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Throughout the last decade, the number of people getting married has been plummeting while the divorce rate remains stubbornly high. Not only has this led to a serious breakdown in family life, but it has wreaked havoc on community life as well, particularly church communities. In response, many churches have instituted marriage preparation programs that would help prospective couples understand the commitment they are making and help them work through potential problems with the relationship.

Healing can only be rooted in what is good and true. "In every generation, followers of Christ have seen protecting and caring for vulnerable children as a crucial part of their calling. Today, children are vulnerable to radically changing social conditions, harmful ideas about their minds and bodies, the loss of institutions crucial to their health and well-being, and a barrage of bad news. "

The animal in LaBeouf is the animal of a generation who desires the infinite but has only been fed with the finite. They may have fallen to the edge of the earth, but they will hopefully be brought back with “a twitch upon a thread.” For hope, as LaBeouf is convinced, is “hearing other people’s stories.”

Unless he has been raised by parents far wiser and more deliberate than the general run of human sinners, he has been steeped in scenes of unspeakable wickedness and depravity, possibly thousands of them, as a regular feature of his disheartening life, and they have been seared into his imagination and into his very nerves and blood by the dopamine that accompanies sexual action. To marry such a person is to marry not just a sinner, since everyone is that. It is to marry someone whose very principle of marital union has been replaced by what is ugly and brutish or even demonic, who when he lies with his wife lies with the anonymous whore his imagination and his memory set before him, whether he will or no.

Rather, my appeal is far broader and deeper in scope. We as parents need to view ourselves not only as those bearing primary responsibility for catechizing our children in the truths of the Catholic Faith but for providing our children a robust moral and intellectual vision of the good life. We need to make a good-faith effort to communicate to our kids the wonder and splendor of the West’s intellectual and cultural inheritance, one that will provide them not only a thoroughly Catholic upbringing but a thoroughly human one that shapes how they view themselves and the world.

Fathers, in particular, tend to prefer setting a silent example and passing the duty of explanation to mothers, priests, or teachers. This move might have worked sixty years ago in Catholic neighborhoods, but no longer. Given the tremendous influence that fathers have on children’s religious practice, dads have to take the initiative as children’s first – and most intense – religion teacher.

The fact is, no one seems to want to talk about what is probably the single greatest contributor to our social pathologies: the breakdown of marriage and the family. Much of the evidence is there (see for example this summary of the data assembled by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, but also important books by Ryan Anderson, Robert George, and Sherif Gergis, Charles Murray, Katie Faust and Stacy Manning, Allan Carlson, and others), but the underlying truth cuts strongly against our dominant culture of expressive individualism.

The Pontifical Academy for Life is no longer what it was under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Under its present leader, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the Academy has undertaken some irresponsible initiatives, but none worse than the recently published collection of essays with the Italian title Etica Teologica della Vita (Theological Ethics of Life). Moral theory is the rational framework by which moral questions are considered and resolved. It’s utterly central to Catholic moral theology because if your moral theory is bad, your conclusions about right and wrong will frequently be bad and so will the acts that are directed by those conclusions

If all we had done was pray about abortion, it might still be legal nationwide, and doubtless our nation would be in even more serious trouble than it is now. The fight itself held back some of the worst of the evil. Prayer was the biggest part of the fight, but it wasn’t the whole fight. Prayer is like the body armor a warrior puts on before embarking on a mission. If all he did was suit up but never left home, evil would win by default.

During a debate on the nature of true worship, a Protestant instructed Cardinal Newman: “Well, Dr. Newman, I suppose we shall have to agree to disagree. You shall worship God in your way, and I in mine.” To which, St. John Henry replied: “No, reverend sir, you can surely worship God in your way; I, however, shall worship Him in His way!”

Our work is not just to make abortion unthinkable. It is to make abandoning pregnant women unthinkable, to make derelict dads unthinkable, to make the fable of “sex without commitment” unthinkable. It is to re-catechize the world, and ourselves, about the true, un-severable relationship between sex, marriage, and babies.

Whether you like it or not, what gives the Church its magisterial authority is its eternal consistency rooted in being founded by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit. That claim is what separates us from the other 46,000 Christian sects.

Here is the question I am asking myself, and I wish to God I had the answer: If Pope Francis is right, then the Church up to his pontificate has been wrong, and my belief in that Church has been misplaced. On the other hand, if (as I believe) the Church up to Pope Francis has been right, then he is wrong, and my belief in a central tenet of that Faith (her teaching authority) has been misplaced, which, in turn, undermines my belief in the whole structure.

A culture that combines radical notions of individual autonomy with a Gnostic rejection of the built-in meaning of material (and, therefore, bodily) reality is a culture in need of conversion, not indulgence. Such a culture, like the one that dominates the West today, is not simply corrosive of the moral life; it’s a culture inoculated against the reality of the Incarnation.

I fell into the trap that ensnares many souls today: believing that if a person has a pleasing personality, is affable, attentive, and “accepting” (whatever that means), then the person is good. Somewhere along the line, Catholics began making crucial judgments based on feelings rather than reason. We are lulled by a hearty laugh, a twinkling eye, a hug with a knowing smile. We get sucked in by a sense that someone loves us, even though we are being led down a garden path.

The modern cultural habit is to doubt his existence. Some, who deny the “personal devil” as a ridiculous exile from the Dark Ages, may nevertheless acknowledge there is such a thing as evil in the world. But having no autonomous existence, it cannot organize itself. Certainly, it cannot invade anybody (as a few of the authorities of the Catholic Church might still dispute).

In other words, the full antidote to the toxic sexuality of the sexual revolution isn’t just to return it to the safety of the fireplace. The sexual morality we rightly talk about from Scripture isn’t the whole story of this beautiful gift. Keeping sex within the confines of a lifelong marriage between one man and one woman is a moral good, but just as loving our neighbors is much more than not actively hating them, respecting God’s design for sex is much more than not transgressing certain boundaries.

Catholic churches throughout the U.S. have been targeted, spray-painted with depictions of rape and phrases like “Abort the church.” Ruth Sent Us, one of the anarchist groups responsible for many of the attacks, promised to burn the Eucharist to protest “the abuse Catholic Churches have condoned for centuries.”

It may be the case that a vision of Hell, such as Our Lady of Fátima showed the three children, may be more effective in convincing somebody to turn to God, but it’s very unlikely that it will be given to any of us. Besides, it is immeasurably better to live for love than by fear. And anybody who studies Scripture must surely note that no one spoke more about Hell than Christ, and that no one spoke more about Heaven.

Intact families are a catalyst for poverty eradication. Studies show that children in one parent families are more likely to drop out of high school, have children young, and work less compared to two parent families. It is harder for one parent to provide the proper attention and nurturing that a child needs to flourish. And if children grow up in financially responsible families, they are less likely to be deceived by the leftist lure of “free” college education, housing, healthcare, UBI, and the other goodies of modern serfdom that the regime dangles before the disaffected.