Want young people at church? Stop your Sunday shopping.

Sherry Weddell of the Colorado Springs-based Siena Institute has been doing important work on the demographic problems facing American Catholicism. She cites disturbing figures:

"Roughly 32% of those raised Catholic have abandoned the identity altogether. An additional 38% of those raised Catholic retain the identity but seldom or never bother to show up. 30% attend Mass at least once a month. Only about 15.6% are at Mass on a given weekend... Catholics leave the Church and the name Catholic by age 23. The majority by age 18."

She notes that attending CCD, involvement in youth ministry and going to a Catholic high school make little or no difference about whether a young man or woman stays Catholic.

But so far she misses one obvious question:

What do young churchgoing Catholics do on Sunday when they start to drift from the Church?

Certainly, some are sleeping in or goofing off. Yet in my experience many young Catholics are working very hard to support themselves or their families or to prepare for the future.

Unlike those fortunate to have "normal" weekday jobs, my twentysomething friends who work retail all have to work Sundays because that's when everyone shops.

If young people are busy working, it's very hard for them to get to Mass.

Catholics are notoriously apathetic about evangelization. If Catholics must be apathetic, let's at least be apathetic in the right ways and not shop or contract labor on Sunday.

Every time we shop on Sunday, we provide a bit more pressure on some young low-paid worker to skip church. This is a matter of worker's rights and, yes, social justice.

As the Catechism says:

"Sanctifying Sundays and holy days requires a common effort. Every Christian should avoid making unnecessary demands on others that would hinder them from observing the Lord's Day."

This is a larger problem than is recognized. In response to these comments on Mark Shea's blog, one woman wrote:

"My husband frequently has to work both Saturday evening and Sunday morning. He works for a grocery store. He has asked if he can be excused from Sunday work because of his religious faith and been told no, because he's in management. It's either quit his job (not an option!) or frequently be literally unable to attend Mass.

"So many people think absolutely nothing about zipping over to the supermarket after Mass on Sunday to pick up a jar of peanut butter. Come on, you couldn't wait one more day? You couldn't think about these things on Saturday?"

This woman's plight is too common. It also suggests Sunday labor has ripple effects. If her family owns only one car (a likely case, in a country where there is less than one car for every two people) both she and her children will face more difficulties simply attending Mass.

Just imagine the difficulty if both spouses work more than two low-paying jobs to stay afloat.

Some parishes are very aware of the problems of arranging rides to Mass for the elderly or disabled. But I'm not sure we're very good at helping distressed families or newly independent young people physically travel to Mass. A mere volunteer driving program can help people grow in faith.

What's more, destructive economic habits don't end with the worker. Many Catholics who leave the faith surely start their decline in a fateful Sunday morning decision to visit the mall instead of Mass.

Both custom and law once prevented Americans from shopping and unnecessary economic activity on Sunday. Such laws are now on the wane, as is churchgoing and human happiness.

Catholic commentators love to condemn the dictatorship of relativism. But for the working man or woman who has trouble making it to Mass on Sunday, a far greater threat to faith is the small dictator in management. Not to mention his many Catholic patrons, myself included, who have acted like Sunday is no different than any other day.

We cannot serve both God and Mammon. What easier way to serve God than through collective inaction on the Lord's Day?

National election poll stops asking respondents if they're married

Peter Hitchens is fond of claiming that the actual purpose of polling is not to measure opinion, but to change it.

More justification for that skeptical attitude comes from the Heritage Foundation. It reports that the National Election Pool (NEP) survey

...did not ask respondents if they were married. So instead we found out [2] that “Men with Children” preferred the GOP 58% to 40% while “Women with Children” preferred Democrats 52% to 45%. But there is a big difference between “Women with Children” who are married and “Women with Children” who are not. For example [3], more than a third of single mothers are poor compared to just 6.4% of married couples with children. Single-parent families with children are almost six times more likely to be poor than married couples. How did marriage affect voters’ preferences in 2010? We don’t know because the NEP stopped asking respondents if they were married.

The survey is used by the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News.

And it's just obscured a key political phenomenon.

While much is made of the "gender gap" in voting, people in the know realize this is usually a proxy for a marriage gap. Married women are more likely to vote Republican and unmarried women are more likely to vote Democrat.

But with this change to a poll, that useful bit of information will be more obscured.

Other linguistic abuses: the poll is using the wordy phrases "men with children" or "women with children" instead of the briefer term "father" or "mother." And the Heritage Foundation unwittingly uses the phrase "single parent" to hide the fact that single mothers are more prone to poverty than single fathers.

These media decisions concerning what demographics to measure shape the way in which politicians and pundits view the country. A polling environment which treats marital status as irrelevant to voting habits is not only the product of a crooked newsroom culture. It is a generator of a crooked popular culture.


(via The Brody File)

Catholic drama and 'grassroots entertainment'

San Diego playwright Cathal Gallagher recently spoke about his plays and his efforts to advance Catholic drama.

While movies cost millions to make, plays are the “grassroots of entertainment,” Gallagher told Catholic News Agency. He rightly noted that such works can have a “profound impact” on college and high school students.

His play "Viva Cristo Rey!" about the Jesuit priest and martyr Blessed Miguel Pro was performed at the Denver archdiocesan seminary earlier this year under the direction seminarian Scott Bailey.

(Last year I saw and deeply enjoyed Bailey's production of "A Man for All Seasons." We in Denver may hope he can become both a successful playwright and a priest, like a certain famous pontiff.)

Recently Gallagher has produced his play "Malcolm and Teresa," about British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and Mother Teresa. According to CNA, his next production is “Margaret of Castello,” about the young Italian woman who "led a life of sanctity in 13th century Florence despite being born blind, lame and a hunchback, and also being abandoned by her parents."

Gallagher's belief in the promise of community theater may be sound. Small theaters have fewer financial and social barriers to entry than the film business. A good dramatist will form more personal connections with the actors, the audience, and artists, a sure precondition for the development of local culture.

And of course, there's no reason a successful play can't become a good movie later on, when it's found worthy.

There's a kind of Christian culture-maker who has a "Hollywood-or-Bust!" attitude. Many of them would have benefited from testing their talents before a live audience first. I worry their shoddy film productions more easily attain prominence just because industry publicity machines emphasize the film's Christian Message (tm).

Small-time stage plays often lack that rare luxury and have to succeed on merit.

However, not being a frequent patron of community theater, the field is unknown to me. I welcome comments from the knowledgeable.

William T. Cavanaugh against the "universal gaze"

From The Other Journal, which also carried the McCarraher interview linked earlier, comes another interview with William T. Cavanaugh. It examines with insight the dominance of the nation-state, the trampling of particularity by universalist pretensions, and how the worship of God in the Eucharist maintains Communion despite these forces.

At one point Cavanaugh critically reflects on every professor's favorite target: his students. He says:

...there is a certain kind of pathology, a mode or way of “seeing” space and time. It is a universal gaze that I have noticed in my students at a university where there is an assumption of this universal gaze. This is prevalent, of course, in what we tell our students all the time: that we are going to take them from their little provincial small towns in Minnesota and we are going to give them the world and make them universal subjects of the university. It is amazing the way they assume this character and assume their ability to enter into any time and/or space. We teach a course on the church in Latin America and we used to start with Rigoberta Manchu’s autobiography. It is incredible how quickly these suburban middle class Minnesota kids assume that they can identify with this Guatemalan peasant woman. And the message, of course if we are going to be honest, is that who we really identify with in the story are the landowners who cheat the peasants. But they assume that they can really just walk into the story and immediately identify with this Guatemalan peasant woman. So in light of this presumed gaze I want to give (God knows nobody will ever allow me to do this) a commencement speech at a college where I would stand up and say, “Please don’t go out and change the world”. The world has had enough of well-meaning middle class university graduates from the U.S. going out and trying to change the world and the world is dying because of it. . . go home.
The Nation State Project, Schizophrenic Globalization, and the Eucharist

"You Christians brought this on yourselves!"

Another murderous mass killing in Colorado. Another aftershock of the massacre at Columbine High School.

The first shootings were less than three miles from my home.


The locked doors announced by this sign inconvenienced me as I tried to stock my parish basement with some empty boxes for food distribution. I suppose we Christians brought that inconvenience upon ourselves.

But, to say the least, my inconvenience pales in comparison to what others lost. Four young people, ranging in age from 16 to 26, were murdered by 24-year-old Matthew Murray, who had been nursing a grudge against Pentecostalism and Christianity for years.

Here's a touching excerpt from a eulogy given by a friend of 16-year-old victim Rachel Works:

Four close friends of Stephanie's and Rachel's also spoke, though it was Aimee Donahue who evoked the most emotion.

Dressed in black - even her fingernails were painted black -- Donahue was supposed to see Rachel this week. Donahue lives in Virginia and the two have been close friends for two years.

She lamented the moment she got the news her friend had been shot and killed, saying she "cried for 13 hours." She said they both loved The Lord of the Rings and called each other Sam and Frodo - the duo of protagonists from the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy.

"I think what hurts the most is that all I think about is the things she'll never get to do, but I can do," Donahue said. "Why did I live and she die?"

And then she referenced the end of the The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo leaves Sam behind and tells his best friend to complete the story he began to write.

"There are still some pages left for you, Sam. Your story will go on," Donahue said. "So, I have to finish my pages - maybe some of hers too - because my story is still going on whether I like it or not."

People are calling Works' murderer crazy, citing an incident where he claimed to be hearing voices:

One night Werner was awakened by Murray's chattering and complained: "Hey, Matt can you just stop that. What are you doing?

"He just turned and said, 'Dude, I'm just talking to my voices,'" Werner recalled.

"Richard ... you don't have to worry," Murray reassured him. "You're a nice guy. The voices like you."

Werner would go on to say: "We didn't know if he was being serious about it or he was just messing with everybody's head." I have to doubt insanity in this case. Though filtered through one man's memory, this incident sounds far too polished. It's like a deliberately creepy line one would hear in a B-movie. That is to say: it's just what a young unoriginal outsider would say to scare a roommate.

In contrast to the Works and Donahue girls' playful imitation of noble Frodo and loyal Sam, the news reports that Murray would imitate the wretched Smeagol/Gollum. Perhaps we do become what we pretend to be.

Our culture often has great difficulty interpreting violent malevolence. We are quick to place it in the "crazy" category, even if there are no clear signs of psychosis in its perpetrators. This is in part an understandable move: there are never good reasons for killing innocent people. From this premise, we say that therefore murderers lack reasons for their action, therefore they are insane.

Yet this confuses mental insanity with spiritual insanity--that is, sin. Though we talk a lot about freedom of choice, we sometimes imagine that the willing choice of an evil deed is impossible.

Armchair character analysis is always risky, of course. But there is certainly a type of person that fetishizes violent insanity, one that looks at Gollum as a figure not to be pitied but emulated. Murray seemed to have enjoyed the aesthetics of chaos and brokenness. Why else would he have made an ironic performance of Marilyn Manson and Linkin Park at a Christian Christmas party? Why else would he have gone on at great lengths about the depths of his despair? Why did he laboriously blame his strict upbringing for ruining his life?

This stylized approach to life, with its pretensions to psychoanalysis and its choice allusions to music and movies, could be used to the good. But these killers reference not revelatory artworks or the words of heroes but each others' fevered hate-riven writings. Murray himself quoted the writings of Eric Harris, the lead murderer at Columbine, as if he were Murray's prophet of doom, a devilish mock-Isaiah.

While it would be ideal if we could erase all memory of these killers from popular culture, that is not going to happen.

These young killers do have parents who loved them very much, and speaking ill even of those wickedly dead should be tempered for their families' sake. But in a world where public figures are attacked for every minor gaffe, a murderer deserves similar outrage.

Murray was a child of the internet era. His last bloodthirsty words, titling this post, were meant for public consumption. He's a ripe target for flaming.

These murderers require unapologetic attacks unforgiving of their motives, irreverent towards their self-importance, and contemptuous of their violence. I proceed in that spirit.

Judging from what is reported in the press, Matthew Murray was a thin-skinned, self-pitying megalomaniac who wrote horrible poetry about how screwed up he thought his life was. The quality of his poetry and his themes can be summed up in a tremulous doggerel: Oh, what a fragile and noble soul,/suffering from so many forces beyond his control!

Murray wanted to be bisexual, but no woman would have him. (For some ludicrous reason, some gay activists are eager to claim this mass murderer as one of their own.) The Mormons baptized Murray, though he left them after two weeks. He couldn't even get the Satanists to approve him: his standards were that low.

The 25-year-old Murray quoted the writings of Columbine murderer Eric Harris, an eighteen-year-old possessed of neither talent nor insight. Ever the victim, in a subtle, original, and proportionate simile Murray compared his strict upbringing to a police state regimen. Christianity and his parents had caused all his problems. To him, his pains were the greatest of all. He was more sinned against than sinning.

In his writings, the real victim is obvious. The deaths of those four young strangers are peripheral.

[They were also peripheral to anyone who was eager to score a quick debating point in the first days after the shootings. Conservatives tried to blame secularism, atheism, and Islam(at first the killer was reportedly wearing a "skullcap"). Liberals tried to blame the easy availability of guns. Rank opportunists, before the victims were even identified, disgustingly blamed Christianity, New Life Church, Youth With a Mission, and the putative homophobia found therein. Sometimes they sided with the murderer in his own hate-ridden self-justifications. Some blog comments were a hideous reminder that every bloody internet story with national attention will attract the worst people: those incapable of grieving for the innocent.]

Murderers like Murray, not to mention their sympathizers, deserve mockery and ridicule. They merit no glamorous re-tellings of their story in film, song, or video game.

A mass-murderer should be malignantly caricatured in a dark comedy about his failed attack on a school or church. His utterly baseless motivations should be obvious and unsympathetically derided. The perpetrator should act obnoxiously to well-meaning people and then complain that nobody likes him. The character should take inspiration from Eric Harris, who ranted against the mentally retarded in his notebooks. Imagine a would-be shooter, convinced of his own greatness and intelligence, enviously resenting a Down's Syndrome teen for being his social better and moral superior.

This kind of deprecatory art would illustrate the revolting bile that leads a man to inflict his despair upon the undeserving. It would serve the social function of challenging potentially violent aesthetes on their own ground.

There are many professions of forgiveness from Murray's victims and their families, and I do not question their authenticity. Speaking for myself, I am good at excusing and minimizing genuine crimes. I can pretend to "explain" them. I am truly bad at actually forgiving the criminals who perpetrate such enormities. To forgive the kinds of characters I have intuited and imagined here requires more virtue than I yet possess. When I invoke the Prince of Peace this holiday season, I hope the purity of heart to forgive a clear-minded murderer will be my Christmas gift.

Examining the "Catholic Ghetto"

One hears all the time that American Catholics were stuck in an introverted ghetto until they grew up and joined the larger culture. It's a common self-aggrandizing story told by more than a few baby boomers.

Note how this essay explodes that liberation story with the gunpowder of multi-culturalism.

The history of the ghetto image in Catholic usage tells much about the changes of mood in Catholic life during the past quarter century. When apologists for Catholic behavior and critics of the encircling WASP cultures wanted to reinforce and legitimate Catholic group-bonding, they accented the ways in which ghetto life was imposed on minorities. This Ellis did only briefly, when he said that the “aloof and unfriendly” American intellectual climate had discouraged Catholics, led them to slacken their efforts, and prompted this “minority to withdraw into itself and to assume the attitude of defenders of a besieged fortress.”

At other times during the domestic aggiornamento that followed the Second Vatican Council, however, a self-deprecating, indeed sometimes almost masochistic view of the tradition prevailed. Then the ghetto was seen not as imposed from without but self-imposed from within. Angry James Colaianni typically wrote that “Ghettoism suffocates. It is just another jail man builds for himself to keep from becoming free.” Some such critics were romantic about the surrounding glories of the secular city, naive in their neglect of the role of intimate community in human life, and scornful of ancestors whose ways they could never understand or emulate.

[...]

My thesis is that while Catholicism often did nurture ghetto existence, it was by no means unique in its relative isolation from a putative Protestant-secular world which I shall henceforth call "The Culture." Surrounding the Catholic version were so many other religious, national, and ideological ghettos that they cast the Catholic ghetto in a less distinctive light. Their presence forces us to reconsider whether the The Culture was not in many ways a larger and more expansive ghetto itself.

[...]

Historians of intergroup relations who have concentrated on the anti-Semitism of some Populists or Henry Adams, or on the anti-Catholicism of the nativist American Protective Association at the turn of the century, do have virulent and potent topics on their hands. But they often miss the dynamics of ghetto existence. One sees more vitriol and hears more vituperation, for example, in conflicts between Catholic Americanists and anti-Americanists, Ukrainian Uniates and Ukrainian Orthodox, Czech Catholics and Czech freethinkers, Catholic traditionalists and Catholic modernists, within their ghettos, than between any and all of them, say, the American Protective Association. Sociologist Georg Simmel seems to have been right, at least in the American historical instance; “People who have many common features often do one another worse or ‘worser’ wrong then complete strangers do.”
Martin E. Marty, Locations: At Home in the Ghettos

I was surprised to discover the noted scholar of American religion Martin Marty was the essay's author. It was his 1981 presidential address to the American Catholic Historical Association.

The Internet Kills

"During a dark time in her life, a troubled girl wandered into a room filled with people who were eager to love and support her, to validate and accept her, and to encourage her to kill herself."

Jeff Harrell's story of Suzanne Gonzales makes me want to set off a worldwide technology-killing EMP. Despairing of her life but mistrustful of her loved ones, she took her suicidal obsessions to a dingy corner of the internet where their power could only be magnified. The demonic advice on display in that Usenet group is more chilling than any mere horror novel.

Addendum:

Jeff Harrell is reporting the progress of the Suzanne Gonzales Suicide Prevention Act at Suzy's Law, which will make it a crime to encourage someone to commit suicide over the internet. I doubt that the law can survive First Amendment scrutiny, but it has obvious consequences for euthanasia and so-called assisted suicide activism.

A Pocket Deity for Ethical Living and Self-Esteem

"Moralistic-therapeutic deism" is a mouthful. It is a habit of thought which exploits the typically American impulse towards self-improvement and revises traditional religious thought and practice to that end. Its god is distant, invoked only to solve some personal problem. Its heaven is well-populated and its hell, if it exists at all, is vague and only for Hitlerian levels of evildoers. This mindset reduces religious ethics to being nice and happy while living a safe and productive life spent thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about self and universe.

It's also apparently a major religious influence among youth today, no matter what their denomination.

Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton spent time with American teenagers, collecting their reflections and opinions about religion and God. It is hardly surprising that the teens were unsophisticated. However, the language they used was that of therapy and self-help. Truth, sanctity, and sacrifice were of little importance. Rather, religion was for most of these youths an instrument of personal self-realization.

Christian Smith sums up his work in the twelve-page essay On "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith(PDF).

The Revealer also provides an overview:

Smith and Denton’s most significant contribution to our understanding of American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives begins when the authors attempt to explain why teens believe what they believe -- in a sense, why they are so conventional. The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that "powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States." Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings." And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.

It is to be hoped against experience that this attitude is a passing phase of unstudied youths. The loss of religious vocabularies must result in an impoverishment of religious thought itself.

How Teenagers Became Culture-movers

...the beasts!

one thing liberal (ie., individualist) ideology and market forces share is that they want us to never settle down. They're forever grinding what they encounter into ever-finer powders. So -- although we often think of "liberalism" and "market forces" as being in conflict -- in fact both of them conspire to make it hard to attain adulthood.

In other words, we've been turned into -- we've turned ourselves into -- perpetual adolescents because perpetual adolescents have no defences against the market, and in America market values triumph.
-Michael Blowhard

Do Relativists Exist?

Robert T. Miller criticizes Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi's attack on relativism. He writes:

Just as a sociological matter, this should give us pause. Generally speaking, our society is more concerned with producing and responding to arguments than probably any other in the history of the world. Whether the issue is abortion or gay rights, tax policy or the trade deficit, global warming or third-world debt, everyone seems ready to adduce arguments in support of some position or other. In learned periodicals like the Journal of Philosophy or the Harvard Law Review, on the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, in the rough-and-tumble opinion journalism of National Review and The Nation, in the postings of bloggers and the ramblings of barroom blowhards, we find nothing but arguments about morals and politics. There are very few people—in fact, virtually none—who "a priori reject rational argumentation" in morals or politics.

Professor Miller is fortunate enough to frequent these learned circles where reasoning is habitual, even if imperfect. However, I think he has mistaken the bishop's attack on relativistic culture in general for an attack on academics and the higher-level punditry in particlar. Pop culture and the lower levels of the media are dominated by irrationalism and Pilatesque views of truth.

Miller does a service in Part II of his essay, examining those various schools of thought which can be mistaken for relativism. He claims the logical positivists, who "argued that sentences from domains of discourse such as religion, metaphysics, and morals were neither analytic nor empirically verifiable and so, under the verification theory of meaning, were literally meaningless," have had their views "thoroughly demolished" in the academy. True enough, but are we to believe that the positivists' evisceration at the hands of scholars has led to their impotence in the public arena? Is public reasoning dead to the fact-value distinction dead?

Hardly. Scarcely a newspaper edition leaves the presses without including some confused appeal to the old standbys of positivism.

The greater distance I gain from the common newspapers and the television, not to mention my college days, the more and more relativism seems like a negligible phantom, and attacks on relativism begin to seem like time-wasting debunkings of ghost stories told around the campfire. Yet such escapes are transient.

Though relativism as a systematic doctrine does not, and indeed cannot exist, the sensibility is still rampant. By attacking this cultural theme, Crepaldi proves himself more attuned than Miller to the tiresome background noise of our day.

Exporting "Creative" Cultural Destruction

For the majority of the airtime on Radio Sawa (50 minutes of the hour) and Radio Farda (the two 24-hour radios in Arabic and Persian), America is represented by everyone from Eminem, to J. Lo, to Britney Spears in the fight against terrorism. (If you find this hard to believe, you can listen in on their websites.) Why at a time of utmost gravity, would the US government do something like this, especially when no other successful international broadcaster, like the BBC, has?

[...]

Radio Sawa’s progenitor, media mogul Norman Pattiz, while still serving his Clinton-appointed term on the BBG in 2002, told The New Yorker that "it was MTV that brought down the Berlin Wall."

[...]

In October 2002, the new and now still serving chairman of the BBG, Ken Tomlinson, approvingly quoted his Naval Academy graduate son: "her (Britney Spears’) music represents the sounds of freedom."

Winning Muslim Hearts with Eminem

The Last Men: Peter Pans

By the same token, the traditional division of a man's public and private lives has been largely reversed in our time. In the 1860s, Newman gave the world a history of his religious opinions, but kept his libidinal appetites to himself. In a college classroom today, both student and professor could more easily discuss their sexual habits than their relationship to Christ. In this too there's a juvenile aspect to the shame and a juvenile aspect to the self-display. The same churchmen who will countenance worship segregated on the basis of homosexual attraction will deplore kneeling at communion as "divisive"; to the mind of a thirteen-year-old, as we know, even someone else's devoutness can be excruciating. What is remarkable is how swift and complete the inversion has been. Perhaps only in certain parts of the military and certain parts of the contemplative monastic life will we yet find models of human dignity in which adulthood holds itself accountable to its own past -- adulthood, that's to say, according to which a man is esteemed for subordinating that which results in his own fun to that which results in the objective good of others.
Diogenes

The Vagaries of Undiscriminating Standards

The supreme principle of social morality today is "nondiscrimination"--the exclusive use of financial and bureaucratic classifications in place of traditional ones. Only formal qualifications and free-floating personal qualities that have somehow been separated from any larger setting can be taken into account in social relations, except to the extent the larger setting must be considered for the sake of neutralizing any effect it might otherwise have.

One must of course make distinctions, but under the new order permissible distinctions can only relate to wealth, neutral bureaucratic classifications, and things that (supposedly) no one cares about personally. Other distinctions would be invidious, so they must all be rooted out. You are allowed to distinguish Yale and Harvard graduates, but not Mayflower descendants and Senegalese immigrants. Military experience can count, but not the experience of being raised a man rather than a woman or for that matter the consequences of 1,000,000,000 years of sexual dimorphism. Personality, character and loyalties can matter, so long as they have nothing whatever to do with cultural background. You can exclude people from teaching who haven't taken useless education courses but it's a crushing objection to sex discrimination that some women are bigger, stronger and more stoic than some men.
-Jim Kalb

Subversion and Censorship

Via Mere Comments, an obvious but necessary skewering of our time's schoolmarmish pro-obscenity, anti-censorship postures:

We still believe in censorship today. It's just that we're too hypocritical to call it censorship, and talk instead of "inappropriate language" in regard to gender or ethnic stereotyping, and of the need to have our "awareness raised". Bah humbug, says Ladenson, in so many words. At the same time, we are so permissive and civilised, à la Jenkins, that you can find de Sade (Moors murderer Ian Brady’s favourite bedtime reading), with its catalogue of child rapes, sexual tortures, mutilations and murders, in any high-street bookshop. And all thanks to such highbrow defenders as Simone de Beauvoir, who hailed de Sade for "his ability to disturb us": the bog-standard defence of every shlocky writer or artist going nowadays. Just because some great works of art are disturbing does not mean that a disturbing work of art must be great. A pretty simple principle, although one that still seems to elude the understanding of many a contemporary Brit artist.

Ladenson isn’t fooled. Our knowing sniggers at Victorian prudery hardly suggest that we have attained any greater maturity ourselves, while de Sade sits freely and unexpurgated on our bookshelves "as a reassurance that ours is a culture that has shed the pointless repressions of the past and fully embraced transgression as an absolute . . . Ours is an age all for subversion, as long as the ideas subverted are other than our own".
-Christopher Hart

Disney's Mary Poppins: Hippie Propaganda

The 1964 Disney movie “Mary Poppins,” for example, treated adulthood as if it should be another form of childhood. Mary Poppins’s job, after teaching the Banks children that any job can be fun if you pour enough sugar over it, is to teach their father that the right dose might even dissolve the job altogether. Mr. Banks learns that the British Empire, its banks and many other manifestations of authority should be undermined, or at least taken less seriously. Life would be better if parents allowed themselves to dance like chimney sweeps and fly kites in the park. They shouldn’t just pay more attention to their children; they should become more like them. The movie’s liberatory spirit is, of course, out of the heart of the 1960s.
-Edward Rothstein, NYTimes

A Father's Love

A touching story from the father of a boy with Down's Syndrome:

At the hospital, when they discovered on the scan that Down's syndrome was a possibility, they very kindly offered to kill him for us. They needn’t have bothered. My wife is, unlike myself, an exceptional person in the field of loving and caring.

[...]

This was not negotiable. It sounds, I know, a little dreadful to put it this way. Certainly, I lack the courage to stand between Cindy and someone she loves. The Devil himself lacks that sort of courage. Had life turned out differently, had I been married to another, had that woman preferred to go the way of amniocentesis and termination, I have no doubt that I would have gone along with that, too, and treated parents of Down's syndrome children with a lofty pity.

But, thank God, I did not marry someone else. And that left me with a straightforward choice.
Simon Barnes, "I'm not a saint, just a parent"

Gawronski on Polish and Polish-American Catholicism

Last Thursday Rev. Raymond Gawronski, S.J., wrapped up the excellent Church, Politics, and Society lecture series at St. Elizabeth of Hungary. He spoke on Polish Catholicism in both the Old Country and America. His points in brief:

-Polish spirituality is Franciscan, not Benedictine. The Benedictines were associated with the Germans and aristocracy, whereas the Franciscans were more popular in the sense of being of the people.

-Poland's cultural touchstone was neither Gothic nor Modern, but Renaissance, which era coincided with Poland's peak as a world power.

-John Paul II's apparent failures as an administrator might derive in part from habitual Polish antipathy towards Prussian and Russian authoritarian bureaucracies. The locals' reaction instilled a careless near-anarchism, an almost quietist devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and a cult of suffering.

Certain parts of Father Gawronski's reflections on the Polish experience in America were especially noteworthy, and I reproduce parts below:

From the very start, Poles were excluded from church governance... the Polish traditions of devotion and family religious practice did not find a place in the emerging American Catholic Church. Though there were ethnic monsignors, auxillary bishops in cities with a large Polish population, it would be possible to say that the rich Polish liturgical, theological, and intellectual tradition has had any real impact on the wider American Church. New York has St. Patrick's Cathedral, I don't think any city has St. Stanislaus' Cathedral.

Beginning in the early sixties, the Poles in America were the object of a strong campaign of vilification. Identified as a Catholic working people, the Poles became symbols of that which had to be destroyed to make way for the new America.

As the dominant culture began to turn against both Catholicism and European culture, it displayed contempt for working class mores. Polish-American resistance to "ethnic cleansing" in urban neighborhoods met the combined, crushing force of state and church power and brute economic realities. Moreover Polish resistance to leftist agendas both in Europe and America made the Poles objects of derision, especially among elites in the academy and in the national media. I've long wondered if those attacks against the Polish community and the polack jokes in the American media were not the forerunners to the attacks on the Catholic Church she was experiencing, in Poland most strongly.

[...]

Ethnic groups in this country have tended to continue the trajectory of the Mother Country. Poland has not had a history of a Germany or modern Ireland, nor did Polish history share all significant Polish values with Polish Jews. Poland, a stateless nation, was formed in a crucible of powerlessness. Character and culture came to matter more than glory or power. Success in politics was often the way of collaborators. ...to be a lawyer was seen to be a disgrace.

...the Slavic countries possessed a tendency unknown to most Western countries, wedded to a dignity and freedom based on the freedom of independent farmers. And that's the heart of this experience--everyone had his own piece of land. The poles as a group had a long-term experience in the USA that was different from some other groups who have enjoyed greater success while fostering a strong public image. For example, I would say that the Polish experience encourages the opposite of the Irish experience in America. Where persecution in America occurred in the context of possible access to power, a shared language and public culture allowed the Irish, in the end, to even dominate their Anglo-Saxon persecutors and tutors.

[I couldn't help but silently cheer here]

Speaking as a somewhat separated Polish-American, this success has come at a great price. The story of the Irish in America is in a large part the story of a transformation from a despised and landless minority to the highest seats of power in the state and the church. In the process, many lost their ancestral Catholic faith. You know, Eamon de Valera when he came to America described Catholics as Protestants who go to mass.

Something similar may well be happening in Ireland itself. So you see the current state of the Catholic Church in America is largely the state of the descendants of those once-oppressed immigrants who, as Don Corleone famously said, "found paradise in America." But the heavenly paradise seems to have dimmed in its appeal.

Coming in numbers three generations later, with a very different language, no cultural experience with Anglo-Saxons whatsoever, this has not helped--and could not have helped--the Polish experience.

Some people would say that Poland has returned to normalcy, that joining the EU will be joining normal states. Pardon my views, but nations that countenance abortion and seek to legitimize homosexual unions are not normal, in any possible religious imagination, not only Christian. Perhaps the Polish experience is the experience of anyone consecrated to God. And to the extend that they are consecrated to God, it is to be scarred, and wounded, the certain sufferings, and the glory of the Cross.

On Enabling Present and Future Atrocities

Amy Welborn links to a John Allen piece. His title asks "In Regensburg's wake, is anyone worried about Christian outrage?"

I, for one, am somewhat concerned. Islamic atrocities against Christians and others are numerous, and one can write a lengthy book obituary for all the victims.

But despite the length of the diabolic litany of recent Islamic atrocities, I suspect an Islamic radical could counter with a few similarly selective readings of history: the Lebanese Catholic militia atrocities, the Baptist(yes, Baptist) terrorist group in India, Russian oppression in Chechnya, or the sometimes mutual mob violence in Islamic-Christian African countries.

Some have compared Western Christians' silence in the face of Muslim violence on our spiritual bretheren to pacifism in the aftermath of the brutal rape of one's sister.

However, I worry that such rhetoric ignores those of the "Christian West" who, in retaliation for such rapine, speculate openly about nuking Mecca and endorse with little criticism policies of torture.

Though we need to clarify some things, like the fact that the highest government official to entertain the idea of nuking Mecca was Rep. Tom Tancredo, a persona non grata in the White House, the Muslim world probably learns of such terrifying comments like us: filtered through an irresponsible sensationalist media without the benefit of such background.

If the US government ever launches a "pre-emptive" nuclear strike on a Muslim country, if US terrorist interrogation agencies become exposed as Inquisitorial horrors, our present opinions on the irredeemable evil of Islam will deservedly haunt us.

The "See No Evil" Oblivion of the Boomers

We forget, those of us at middle age, that we grew up in a saner time. I'm in no way saying that the world I grew up in was perfect; however, it wasn't like it was today. For instance, the culture of free sex, abortion, pornography, only began to explode in the '70s. We have lived in it for over thirty years, but most of us have turned out okay. So we think our children will be fine, too. But they have never had a normal culture against which to balance this newer, sicker one. They have no references which point to the old, boring normality.

We assume that they know what we know, which is "this is not right!" But why would they know that? This is the only world they have ever known.
-Terry Polakvic, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Lecture Series

Of course, this statement provoked a well-meaning but naive audience member to claim Mrs. Polakvic was painting with too broad a brush. I thought the objection was reminiscent of those in a crisis who say "Problem? What problem?" Those of my parents' generation, like this doubter, often presume their mores were passed along relatively unaffected by the turmoils of the recent decades. They correctly claim that there were always wild kids. Yet they never even suspect that such adolescent dissolution now has very considerable cultural, economic and political forces promoting the moral haze of libertine sloth. They seem utterly oblivious to debauchery and violence, believing it safely confined to late night television.

With such nigh-ubiquitous polyannas, I have to say that I am grateful to Mrs. Polakvic for her realization that something momentous has indeed actually happened. The ability to state the obvious shouldn't be so uncommon.

Just Plain Folks

"The Western world today wants the opposite of both facade and mystery, destroying them as soon as the suspicion of either arises. We speak of the imnportance of "image" and the kind desired is one of anti-facade. It must dispel, not create, the aura of grandeur and power and even dignity. Heads of state insist on being Tony or Jimmy; they grow in popularity when they are inarticulate. The plain man with the boyish, rather helpless look is the figure congenial to a democratic society."
-Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence