One idiom is showing up more often lately, as people claim that the gene therapy device speciously known as The Vaccine is “the hill they will die on,” especially as mandates close in on people’s livelihoods and children’s safety.
What’s over now is what you might call the Napoleonic Phase of the Culture War: the two armies in smart uniforms lining up and trading grapeshot like gentlemen. That phase is over, and we’ve lost. The radical Left has finished its “long march through the institutions.” They now control every major center of power—be it political, military, economic, social, and cultural.
The Breastplate of Saint Patrick contains a curious prayer invoking God’s power “against every knowledge that blinds the soul of man.” Sometimes it’s called the knowledge that “corrupts,” “binds,” or “defiles.” Whatever the translation, the point remains the same and runs contrary to our culture’s way of thinking. We live by the silly, simplistic notion that “Knowledge is power.” We can’t imagine a bad kind of knowledge. Saint Patrick knew better. He knew our need to be defended against that kind of “knowledge” that not only fails to help but in fact threatens us. It is a knowledge that promises sight but delivers blindness.
The developing news story has only deepened local mistrust of county school administrators. And some Catholic experts believe it will encourage more parents to embrace their rights and responsibilities as the primary educators of their children, a fundamental teaching addressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2223). The Catechism states that parents have “the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule.” The Catechism upholds the right of parents “to choose a school for them that corresponds to their own convictions” (2229).
Treating school parents as domestic terrorists while ignoring this? "The banquet this year was much like those in past years, with one major difference: the presence of heavy security. There were uniformed police officers with bulletproof vests in evidence everywhere. For Texas Right to Life is an organization under fire, part of a nationwide movement under fire, suffering harassment and maltreatment that I predict will only get worse in the coming months and years."
Each book in The Tuttle Twins series comes with discussion questions at the end, helping parents to talk with their children about the important ideas in the book—ideas such as individual rights, the proper role of government, and what it means to be free. There are also free activity workbooks to accompany the books.
Schnurr knows any attempt to close parishes will be met with fierce resistance from the “Not my parish!” folks. Yet he is trying to manage the decline smartly. Too many bishops around the world are punting on this issue, pushing off the difficult decisions to their successors. Eventually dioceses will collapse under the weight of too many parishes and not enough parishioners. But managing the decline is only one aspect of the path forward. We also have to ask what kind of Church we want to emerge after this decline. Will it be a Church that stubbornly and irrationally clings to the post-Vatican II status quo? Pope Francis often speaks against rigidity and living in the past, but none are more rigid and stuck in the past than the Church officials who want every year to be 1976 again.
Since the Islamic insurgency began in earnest in July 2009 — first at the hands of Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist organization, and later by the Fulani, who are Muslim herdsmen also radicalized and motivated by jihadist ideology — more than 60,000 Christians have either been murdered or abducted during raids. The abducted Christians have never returned to their homes and their loved ones believe them to be dead. In addition, in the same time frame, approximately 20,000 churches and Christian schools have been torched and destroyed.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that parents need to homeschool—though there are good resources for those who do—but they do need to set academic and moral standards for their own children. This means creating clear parameters on the quantity and quality of their children’s moral and academic habits. This is often done in sports, where an athlete has a good idea of what their workout should be and what they should be able to do by the end of a season. This is also done in music, where musicians have certain pieces they need to perform and memorize, so they make a plan of how they should train.
The protest stems from their teaching a reverse racism instead of the older American ideal of equality before the law. And, at an even more fundamental level, it arises from not just a discussion of current sexual mores, but a deliberate challenge to religious traditions.
But we never hear a public official say, “If American kids are to be better educated, they need to have better parents and better friends and better TV programs and better popular music.”
With each breath, we also begin anew, and each moment can be filled with meaning, despite the toxic and evil powers that try to take hold of our lives (as we are witnessing today). If we think that life is only filled with superficial happiness or an overbearing dystopia, then we are missing the complexity of human condition and experience. We do need to ask one question: are we creators or are we destroyers? This is a crucial distinction that is implied in Qohelet, and certainly something quite relevant today.
Not only has denying the full humanity of all biological human beings always been a mistake, it has shown itself repeatedly to be one of the worst mistakes we ever make. And yet it is one we continue to make and are loathe to abandon once we make it.
As Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger herself explained: “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.” The pro-choice movement prioritizes autonomy and perceives in Catholic authority a direct threat to personal liberty. Yet, as John Paul II observes in Evangelium Vitae: “To claim the right to abortion…and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.”
The family is being ripped apart, and it has no adequate replacement. In Familiaris Consortio, issued 40 years ago Nov. 22, Pope St. John Paul II has reminded us of the true nature and dignity of this institution: “‘Since the Creator of all things has established the conjugal partnership as the beginning of human society’ the family is ‘the first and vital cell of society.’”
As I noted earlier, the nature of today’s secularist threat to the life and liberty of religious believers, in the U.S and in other countries, is substantially different from the military menace posed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire’s naval forces at Lepanto. The world is a very different place than it was in 1571, when Pope St. Pius V rallied the leaders of Christian Europe to form a Holy League and face down a violent aggressor with military action. But the most central element of St. Pius V’s response can and should be emulated. Ahead of the great sea battle, he ordered the city of Rome’s churches be kept open around the clock for prayers and advocated particularly for recitation of the Rosary in order to prompt the Blessed Virgin Mary’s intercession.
The virtue we need at the moment is courage. As Paul said, we’re called to speak the truth with love. (Eph 4:15) With love. But we do need to speak the truth. . .and demand the same from others.