health is impossible to miss, at least for those who aren't heavily invested in the so-called "sexual revolution". It is clear that the societal endorsement of sexual license directly undermines the institution of marriage, and the breakdown of marriage in turn has a profoundly negative impact on children most immediately, and from there on everything and everyone else.

     This last point is backed up by an enormous body of research accumulated over decades.  I'm not going to delve into that mountain of data here, except to illustrate with a small sample from a 2014 article by posted on the United States National Institute of Health website . . .

[click HERE to continue reading this post on Spes in Domino]

Sins Of The Fathers . . . And Of Kings

(This Throwback was first published 24 March 2015 on the blog Nisi Dominus)      530 years is a long, long time to wait.  Thursday [March 26th 2015] England’s King Richard III, the last English monarch to die in battle, and one of the last English kings to die a Catholic, will, finally, receive a Christian burial.  Not a Catholic funeral, unfortunately, but his interment in the Anglican Cathedral of Leicester will be a great improvement over the hasty, unmarked burying of his desecrated corpse after the Battle of Bosworth Field 530 years ago.

Richard III

     Richard remains one of the most controversial of British kings.  He assumed the throne when his twelve-year-old nephew Edward V was declared illegitimate by Parliament. Edward and his younger brother Richard were sent to live in the Tower in London (which was not yet used exclusively as a prison), and their uncle became King Richard III.  The two boys disappeared from public view and just two years after his accession Richard was deposed by Henry Tudor, who then became Henry VII.  Richard has been suspected of having the “little princes” murdered  ever since, although historians today (for instance, Paul Murray Kendall) acknowledge that there is no evidence that he had anything to do with their deaths, and that Henry Tudor had far more motive to kill them than Richard did.*

     As interesting as it would be to speculate on the probable guilt of the various parties involved (and of course it would be), that’s not the purpose of this blog.  Instead, I’d like to focus on what can happen when we let desires untamed by a properly formed conscience have free rein.  The connection here is that Henry VII, who drove Richard from the throne, in time bequeathed the throne to his son Henry VIII, who separated the English Church from the Universal Church and made himself its head.  Henry’s action had profound consequences, and not only the destruction of Catholic culture and a century and a half of strife and bloodshed in England (which was, in itself, more than enough).  Some historians (such as Warren Carroll)  believe that the separation of the English Church went a long way towards ensuring that the Protestant Reformation became a permanent feature of religious life in Europe, and did not remain a largely German affair.  In later years, the spread of the British Empire ensured that the split in the Latin Church was spread over the whole globe.

Henry VIII

    And all because of Henry VIII’s wandering eye.  He did not set up his own church for theological reasons (he never considered himself a Protestant), nor was he compelled by a groundswell of anti-Catholic feeling in England.  Rather, he was motivated by his failure to produce a male heir with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, coupled with an ardent desire to indulge in a more intimate relationship with one of Catherine’s ladies, Anne Boleyn.  Anne’s price for returning the king’s affections was that she be allowed to take Catherine’s place.  Since the Pope was unwilling to grant Henry an annulment, the English monarch simply made himself the pope of England, and, as far as he was concerned, the problem was solved.  While it is possible that a Plantagenet descendant of Richard III, had he ruled instead of Henry, might also have split with Rome, it seems much less likely, since the actual break was not precipitated by external forces, but was closely tied to Henry’s character.

     However decisive Henry VIII’s libido might have been for the creation of the Anglican Church, however, there would have been no Henry VIII to have caused the split had it not been for another king’s lust.  That king is Richard III’s elder brother, Edward IV, father of the little princes who were allegedly murdered in the Tower of London.  Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a sudden and inadvisable match, came as a surprise to his family and advisors; he married her not because it was an appropriate marriage for an English monarch but because, as with Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII a couple generations later, it was her price for returning the king’s affections. Elizabeth brought her family with her, of course, whose ambitions after Edward’s death were so alarming that many nobles and Parliament called upon the late king’s brother   Richard to serve as protector of the young Edward V and his brother.  Soon it seemed expedient to remove the twelve-year-old king altogether in favor of his grown-up and capable uncle, especially after another sexual indiscretion of Edward IV’s came to light which allowed Parliament to declare Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville null, and the boy-king illegitimate.  In other words, Edward’s lust-driven behavior in one instance created the unstable situation that made the deposition of his son desirable, and his libidinous behavior in another instance provided the grounds to do so.  Consequences of these indiscretions can still be seen around the globe more than half a millennium later.

The Marriage of Edward IV & Elizabeth Woodville

     Few of us, of course, can expect our misdeeds to have anywhere near the impact of those of Edward IV or Henry VIII.  Nonetheless we can see, as Scripture tells us, how “the iniquity of fathers” is visited “upon children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation” (Numbers, 14:18). Indeed, for centuries.  The point is, we have no way to predict how far-reaching the consequences of our own sins will be, and how long they’ll last.  As we’ve seen, one of the greatest contributors to poverty and other social ills today is the break-down of sexual morality (see “Where Have All The Fathers Gone”). The next time we are tempted, we might do well to remember what happened when Edward and Henry went astray.

    

*In brief, while Richard might fear that the princes could become a rallying point for those disaffected with his rule, they had been formally removed from the succession by act of Parliament, and he had been legally crowned.  Henry, on the other hand, came from a line that had been exc luded from the succession generations earlier by Henry IV.  He needed both Richard and the princes dead, because the justification for his rebellion was that Richard was a usurper: if so, then Edward V, and not Henry Tudor, was the rightful king; if not, then Richard III was the rightful king, and Henry simply a traitor.  Either way, no Henry VII.  

It Doesn't Need To Be As Bad As Iran To Be Bad Enough

(As the post-Christian, post-modern insanity escalates on college campuses, it seems a good time to re-publish this Worth Revisiting this post from September, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

Submit Or Be Derecognized

      For a long time now elite opinion on college campuses has been trying to shut down speech that doesn’t stick to to a certain script, especially religious speech.  Specifically, Christian speech.  The clampdown has now become a little more overt: the California State University system has “derecognized” the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), an Evangelical group, on all 23 of its campuses, as explained in this article [here] by Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today.  The reason for the derecognition (who even knew that there was such a word?) is that the ICVF refuses to change its rules requiring leaders in the group to be believing Christians.  The state of California has said, in other words, that Christian groups will not be recognized as official groups on campus unless they open up their leadership to people who don’t share, and may even be hostile to, their very reason for existing in the first place.

InterVarsity Students spreading . . . bigotry and intolerance?

Consequences of derecognition

     You may be wondering what the consequences of derecognition are.  According to Greg Jao, National Field Director & Campus Access Coordinator, there are three main things that IVCF chapters will lose:

1)      Free access to rooms (they will now have to pay, and will be shut out if a “recognized" group wants the room).

2)      Access to student activities programs “including”, he says, “new student fairs where we meet most students.”

3)      “We also lose standing when we engage faculty, students and administrators.”

He doesn’t explain in detail what that last point entails. Tish Warren led a similar IVCF group at the private Vanderbilt University a few years ago that experienced a similar fate.  In a separate Christianity Today article that Stetzer quotes at length she explains:

Because we were no longer allowed to use Vanderbilt's name, we struggled to convey that we were a community of Vanderbilt students who met near campus.

In other words, as close to invisible as they can be short of being banned altogether.

Is Christianity "Hate Speech"?

     What’s behind it all?  Stetzer says that “The university system has decided that speech with beliefs that undergird it—and shape how it is organized—has to be derecognized.”  I suppose you could put it that way, but not all “speech with beliefs” is really being targeted.  He allows Warren to be somewhat more specific.  She explains that the banned groups had “crossed a line”, one that

was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.

This states the case more plainly.  Notice that it is the same in the wider world: support (not simply tolerance) of what used to be considered sexual heterodoxy is the standard by which elite opinion decides who enjoys basic rights and who does not.  Warren and Jao are both being rather too generous when they posit a desire for “democracy” as one of the motives for the anti-Christian people.  No, democracy is not a priority; these same people have no problem with federal judges overturning state laws and constitutional amendments voted in by 60-70% of the electorate, and at the university level you will not see them applying to the vegetarians, Muslims, and certainly not the LGBTQ groups the same unreasonable demands they have imposed upon the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Don't read that, kids - it might be hate speech

    And that connection to the wider world is what most concerns me. Stetzer starts out his article saying “Now, it’s not persecution”, an admonition he repeats at the end, adding: “I hope they won’t call themselves persecuted, since that lessens the persecution in, for example, Iran.”  If only we could lessen the persecution in Iran so easily!  What he means, of course, is that equating the inconveniences experienced by college students in California to the very real suffering, up to and including torture and death, suffered by Christians in the Middle East tends to diminish our proper sense of horror and outrage at the latter. Fair enough, but on the other hand injustices don’t need to rise to the Iran or ISIS level, or anywhere near it, to merit condemnation.  And I don’t think he should be in such a hurry to downplay the significance of what has happened in California.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Constitution

     First of all, what the State of California is doing is a direct assault on the constitutional rights of  Christian students.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution starts out as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

Telling members of a religious group whom they must choose as their leaders is an exceptionally unsubtle trespass on the free exercise of religion – and I know that courts have found all sorts of ingenious ways to make laws and constitutional provisions mean the exact opposite of their clear meaning, but if we’re not willing to fight something this blatant, we might as well run the white flag up the pole and get it over with.  Since the courts have also found that the restrictions the Bill of Rights places upon Congress also apply to all other government organs, including state run schools, this is clearly a constitutional issue (as it is not at a private school like Vanderbilt).

     This potential damage here also extends beyond the walls of the university.  The half-spoken message that California State is sending its students is that Christian belief is bad: “not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus”, as Tish Warren said of the attitude of the authorities at Vanderbilt.  If such a thing is simply a given in the environment where they are formed for four years, how many students are going to be prepared to be open to and tolerant of Christian belief when they get out . . . especially if the outside environment agrees with what they experienced at the university?

Bad Is Bad

     And, as I have noted in these pages many times, there is a conscious and coordinated campaign underway in the United States and the rest of the Western world to “derecognize” Christianity as a whole.  The mainstreaming of anti-Christian bigotry lays the foundation; simply holding traditional beliefs about morality and marriage makes a person fair game for the foulest and most hateful verbal abuse (see here and here).  Somehow the targets of this vileness, and not the spewers of it, are scorned by elite opinion-makers as “haters” and “bigots”.  And who is going to argue when haters and bigots are defamed, or even threatened with loss of their livelihood (here, here, here) if they oppose the dismantling of traditional morality -  or simply decline to participate actively in its destruction?  This harassment, I submit, is in fact persecution, even if not on the level of Iran or Iraq, and it sets the stage for worse: once Christians have been completely driven beyond the pale, what's to prevent harsher forms of persecution?  And in fact serious persecutions almost always start with little things, and with the delegitimizing, the "derecognition", if you will, of the targeted group, 

     Finally, I haven’t discussed the fact that our colleges and universities have, in a very short time (and practically unremarked), undergone a radical change: where formerly they acted in loco parentis ("in the place of the parent"), a role in which they protected their students and enforced moral standards, now they actively promote promiscuity and licentiousness . . . and actually punish students for upholding morality.  How can this possibly turn out well?  

     So, to all you Ed Stetzers out there, hold your head up – we have nothing to apologize for. Nobody is confusing California State University with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but what’s happening at California State is bad enough, and if we allow harassment and injustice to continue, more serious persecution is sure to follow.

Christ Is The Only Firm Foundation For Western Civilization

Given the crisis surrounding the current influx of refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries into Europe, it seems Worth Revisiting this post from August 12th, 2014 (originally titled "If they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”). To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

It's never really safe to be a Christian

It’s never completely safe to be a Christian in this world.  In my recent Sunday Snippets post [here] I briefly discussed the plight of Christians in Iraq, who are facing brutal persecution at the hands of ISIS, an armed movement embracing a particularly virulent strain of radical Islam. I illustrated the post with the Arabic “N”, with which ISIS terrorists target Christian homes, and which has since become an emblem of solidarity and a badge of honor for Christians around the world.

The Fall of Rome

     That explicit identification as Christians, and with other Christians, is vitally important. I made the point the week before [here] that radical Islam would pose little threat to “a Christendom united in Faith and fortified with Prayer”. Unfortunately, what had been Christendom is rapidly de-Christianizing, which creates a twofold threat, both from within and from without.  The external threat, a radicalized and aggressive Islam, still looks relatively distant to those of us in the United States; it seems a lot more formidable in Europe.  There, a growing, poorly assimilated, and increasingly alienated and hostile  Muslim population  is combining with the forces of societal destruction under the guise of secularism and “multiculturism” to attack the very basis of historic (which means, essentially, Christian) European culture, as described by Joseph Pearce in a piece that is appearing on Life Site News [here].  The article is well worth reading in its entirety; the best summation of Pearce’s point comes in a quote from actor John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the screen adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Rhys-Davies says: “I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged, and if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization”.  Since the actor first spoke these words several years ago, the concrete evidence of their truth has been rapidly multiplying, and so although the multi-culti wrecking ball pounds on, an increasing number of Europeans are starting to see multiculturalism for the civilizational suicide that it is.

"If we falter and lose our freedoms, 

it will be because we destroyed ourselves" -Abraham Lincoln

     To those of us in the United States the threat of islamism, although real, still seems remote.  The incidence of jihadism here can be seen as sporadic, with only a few serious incidents (9/11, the Fort Hood Massacre), and the local Muslim population is still quite small and has shown only scattered signs of radicalization – so far.  The heedless dismantling of our culture from within, however, proceeds apace.  I’ll provide just two recent examples.  First, the College Board, which through the content of its Advanced Placement (AP) exams determines the curriculum of thousands of high school classes around the country, has come with a new AP American History course [article here] that ignores great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Martin Luther King, jr.  Instead it emphasizes impersonal “historical forces” - and not so much those familiar to earlier generations of students like the development of democratic institutions, or religious tolerance.  From the Fox News article: 

“ . . . you’re not going to find Thomas Jefferson and the House of Burgesses and the cradle of democracy either,” said Larry Krieger, who retired in 2005 after more than three decades in the classroom.  And finally, you’re not going to find Benjamin Franklin and the birth of American entrepreneurialism . . . what you’re going to find is our nation’s founders portrayed as bigots who developed a belief in white superiority . . .”

The article adds that students will find, overall, “a narrative laden with tyranny and subjugation.”  
     As if it’s not enough that individual classes are convincing young people that their country is and always has been irredeemably corrupt, we now have entire schools dedicated to the purpose – at your expense.  We now have “social justice” charter schools [here], government schools funded with taxpayer money.  And while the term social justice has an honorable origin in Catholic social teaching, it has long since been hijacked by the left.  No, the students at these schools won’t be studying Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, they’ll be training in “social activism”, a.k.a. leftist political agitation.  All of which means that in certain localities in the United States we’ll have the curious phenomenon of the government expending public funds to set up public schools dedicated to training young people to tear it all down. 

"The Church of the Living God, the pillar 

and the foundation of the Truth." -1 Timothy 3:15

     Tearing it all down seems to be the program of the cultural and political left, whether we’re talking about multi-culturalism, the redefinition of marriage, revisionist history, or Robin Hood economic activism.  Very often, they don’t even seem to pretend anymore to have a coherent positive vision of what might replace all the institutions they seek to eradicate.  Not that it would help much if they did: every attempt to destroy a society that had developed over time in response to the real needs and experiences of human beings and construct on its ruins a society hatched in the brains of men (e.g., the French Revolution, Soviet Communism) has been a disaster; bloody, inhuman disaster, such as is still playing out in North Korea.  In similar fashion, the man-made religion of Islam has had a track record over the past millennium and a half of spawning anti-human horrors such the one currently on display in Iraq and Syria.
     The most profound and radical revolution in human history, on the other hand, was the transformation of the Greco-Roman civilization by the unlikely spread of Christianity.  It was no mere human idea, but the revelation of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ that subdued “the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome” (props to Edgar Allan Poe).  And notice that the Church didn’t so much destroy and replace the institutions of the Roman Empire as it “baptized” them and made them the bulwarks of a more humane culture [for more on that, see here and here].  When Rome did fall to invaders from the North, the Church worked the same transformation on the newcomers.

     And now here we are in a society that wants to do away with both the Church of Jesus Christ and the institutions passed on by our ancestors.  Do we really think that the empty shell that will be left can stand against the legions of the New Caliphate, or any other motivated and determined conqueror from without or within?

    

Marriages Are Made In Heaven

(My lovely bride and I celebrated our 29th Wedding Anniversary this past weekend; given that, as well as the Synod on the Family currently unfolding in Rome, it seems Worth Revisiting this post about marriage from January 14th, 2015. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

    Marriage is our oldest human institution, and the indispensible foundation for any successful society, and hence is a perennial topic of discussion.  Just this past week I’ve run across two different articles, one from a positive perspective, the other from the negative; together, they say a lot about marriage today, which is to say that they say a lot about the challenges facing our world.

     First, the good news.  This is a feature article from Foxnews.com called “Seven ways to stay married” [full article here].  The author starts out by explaining that he wanted to know, “What can people do to have a happy, fulfilling, lifelong marriage?”  Rather than ask the so-called experts (“psychologist or self-help gurus”), he went to the real experts: “older Americans who have been married 50, 60, 70 years and more.”  What he found turns out to be not that surprising, at least the first six points (not all are really presented as “ways”): “ 1. Marriage is hard . . .  2. But marriage for a lifetime is worth it . . . 3. Marry someone a lot like you . . . 4. Think small . . . 5. Talk, talk, talk  . . . 6. Stop trying to change your partner.”  Number 7 looks like a new one at first: “Are we hungry?”  “The elders”, our author tells us, recommend stopping to eat when a big fight is in the offing.  As it turns out, the food is just a way of buying some “cooling off” time, which is another tried and true technique.

     The good news about the good news is that all of these things are commonsensical and accessible to anyone, once you know them.  My lovely bride and I have benefited from them (sometimes, it is true, after learning them the hard way) in our own experience over twenty-eight years of marriage.  The bad news is that such obvious things, most of which would have been conventional wisdom passed on from mothers and fathers to their children a couple generations ago, are now presented as revelations.  But it makes sense: how many newlyweds today can turn for advice to parents who are still married to each other?  The number is shrinking all the time.

     Which brings us to Exhibit B: a lifesitenews.com article called “Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’” [hat tip to Fr. Z; full article here].  The article draws on a survey from the Pew Research Center detailing attitudes about marriage among various people from various age groups.  One section focuses on data showing that young men are growing less interested in marriage: only 29% say that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things, a six-point drop since 1997, while the number of women saying the same thing rose nine points to 37% over the same period (perhaps a reflection of the fact that women and their children suffer the brunt of family erosion more directly).  There are plenty of other frightening statistics in the article; I found this one particularly alarming:: “Just 20 percent of those aged 18 to 29 are married, compared with 59 percent in 1960.”  In other words, four out of five people in their prime child-bearing years are unmarried, which means they are either denying their children the enormous advantages of married parents who are committed to each other and to the family, or they are having no children at all.  Those who do get married after thirty will have much less time for building a family (fertility starts declining sharply after 35, here), but a surprisingly large number of them will never marry at all, according to Pew’s own updated summary [full summary here] of their survey:

                In 1960, some 12% of adults ages 25-34 had never been married.  After 10 years, when that group was between the ages of 35 and 44, 7% of them still hadn’t wed.  By 1980, when they were in their mid-40s to -50s, only 5% had still never married.  The next cohort starting in 1970 followed a similar trajectory.  However, each new cohort of young adults since then has had a higher share of never-married members than the cohort that came before it.  If current trends continue, 25% of young adults in the most recent cohort (ages 25-24 in 2010) will have never married by 2030.  That would be the highest share in modern history. (Pew Research: “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” – bold mine)

     We are headed into uncharted waters.  In most western countries we are not producing enough babies to replace our current population as it dies, and an increasing proportion of those children who are being born are being raised outside of the framework of the traditional family, with all the well-documented implications for their own well-being and the health and stability of society as a whole.  And, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better soon: the Pew report also tells us that 67% of those aged 18-29, the prime family-building years, are off the opinion that “society is just as well off if people have other priorities than marriage and children”. This is a recipe for societal suicide.

     And yet . . . I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet.  Let’s return to the first article for a moment, on the Seven Ways to Stay Married.  We are told that marriage is hard, “both because of the range of stresses and problems that confront all couples, but also because of the fundamental difficulty of merging two separate and different people into one single life.”  Nonetheless, for those who persevere, “It is a sublime experience, a connection to another person unlike any other relationship.  The elders describe it as the experience of a lifetime.” 

     Now, I’m not privy to the author’s private notes, but I can’t help but suspect he’s left something out.  Where do people find the strength and perseverance to stay at it long enough to merge themselves ”into one single life” with another person?  In effect, to sacrifice themselves? One might almost say, to become one flesh? I find it very surprising that none of these long-married couples seem to make any mention of Faith, or relying on the help of God.  Most of the long-married couples I know (not all, it is true, but most) would put those things at the very top of their list.  Surely many of those who spoke to this author did the same. In any case, we know, as Psalm 127 puts it, “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor”, and also “Truly sons are a gift from the Lord, a blessing, the fruit of the womb”.  Not only that, Jesus Christ provides us with both a model of self-sacrifice, and help in bearing our own burdens. 

     Just as God is the only sure foundation for individual marriages, so he is for society as a whole.   Scripture tells us to be ready with reasons for the Hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15), which means we need to be prepared to speak out on the importance of marriage and family; we also know that those who are not amenable to reason can often be swayed by the power of example, and so we need to show by our actions we honor and support marriage and family life, and that we find it a joyous, "sublime" experience.  Above all, we need to pray for marriage, families, and for our society, and ask the Lord to yet again “turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6) and heal our wounded culture.

Teenage Werewolves And Other Mythical Beasts

(This Worth Revisiting post was first published on May 13th, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.)

Enter The Teenager   

        We tend to take the environment in which we live for granted, to unthinkingly assume that the way things are now is how they are always supposed to be. For instance, I was born just a couple of weeks before the Cuban Missile crisis, and grew to adulthood in a world overshadowed by the Cold War and a seemingly intractable rivalry between the West and the Communist Bloc.  Those of a certain age will identify with my sense of amazement when the apparently permanent Communist Bloc simply vanished in the space of a few short years.  Our tendency to think of the contours of the world we know as fixed and eternal can blind us both to current problems and to future possibilities, but even worse than that: as Catholics we should know that the things that really are fixed and eternal are beyond this world, and they alone give us the context in which to consider worldly things in their true perspective.   

      Consider, for instance, the curious creature we know as "The Teenager", a term that does not simply mean an adolescent (with all the interesting quirks that go along with that stage of development), but a distinct "identity" with its own Teen Culture.  Some years ago I read an article by Thomas Hine called “The Rise And Decline of the Teenager” (here) that crystallized for me something that I should already have known from studying history: that our understanding of the teenager, and what it means to be one, even that there is such a creature, is a very recent product of our historical circumstances.  Hine says:

Most adults seem to view this conflicted, contradictory figure of the teenager as inevitable, part of the growth of a human being.  Yet many people now living [in 1999] came of age before there was anything called a teenager.

A Failed Adolescent

     Hines writes from a secular perspective, and I don’t go along with all of his conclusions, but there is quite a lot of valuable information in his essay.  He traces the birth of “the teenager” back to the Great Depression (the word first appears in print in 1941 in Popular Science magazine), when for the first time a majority of adolescent Americans were actually enrolled in high school; previously, most young men at this age would already be working full time, and most young women would have been married or working in their parents’ home.  The teenager, as Hines plausibly tells the tale, is largely the product of universal (mostly public) high school attendance.

     The article is more concerned with the development of teenagerdom than with exploring its ramifications (he may do more analysis in his books and on his website, which I have not explored), but he does offer some interesting insights.  For instance:

Indeed, the teenager may be, as Edgar Z. Friedenberg argued in a 1959 book, a failed adolescent. Being a teenager is, he said, a false identity, meant to short-circuit the quest for a real one. By giving people superficial roles to play, advertising, the mass media, and even the schools confuse young people and leave them dissatisfied and thus open to sales pitches that promise a deepening of identity.

The word "adolescent" means "becoming an adult", but teenhood is presented to young people as a destination in itself, directing adolescents away from their true mission of preparing to take their place in the grown-up world (hence the "failure"). Hines goes on to say:

We stopped expecting young people to be productive members of society and began to think of them as gullible consumers.  We denned maturity primarily in terms being permitted adult vices, and then were surprised when teenagers drank, smoked, or had promiscuous sex.

Boys To Men?

     There is a lot to think about here.  While there are and have been certain natural features of adolescence, such as impulsiveness, emotionalism, and (dare I say it) a certain arrogance, the idea of a “youth culture”, distinct from (or even in rebellion against) the adult culture is a new and, I would argue, destructive phenomenon. Adolescent males in particular had traditionally exhibited their youthful “spiritedness” in an impatience to join their fathers and participate in the World of Adult Men. Their eagerness to enter this august company, to take on the “identity” of a grown man, was their impetus to integrate productively with the rest of their society. Its markers were not just work, but marriage and fatherhood, and therefore taking on responsibility was the public proof of Manhood.  Now, as Hines points out, the young are encouraged to see adulthood as a time to give free rein to the sort of self-indulgent irresponsibility that is so attractive to adolescents.  One might add that the near-universality of college attendance seems to be extending Teenhood even further into adulthood, with the result that we are seeing ever more Perpetual Teens.

What Are They Teaching in These Schools?

Michael Landon in the film I Was A Teenage Werewolf

     It seems clear to me that we don’t want our adolescent children to self-identify with the secular “youth culture.” When I first read this article our oldest child had just turned three, and we had already decided to teach him and his siblings at home.  We were primarily concerned with the formation of character and instruction in the Faith, and homeschooling seemed the best way to avoid the pitfalls of the teenage peer culture.  At the same time I understand that homeschooling is not going to be the answer for many, probably most, Catholic families. Good Catholic schools are a much better option than the public schools (not all Catholic schools are “good” ones, unfortunately), especially schools that take the faith seriously.  In the best Catholic schools you won’t find sexual morality being taught by Planned Parenthood, there will be less left-wing indoctrination (much will depend, of course,  on individual teachers) and the Catholic faith will not only be taught, but be a living reality in the school.

     On the other hand, any institutional school, however good, will inevitably contribute to some of the negative outcomes noted above. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone; I have taught full-time in Catholic schools for the past twenty-nine years, and I would have quit long ago if I didn’t think they were, on balance, a good thing. Nonetheless, there will be a powerful attraction to the peer culture, and many, probably most, of your sons’ and daughters’ classmates will have been influenced much more by secular values and the consumer culture than by traditional Christian belief and practice. 

Parents Are The Primary Educators

     Whether we send our children to Catholic school or teach them at home, we are their primary educators, and God has given us parents, not the schools (and certainly not the popular culture) the graces to direct their formation properly (see St. John Paul II's Letter to Families).  If we do send our sons and daughters to school we need to make an extra effort to help them form their identity as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, of their family, and of society, not their peer group. One way is to see that they are involved in activities outside of school that involve people of different ages.  For example, when my sons were younger we took part in a Catholic ConQuest group with a lot of boys of different ages, but also a number of fathers who not only directed activities but also participated along with their sons, the adult men acting as guides and role models for the boys.  Also, however good the religious instruction may be at the school, it’s not sufficient; the parents must take a direct role in the instruction of their children and offer an example of living a Christ-centered life (and it’s vitally important for fathers to be the high-priest of the domestic church: see here).  If we who are concerned for the well-being and eternal salvation of our children don’t take the lead, then the secular culture, which cares for neither of those things, will step in.

     Too often I have seen parents throw up their hands in the belief that there is nothing they can do.  But there is: teenagerhood, unlike biological sex, is not an immutable fact.  At the age when young men and women should be well along in the task of conforming themselves to the responsibilities of adulthood, it is unhealthy for them and corrosive of a healthy society to be accustoming themselves greater irresponsibility and self-indulgence. While each of us all must go through his or her teens, none needs to be a Teenager.

Archangels, St. Jerome, Morality, And God's Law

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the LORD,

and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water,

that yields its fruit in its season,

and its leaf does not wither.

In all that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so,

but are like chaff which the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

 for the LORD knows the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1)

  

   The first Psalm gives us an interesting account of God’s law.  It is explained primarily in descriptive terms: if you follow God’s Law, and take it to heart, you will be happy, but if you choose wickedness, well, then your wages will be death.  Here is one of many indications in Scripture that while God allows us to conduct our own affairs, both on an individual and societal level, he wants to be involved, and he has created us in such a way that we in turn desire his presence in our lives (yet another occasion to quote St. Augustine: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you”).  And so he has created a variety of means for communicating with us without controlling us.

     We see God’s desire to communicate reflected in different ways in our obsevances over the next two days.  Today is the feast of the Archangels: our word “angel” comes from the Greek ἄγγελος, which simply means “messenger”.  The function of angels, at least as far as they concern us, is as carriers of God’s messages to us.  In addition to that, tomorrow is the feast of St. Jerome, who is known primarily for creating the first complete and reliable Latin translation of the Holy Scriptures, making the Bible available to all those inhabitants of the Roman Empire who did not know Greek. We honor St. Jerome because he made the word of God available to so many people.

      I couldn’t help thinking about the Archangels and St. Jerome the other day when I was reading this column [here] by Star Parker.  Parker is reporting on a recent survey by the Pew Center showing that: 

Over the last 12 years, the percentage of Americans that think religion is losing influence in American life has increased dramatically.  In 2002, 52 percent of those surveyed said religion is losing influence.  In 2014, 72 percent of Americans said religion is losing influence. 

Star Parker

     At the same time, Parker says, “fifty-six percent say that the waning of religion is a bad thing compared to 12 percent that say it is a good thing”, and she points to a Pew poll from 2012 that found that 58 percent thought religion was “very important” against only 12 percent who believed the opposite.

     What are we to make of these figures?  One would think that the large majority decrying the decline of religion must nonetheless play some part in that decline.  I suspect that we are seeing, at least in part, the struggle between our willing spirits and weak flesh within our restless hearts: “Lord give me chastity . . . but not yet” (St. Augustine has all the bases covered).  There are also more concrete considerations.  Parker, who was at one time a single mother on welfare, and who credits the welfare reforms of the 1990’s with rescuing her from a life of dependency on government largesse, sees the baleful moral consequences of such dependence as an important proximate cause.  Most Americans, largely out of a sense of Christian Charity, supported the enormous expansion of government assistance programs starting in the 1960’s.  

Who appreciated that the program would undermine the very religious, traditional values that keep families intact, essential for the work ethic that leads people out of poverty?  Massive increases of government in the lives of low-income black families were accompanied by a tripling of single parent households and out-of-wedlock births, laying the groundwork for intergenerational poverty. 

Now it’s happening in the whole country.  As we’ve gotten more government telling Americans how to save for retirement, how to deal with their health care, how to educate their children – American families have been damaged and out-of-wedlock births have increased six-fold from 1960 to 42 percent today.  Government has displaced family.

But it’s not simply about government.  In fact, Parker finds fault with both the Statists on the left and the Libertarians on the right who see the government per se as the issue, as if adding more government or radically cutting it will alone solve our social problems.  No, “you can’t have a free society that is not also a virtuous society”, and “we can’t separate our fiscal and economic problems from our moral problems.”  And where does morality come from?  Of course . . . God’s Law.

     I want to be clear that I’m not pushing some kind of “Gospel of Prosperity”, but the discussion above does offer an example of how God knows the truth about us, and that living by that truth leads to happiness, while denying it brings on ruin.  We know it from the messages carried by his Angels, the Scriptures he inspired, and the Church he established.  As the Lord Himself tells Moses:   

For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off.  It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.  "See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil.  If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you this day, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it.   (Deuteronomy 30:11-16)

  

Art For A Degraded Age

Warning: the post below deals with material inappropriate for small children, for adults with artistic taste, or for anyone with a sense of decency.

Is it art, or is it architectural smut?

   The other day I heard a commentator on Catholic radio say that the Church has always "considered church buildings to be arguments”, where not just the paintings and statues, but the architecture and use of space itself teach us what it is to be part of an ordered universe with God at its head.  This is a theme  I’ve broached a few times myself, here and here in terms of church architecture, and more broadly in regard to the arts in general here and, just last week, here. Catholicism has always  understood that art and the arts play an important role in shaping our understanding of our world and our place in it.

    Today I want to take a quick look at one recent example of a very different argument in the architecture, an instance of where, as a society, we’re going in the wrong direction. The ugly little building pictured to the left, designed by Atelier Van Lieshout for the Ruhrtriennale Festival in Bochum, Germany, is supposed to resemble two people engaged in the sexual act. According to Rookje Meijerjink, a publicist for Atelier Van Lieshout, many people are delighted by it.  The Daily Mirror (full article here) quotes her as saying:

The response by both professionals, press and the general public has been very positive, the installation has featured in a large number of renowned Dutch and German newspapers, magazines and television stations, and has gathered a lot of attention online.

With all due respect to the professionals, press, public, etc., I’m afraid I can’t agree: I contend that the building is ugly, degrading, and anti-human, and the very fact that an angry crowd hasn’t burned it to the ground is a sad commentary on the sorry state of a once Christian culture.

    It’s defenders, of course, roll out the usual quasi-intellectual artspeak gobbledygook in an attempt to make this eyesore seem like a respectable artistic creation.  The Daily Mirror tells us that it “is intended to show the power of humanity over the natural world, and our disrupted relationship with nature”; Ms. Meijerink assures us that  

The artwork pays tribute to the ingenuity, the sophistication and the capacities of humankind, to the power of organisation, and to the use of this power to dominate, domesticate the natural environment.

Indeed.  It looks more to me like something a perverted pre-adolescent might make out of lego blocks, which I suppose is in keeping with the infantilism of much that passes as “art” these days. Specifically, while it is obviously intended to resemble a sexual act, the participants don’t really look like human beings.  The crude, block-like design of the structure is suggestive of people, but could just as easily be robots, animals, or any combination of the above.

    Also, while I don’t believe that it’s really possible to express the true beauty of the marital embrace in a work of representative art (for a variety of reasons both moral and aesthetic), this creation doesn’t even try. Everything from the not-quite-human crudeness of the forms to the functional rather than intimate postures of the figures seems to be an intentional mockery of anything that could be called “love making” in favor of “mating”,  or perhaps other words too uncouth to reproduce in this space. In short, rather than showing "the power of humanity over the natural world", it is showing humanity subjugated by unthinking animal passions.

The open arms of St. Peter's Basilica

    Those aren’t the only reasons why this structure so perfectly captures the spirit of its age.  It isn’t hidden in a private gallery, or in some xxx domain on the internet where the prurient-minded must intentionally seek it out: it is huge, public, and in-your-face, where no man, woman , or child could possibly miss it. One can’t help but be impressed (granted, in a somewhat nauseated way) by how this one piece of . . . um . . . "art" . . . so perfectly incorporates within itself so many of the most toxic features of the current popular culture: the celebration of ugliness over beauty, a pornification of human sexuality that insists on infusing it into everything while at the same time turning it into something no more exalted than bestial rutting, and the aggressive insistence that everyone, willing or not, must wallow together in the filth.

What a contrast between this nasty little piece of work and the sweeping colonnades of St. Peter's Basilica, which are meant to represent loving arms open to embrace the whole world with the love of Christ.  Now, I know that it's tempting to dismiss the whole thing as a puerile, harmless prank.  I disagree.  Sure, this one piece of ugliness, which will probably soon come down anyway (the show of which it is a part is scheduled to close in a couple of weeks) is not the end of civilization as we have known it.  But it's not just one piece; it is one more piece, one more bit of degradation, pushing the boundaries of the acceptable just a little beyond the last thing that was "no big deal", one more step toward cultural oblivion. And there will be something else, just a little more "transgressive", after this, and another, and another.  The Devil is in the details, and he has nothing else to do with his time; he'll keep on pushing, forever if given the chance.  

    That's why the "culture wars" shouldn't be dismissed as a distraction, or a waste of time: they have become the front lines in the eternal combat between the armies of Christ and those of Satan.  We know our General will win in the end, but there are still plenty of battles, and souls, we can lose along the way if we refuse to fight.