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abuse, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events, Pope Francis, scandal, sin, Suffering

Flipping tables in the temple

August 22, 2018

I have fielded countless emails, Instagram messages, comments, and texts from faithful Catholics these last few weeks. Most carry the same tone of concern and horror for what is coming to light: an egregious lack of transparency and honesty in the hierarchy, a terrifying lack of integrity where it comes to matters of sexual morality, and a smug assumption that the average Joe – or Jane – in the pew would never find out.

We’re finding out.

I shared my frustration with a priest friend yesterday, a faithful man who is valiantly struggling to lead his religious community in holiness. He shares my rage. He sent a letter to the parents of the young men who are in formation in his community, outlining the steps their community takes to ensure that chastity is the rule and not the exception. It gave me some ideas for what I can do as a parent to ensure that my children are safe and well-informed, as it becomes necessary and age appropriate, of the current crisis we face in the Catholic Church.

My oldest is not yet 8, so thankfully we are not having detailed conversations or answering horrifying questions about the current news coverage. We have done an okay job of shielding them from the details. I could probably be more careful with my phone conversations or dinner table talk when the kids have scooted off to play.

We have always instructed our kids openly about body safety and boundaries, encouraging them to tell us if anyone ever makes them uncomfortable or asks them to do something that scares them or makes them feel funny.

We’ve given them the real names for the various components of the reproductive system, and have emphasized repeatedly that only mommy and daddy and the doctor (with a parent present) ever have the right to touch their genitals, and then only to help them if they are sick or to wash them in the bathtub or at diaper changing time.

We’ve talked about grown ups or older kids or even age-group peers who make their tummies feel funny, who hug too hard or touch in the wrong places. We’ve had a couple incidents with our kids being put in uncomfortable positions by other children, and as we’ve navigated the fallout we’ve refined our family rules and our best practices as parents.

We don’t do sleepovers. We don’t do overnight camps or send our kids on out of town trips with other families. We have certain family members and friends whom we trust to baby-sit, and we politely decline other offers or avoid situations where we are not 100% confident in the sexual and moral integrity of the adults in question. We don’t send our kids to the neighbors’ houses to play for the most part, and we don’t allow them to play with their friends in our own home with their bedroom doors closed.

It sounds overprotective, but from our experience, it is basic common sense. Our kids are not smothered. They ride their bikes unescorted around the block, they run wild and free in playgrounds and parks and at parties and barbecues with our friends, they speak confidently to adults when they are in our presence, and they climb as high as they are able to in the trees of their choosing.

We do not want them to have a stilted childhood, but we do want them to have a safe one.

As they get older, we will increase their freedom. We will let our boys serve at the altar if they feel so called, and we will ensure that any altar server training or trips include parent volunteers. We will continue to welcome our priest friends into our home, providing concrete examples of holiness in religious life to our children. We will bring our kids to the sacraments, particularly reconciliation, trusting that our pastor and associate pastors are beyond reproach, and also insisting on confessionals with see-through doors or confession in an open pew in the main sanctuary. We will begin having the painful conversations about bishops who hurt seminarians, about priests who hurt children, about men who pledged their lives to God, but who lived their lives for satan.

We will do this in conjunction with instructing them about healthy sexuality. About the good and holy gift of marriage, and of sex within marriage as a bonding and creative force for holiness and sanctification and new life.

We will teach them about the complementary nature of men and women, explaining that some people struggle in their sexuality and have wounds that cause them great difficulty in their lives. We will teach them about the inexhaustible mercy of God in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and the life-long struggle for chastity and sexual integrity that is the responsibility of every baptized Christian.

So my question to you, dear fathers and bishops, is this: what will you do to help us?

Will you continue to turn a blind eye to sexual deviance in your seminaries? Will you turn a blind eye to homosexual activity in your ranks? Will you shuffle the bad apples around from assignment to assignment, destroying the lives of children and entire families in the process? Will you own up to the mistakes that have been made in the past, and commit to taking immediate action when predators strike in the future? Will you hold yourselves to a level of purity that is beyond reproach as an example to those who are subordinate to your authority?

Will you overturn some tables with us, now?

Will you rage with us against the evil that stalks our institutional Church like a demonic predator, rooting out the perpetrators and helping bring them to prosecution to the fullest extent of the law?

Will you link arms with us in fasting, in penance, and in prayer; in calling for and facilitating the criminal prosecution of the men who have ruined lives and snatched away souls?

Will you bring to bear on the problems we face the full weight of your priestly authority, performing exorcisms as necessary and demonstrating with your own example a model of

penance and purification that we can all emulate?

Will you wage war with us?

We, the parents of those who are the greatest in the kingdom of God, the children, await your answer.

And we won’t accept “no”.

I have linked here to a letter I drafted to the US nuncio on behalf of mothers, in particular, calling for a full criminal and ecclesial investigation of the US bishops, initiated by Pope Francis. Feel free to adapt and copy for your own use, or to respond to have your signature included with my letter. I plan to send it on August 31, the final day of a novena of penance that our local religious community is leading.

abuse, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events

A letter of petition to the Nuncio for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States

August 22, 2018

Most Reverend Christophe Pierre

Apostolic Nuncio to the United States

3339 Massachusetts Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20008

Your Excellency,

We are Catholic women, baptized members of the Body of Christ. Mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. We are faithful to the Magisterium and reliant upon the mercy of God which is poured out upon us in the sacrament of penance when we fail to live up to the demands of Jesus Christ who is the only way to the Father. We are filled with sorrow and rage at the accusations and allegations, the cover ups and controversies, all the vile and demonic filth that has spilled forth in the news in recent weeks.

We weep for the victims, for the shattered lives, the broken bodies, and the tortured souls. We turn to His Holiness Pope Francis, and we beg, we implore, and we demand that he take action against any credibly accused predatory priests, bishops, and religious. These men and women to whom the children of God were entrusted with the most precious gift a human parent can offer – his or her child’s physical and spiritual safety – have failed utterly in their mission from God Almighty to defend the least of these. We demand that he as pastor of this universal flock take swift and severe action against those who committed heinous crimes against children and against adults over whom they held positions of power.

We also ask Pope Francis to proclaim boldly the universal call to chastity for every baptized believer, to condemn unequivocally all sexual acts outside of the holy bond of matrimony between husband and wife. We humbly submit ourselves to this same standard and beg the mercy of Christ when we fall short. We must be able to trust that our chanceries, our rectories, and our seminaries are submitting likewise to uncompromising purity and fidelity, and that there is zero tolerance for homosexual or heterosexual activity of any kind.

For the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Judge, we implore you to take action now. Do not delay where justice and mercy demand a cleansing by holy fire. Do not withhold the least authority of the law, both civil and canonical. Root out this duplicitous and satanic rot which compromises the integrity of the very foundation of our One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

In the name of Mary, Mater Ecclesia and Theotokos, we entrust our petitions to you,

Signed:

(your name here)

(All content is available free for use and reproduction in its original form for the use of the Catholic faithful. You may change the pronouns and references to suit your station in life.)

abuse, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Parenting, prayer, scandal, sin, spiritual warfare, Suffering

What’s a faithful Catholic to do?

August 16, 2018

There is a tremendous – and warranted – outcry of rage and betrayal in the Church right now.

I’m not talking about the usual suspects in the media and the voices coming from the cafeteria line, either. I’m talking about the men and women who have sacrificed and stood steadfast, serving the Church with their professional lives, settling for smaller salaries and raised eyebrows at cocktail parties when they disclose their line of work. The little old ladies who are daily communicants. The blue collar workers who pray a Rosary on their lunch breaks and fast on bread and water on Wednesdays. The underpaid Catholic school teachers and the harassed Catholic healthcare professionals.

In other words, the faithful.

The ones raising larger than average families on smaller than average budgets. Refusing to cave to the extraordinary societal pressure to relieve the emptiness of their wombs at any cost, and opting for adoption or even childlessness over IVF. Bearing patiently the slings and arrows of public opinion when it comes time to defend the Church when her ways are not the world’s ways. Tossing aside the contraceptives and using NFP instead. Forgoing the “pleasures” of pornography and honoring their marriage vows. Remaining celibate and suffering in loneliness as an abandoned spouse or a same-sex attracted person. Sacrificing to educate their children in the Faith in the face of extraordinary difficulty. Refusing to reduce the immutable dignity of every single human person to an object to be used or discarded.

And defending Holy Mother Church with the ultimate gift – one’s fidelity to the Faith – even as the world around us spins farther into secular materialism.

Fathers, these children of your flocks are suffering. Suffering over the grievous injuries done to those other children, the ones named in the Pennsylvania report, the ones whose innocence was shattered, whose dignity was spat upon, who suffered in their very bodies the wounds of Christ tortured and crucified.

We cannot sleep for weeping over these images, crying out to heaven that men ordained to act in the person of Christ at the altar could also rape, pillage, and destroy the most innocent.

We need to hear from you.

We need to hear lamentation and rage, resolution and public penances. We must know that you stand on the side of Christ, crucified and risen. That even if your diocese is beyond a shadow of suspicion in August of 2018, your father’s heart breaks and your stomach roils in anger over what happened in our Church – no matter which diocese and no matter what year.

Many of us carried heavy hearts into Mass for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary yesterday, lifting red and swollen eyes to heaven during the readings and beseeching God for any answers, any explanation.

Too many of us – not all, but many – were met with deafening silence from the pulpits when the time for the homily arrived. The silence tore deeper into the wounds rent by the horrifying grand jury report; there was scarcely time for a scab to form over last month’s McCarrick revelations.

We need to hear from our fathers. We need to hear your anger, your shame, your outrage, your sorrow, and your profound and sincere resolution that this evil will be purged from the ranks of the Church hierarchy, no matter what the cost.

When someone intentionally injures or violates my child, even if – and perhaps especially if – I am not the cause of the injury, he or she can count on my swift and unapologetic rage.

We need to see your hearts, fathers. We need to see and hear our bishops doing public acts of reparation and penance, or resigning the privilege of office if the circumstances warrant it.

We need to hear our priests – especially our pastors – speaking uncompromisingly and unceasingly about what is happening, about the war zone we American Catholics find ourselves in, about the corruption and satanic violence within our own ranks, and about what is being done to bring about justice.

If your bishop hasn’t issued talking points yet or the diocesan-level HR department is cautioning restraint, damn the restraint. Your people are suffering, and they need to know their spiritual fathers are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore.

What can we, as lay people, do at a moment such as this?

Pray. Pray as you never have before. Pray a daily Rosary with your family, if you have one. With your spouse or significant other or roommate. Alone or with a recording, if you have nobody else to pray with. Ask especially for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, St. Charles Lwanga (Google his martyrdom story) and St. Catherine of Siena.

Fast. Give up social media one day a week, or limit it to a few minutes a day. Get rid of one of the three or four platforms you’re using entirely, maybe. Offer up those pinpricks of dopamine denial for the cleansing of the Church, and for the souls of the victims living and deceased.

Purge your home of anything that is complicit with this culture of death. Vaguely pornographic media. Explicitly pornographic media. Showtime or HBO DirectTV or maybe even your high speed internet, if it’s an occasion of sin for you. Go through your library and destroy anything that is influenced by the occult. If your right arm causes you to sin, cut it off. We must be beyond reproach as Catholics going forward if we are to have any credibility with this world and, more importantly, with Christ.

Throw away your contraception. Your mind altering drugs. Your habit of gossip, of masturbation, of criticism, of getting drunk, of cheating “just a little” on your income taxes, of cheating on your spouse, of ignoring your children.

In other words, be a saint.

Our times call for great sanctity to counter this grave evil. And sinners like us, myself first and foremost, are the only material Our Lord has to work with.

Other practical suggestions:

Email, call, and write to your bishop’s office (and while you’re at it, to the Holy Father himself.) Be respectful and unrelenting in asking for a public meeting or an explanation of what your diocese is doing to address these evils. Ask your bishop what his plans are to clean up your local church if housekeeping needs to be done. Find out what measures are in place to protect youth and children and seminarians and old people and not so old people. Ask what standard of sexual integrity is set and maintained by the diocese of X. Do the same with your pastor. Be persistent. But love your Church enough to not stop until you get a satisfactory answer.

Tell your priest, once you’ve finished asking when his next related and excruciatingly clear homily will be preached, that you are praying for him. And then do so. Offer a specific act of penance every day for your priest. For any priest you know. Give up your daily coffee, your nightcap, your nighttime pleasure reading, a workout, salt on your food, etc. Do not leave our courageous priests and bishops unarmed in this time of agony for the Church. They are suffering as Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane, and they need our prayers.

We have decided for our family, that to avoid even the appearance of scandal and to protect all parties involved, it is best to avoid ever putting our priest friends – or any priest – in a situation where they are alone with a child of ours. I’m not talking about casual one-on-one talks with Father on the playground during recess, but being alone in a car, in a closed room, in a private home, etc. We are also exceedingly cautious about whom we leave our children with, and take into consideration the circumstances of any home or place they’ll be visiting. Most abuse takes place within the context of the extended family or trusted circle of friends, and we have chosen to err on the side of potentially giving offense by being “too careful.”

May Christ Jesus in whom we place our trust and confidence convict in our hearts a profound sorrow for all who suffer, and a firm resolution to spend ourselves utterly in striving to prevent future evil.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

 

current events, mental health, PPD, Suffering

You know someone struggling with mental health (and you probably ate dinner with them last night)

June 8, 2018

Have you ever been so depressed or overwhelmed with anxiety that you had the thought “I wish I could just stop existing?” The classic suicide questionnaire used in doctor’s offices to assess mental health includes some version of the concept of “the means and a plan,” but for many people it isn’t the thought of self harm that brings relief, but simply the thought of stopping the pain.

For many people this pain is unfathomable and deeply unfamiliar.

And for many others, it is not.

According to the CDC, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death for adults in the US. For teenagers, it is the second.

One in five Americans will suffer from a mental health issue in a given year. Data collected from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) indicate that of those 20% of the population suffering, 4% will experience severe and life-interrupting symptoms.

All those numbers are interesting – or maybe they aren’t, I’ve never been much of a numbers gal myself – but what they can obscure is the reality that if you live in a 5-person household with a couple parents and a few kids, you are statistically likely to be sharing a kitchen with someone struggling with depression, anxiety, OCD, panic attacks, schizophrenia, or some other ailment affecting the brain and the areas under its control (read: everything. When your brain isn’t working right, nothing is working right.)

I hate mental illness. I hate anxiety and I hate depression and I super hate postpartum depression. These diseases rob you of your ability to relate to your family. Of your ability to perform at work. Of your capacity for joy and wonder and compassion. And in the case of PPD, of precious moments of joy and wonder at the very beginning of one of the most important relationships of your life. The cost is staggering.

(For many people the cost is compounded by the difficulty in obtaining good treatment. Mental healthcare is expensive. For many people, prohibitively so. It is difficult to find a good provider. It is difficult to get scheduled with a good provider, with many counseling and psychiatric practices maintaining waitlists that stretch out over weeks or even months. But that is beyond the scope of this post.)

I have been fortunate to be surrounded by compassionate, intelligent, and deeply empathic friends and family who have walked alongside me during some of my darkest days of struggle with depression. It is because of this deep well of support that I feel a grave responsibility to my fellow sufferers to speak loudly, boldly, and publically on the matter.

If you or someone you love is battling mental illness right now, I want you to hear this: you are not crazy, things are not hopeless, and you are not alone.

There have been two high profile suicides in the US this week. In the devastation left in their wake, let us pause for a moment to pray for the repose of the souls of the departed and for the comfort of their families, and also take stock of who there might be in our own immediate circle of friends and loved ones in need of our attention and compassion and action. Not everyone who commits suicide has a mental illness, but many people who commit suicide do.

When I read the news about Kate Spade earlier this week I immediately thought of a friend who has been struggling. They share nothing in common other than their gender and their motherhood, but she sprang to mind as I scanned the sad headlines. Mental illness often requires more than compassion and communication and even prayer. But it very often receives not even these minimum attentions. (I do not seek here to minimize the profound power of prayer and God’s ability to heal. But He frequently heals through medicine – few people would treat cancer with prayer and encouragement alone, but frequently those suffering from depression or anxiety are assured that these alone are sufficient.)

We all know someone who is struggling with mental illness. But we might not know that they are struggling with mental illness.

I try to make it a point to ask my new mom friends, acquaintances, and even total strangers at Target how they are doing emotionally when I see them with a new baby in hand. Very often they’re doing great! And a few of them are not. And more than a couple have burst into tears and started pouring out their story to a stranger holding a box of Up and Up diapers, so relieved are they to have been asked the question.

It can feel scary to invite someone to share their burdens with you. But there is nothing scarier than walking through life just floating on the surface, never really knowing what other people are dealing with.

The devil loves mental illness as I’m sure he loves all things that cause people pain. But he seems to have a particular affinity for a disease process that is steeped in secrecy and shame and private suffering.

Shame and secrecy are Satan’s calling cards.

But bringing things out into the light and speaking truth over them? That’s when healing happens. Keeping them bottled up and private and buried beneath vows of “I will never” and “nobody can find out” are much more in line with the plans of the prince of this world.

Jesus wants our pain out front and center so He can work with it. So He can lessen the burden on our shoulders, shifting some of the weight to His own. So He can lead us to the right doctors, the right medicines, the right kinds of therapy and lifestyle changes so that healing can happen.

And healing – the total, miraculous, this-obstacle-has-been-removed kind of healing?

That doesn’t always happen. It just isn’t in the cards for everybody. God has a plan larger and longer than our mortal minds can fathom, and so yes, 14 year-olds die of cancer and babies are stillborn and husbands leave behind grieving families. But God does not will for us to suffer alone, separated from Him and from our brothers and sisters by shame and secrecy and lies. That kind of suffering, my friends,is actually a great working definition of Hell.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental illness, or otherwise feeling despondent, do not be afraid to speak up. To speak life. To speak compassion and kindness and healing and hope over the circumstances and to persist with courage until you find someone who will hear you.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard from over the years I’ve been writing publically about mental health who felt unheard or uncertain or ashamed after mustering up the courage to broach the subject with someone only to hear crickets or platitudes in response.

Keep trying.

Keep speaking up and reaching out and believing that you are worthy of feeling whole and healthy.

Don’t let an uneducated comment or an inattentive doctor prevent you from seeking the help that you need. And if someone has the courage to share their secret pain with you? Don’t leave them hanging. As awkward or ill-equipped as you might feel, push through the social norms that leave so many of us us cripplingly lonely in this society of ours and help that friend or neighbor or brother who just bared their soul to you find the number of a good therapist. A doctor you’ve heard good things about from someone. Your pastor who is generally a wealth of resources on mental illness from spending hours and hours in the confessional and who has every major counseling practice within a 40-mile radius on speed dial.

You are not alone. Your beloved friend, estranged cousin, barely-familier coworker or your darling daughter are not alone. Be somebody’s Simon. Put your shoulder under that cross and help them get where they need to go when they’re just about ready to quit.

The world needs what you have to offer. But you must offer it!

St. Dymphna, St. John Paul II, St. Teresa of Kolkata, pray for us.

coffee clicks, current events

Coffee Clicks: Star Wars Day

May 4, 2018

Howdy readers, happy weekend eve!  First, I’m so excited by the flood of NFP stories that have been hitting my inbox. Seems like the series is going to be a huge success. If you’ve already sent me something, thank you! If you haven’t and you’d like to, go right ahead, but know that I have a pretty hefty stack to share in the coming weeks so I can’t guarantee that they’ll all be included in their entirety. I have been so humbled and inspired by the courage and the sacrifice and the goodness of so many of the couples who have reached out to share their testimony. There are seemingly ordinary people living extraordinary lives all around you.

Also, for my Instagram followers, a heartfelt thanks for your prayers for my dad. His surgery yesterday was a success, so now we wait and pray for a clean pathology report. We are asking Julia Greeley to intercede that he be cancer free and have a miraculously easy and complete recovery.

Our editor did a sobering interview about the grim implications of little Alfie Evans’ death. Eternal rest unto him, the little martyr, O Lord.

I grew up Catholic and straggled away for a while during college, but I was always on board with the Church’s teachings on contraception. (Even as a full-on heathen in college.) But it wasn’t until listening to Dr. Smith’s famed “Contraception, Why Not?” presentation and then reading her impressive volume “Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later” that I really understood that teaching on an intellectual level. She is eminently clear and approachable to read even with her high level of scholarship, and I think every single human person should be forced to listen to Contraception YN at least once in their lifetime. (fun fact, there is a “secular” version of the recording available where she makes the case from a strictly natural law perspective, no religion necessary.

Another gem from that lion of Catholicism, Archbishop Chaput. Fun fact about the good bishop: he has something of a photographic memory for human beings. So if he has met you once or twice and then seen you not at all for years on end, he will probably look you in the eye, call you by your (correct) first name, and ask you how your kids/job/parents are doing. He’s astonishing.

This mom is a superhero for her daughter and put together a really practical and compassionate how-to for talking with little kids (read: big mouthed hams) about classmates who look/act/sound different than the “average” kid. I really appreciate this as a primer for helping my own crew (especially Evie, ahem) navigate those moments in the checkout line in a more constructive and loving way then pointing and yelling WHY IS THAT MAN REALLY REALLY FAT, MOM? WHY? (I don’t know, sweetheart. Maybe his metabolism works about as well as mine does. Now please let me crawl into a hole and disappear.) An interesting aside: my kids have only rarely pointed or stared at someone in a wheelchair or with an obvious disability. They’ve never said anything about our favorite checker, Kami, at King Soopers, who has Down Syndrome. They don’t bat an eye when we drive through downtown Littleton and see a bunch of students with canes crossing the street across from the Colorado College for the Blind. But if you are overweight or happen to be in possession of a pair of  long ponytails as a grown man? Look out. My 4-year-old is about to publicly humiliate her mother again.

Check out this hilarious, interactive, and exhaustive multimedia coverage of the imminent Royal Wedding and any religious or political differences aside, someone is getting married in a princess dress this weekend and I AM HERE FOR IT. (Not responsible for any questionable content you might stumble upon whilst reading the New York Times.)

Any big cinco de mayo plans? We’ll be having margaritas and celebrating a Lord’s Day dinner with a group of neighborhood families and hopefully putting all 30-something collective children into the backyard, weather permitting, because it snowed yesterday. Snow, I tell you. Only briefly and it didn’t stick but I tell ya what, I am well and truly done with laundry and am ready for swimsuits ‘n activewear season where my kids can run wild and free and go through only 1-2 articles of clothing a day. Which is a significant downtick from the 15 items they are currently soiling per day.

Have a wonderful weekend! And, even  more importantly: May the 4th be with you.

coffee clicks, current events, pregnancy

Coffee clicks: December 15th

December 15, 2017

Even though it’s the shortest possible Advent, liturgically speaking, I’m still kind of feeling like things are craaaaawling by. Christmas is 10 days away, which is so soon. But when I stop to think I might still be pregnant 10 days from now…. well, yeah.

At any rate, it’ll be a magical sort of progression of time between now and then for our family, baby or no. Today is Evie’s 4th birthday, which she marked by coming downstairs at 3 am to snuggle while I was up being a pseudo-productive insomniac. We cuddled for a while before I convinced her that it was, in fact, still nighttime, as evidenced by the Christmas lights glowing merrily out the window.

Tonight we have the Christmas program at school, and then tomorrow, the absolute highlight of Advent 2017: STAR WARS. Also my birthday celebration with my parents, all my adult siblings + spouses. If I ever doubted God’s love for me, that silly notion was laid to rest when Disney bought Lucasfilm and started cranking out a brand spanking new iteration of everyone’s favorite space opera every December for the past 4 years. Hashtag very blessed.

Next week the kids have just a few days of school, culminating in a half day on the 21st, my 35th birthday and the official starting point of the “advanced maternal age” portion of this pregnancy. It’s also the day of my brother’s rehearsal dinner, with his wedding to follow on the 22nd. Then it’s basically the best day of the year, Christmas Adam, a brief extra-liturgical pause solemnly observed in my family of origin by watching Home Alone and singing karaoke and maybe cigars (though not his year) and perhaps getting the tree totally decorated before a blur of long Masses and joyous celebration…

And so help me, if I am still pregnant come Boxing Day (which, despite the flurry of activity this week is still a distinct possibility) I don’t know what stamina or motivation I will have left.

So that’s what my Google calendar looks like for the rest of December. Whew.

1.

I have some great links this week, starting with a story that is close to home and utterly heartwarming:

2.

I temporarily scrapped another, lighter-hearted piece (forthcoming early next week) while pondering the occasion of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s feast day earlier this week. I remembered how much she had helped me through Genevieve’s delivery, now 4 years ago, and since then have been asking her intercession as this current resident’s exit date draws near:

3.

Maybe you don’t know this about me (though after that disclosure towards the beginning, it’s a little more obvious) but I’m probably the biggest female Star Wars fan you’ve ever met who is simultaneously living a normal looking life (no cosplay or card games or weird conventions). But find yourself signed up for a Jedi trivia night at your local neighborhood pub and missing a 4th teammmate? You’re gonna want to call me. Or maybe Bishop Conley, if I’m not available.

“But yea though ewok through the valley of the shadow of death, Bishop Conley feared no evil, and found a fisherman brave enough to take his group of friends to the island, because Han-YOLO.”

4.

Great news out of Ohio for anyone who claims to care about the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. It always puzzles me that, on the whole, culture warriors and social justice activists aren’t more impassioned about the rights of people with Down Syndrome. Seems the polar opposite of progressive.

5.

This piece is a long but essential read. My parents have been calling abortion a “sacrament” of the secularist religion since I can first remember talking about it around the dinner table, and Eberstadt’s piece magnificently distills the tenants and dogmas of this brave new religion into non-academic sized bites. (But boy, when I read heavy hitting pieces that go past 2,000 words, I sure am aware of how much the internet and social media have weakened/destroyed my attention span…)

“All of the expressions of animosity now aimed against Christianity by this new secularist faith share a common denominator. They are rooted in secularist dogma about the sexual revolution”

5.

Finally, did you catch this short (unaffiliated) video about harnassing the power of Amazon Prime Now for good? I was full on weeping by the end. Praying Amazon execs see it and take note.

6.

Do you follow CNA on Instagram? You want to. Also, even Popes have that one school picture that will follow them around for ever.

Happy (belated) ordination anniversary, Papa!

Happiest last week plus a day of Advent! It’s not too late to jump back on the horse if you’ve fallen slack in your preparations and add in a little sacrifice or penence here or there as the Christmas countdown ticks down. I like to try to turn off the Christmas music between now and the 24th to kind of reset my brain in preparation for celebration, and that will be especially necessary this year as I’ve been a little, ah, lax in my generally temperate pre-Christmas indulgence in James Taylor. Also planning to try to offer up the somewhat interminable nights of prodromal labor which seem temporarily here to stay, so please, if you have specific prayer intentions, please share them and I’ll remmber you while I’m not sleeping from 2-5 am for the next few weeks…

Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Marriage, Parenting, Pro Life, reality check, Sex

It’s not a fertility problem, it’s a marriage problem

December 1, 2017

I read – and shared – a piece from Medium with my Facebook readers yesterday morning. It’s about the precipitous decline of childbirths in the West – particularly in America – and especially in the year 2017.

In it the author, Lyman Stone, contemplates the impending collapse of the US fertility rate and tries to make some sense of it. He also rings a few alarm bells, launching wondering statements into the ether in an attempt to explain “why” this is happening. And also, to communicate to the reader that barring a full-stop culture-wide reversal of the trend, there is little we can actually do to recover to a baseline replacement rate of fertility.

I think he makes some compelling points, and that his data are both fascinating and confounding.

I also think we may be missing the forest for the trees.

The problem, from where I see it, hasn’t as much to do with our fertility rates as with what we have done – or what we have allowed to be done – to marriage.

Marriage has undergone a radical paradigm shift over the past decade. Sure, the roots of that shift date much further back, reaching into the origins of widely available artificial contraception and no-fault divorce, but marriage has been transformed from a commonly-agreed upon arrangement of mutual sexual fidelity between one male and female “till death do them part” has been dismantled piecemeal over the last decade at breakneck pace. And not only dismantled, but resurrected as something entirely different, styled and promulgated through the media and disseminated with breathtaking effectiveness across the digital continent.

So let me bring this back around to my thesis: people aren’t having children because people aren’t getting married. At least not “married” in the way we would have commonly recognized as marriage 100, 50, or even 25 years ago.

Let me try to explain.

Old view of marriage: (leaving religion entirely aside) Life partner/best friend + sexual attraction + desire to build a family + pledge of fidelity and financial/emotional support through thick and thin = lifetime commitment.

(Were there people who fell outside the bounds of this overgeneralization I’m making? Yes. But they were cultural outliers.)

New view of marriage: contractual arrangement ordered toward self-fulfillment/actualization, sexual desire and acquisition of maximum pleasure + material goods + financial fail-safes engaged to legally protect both parties in case of dissolution + mutually agreed upon terms of behavior/performance = finite legal arrangement hinging upon the satisfaction of both parties.

You notice in the old view of marriage, friendship – or at least partnership – and the creation of a family, built to last, were at least a part of the bundled expectations at the outset of marriage. My theory is that far fewer couples today go into marriage thinking primarily of the other, let alone the potential others, who might benefit from their committed union.

Marriage used to be ordered toward the future and toward the other. I would argue the marriage, in its present culturally understood form, is ordered primarily towards the present and the self.

And that’s not a great recipe for childbearing.

Because if marriage is primarily about me, and about my fulfillment in the present moment, then it makes almost zero sense to take the flying leap of courageous insanity necessary to procreate the next generation.

First, because the cost to me personally is so high: social, professional, financial, physical, and even sexual well-being can all take a real beating during childbearing and rearing.

Second, if I am partnered with a spouse who views our union primarily in terms of contractual benefits weighed against risks, and whose fidelity I cannot count on, I would have to be somewhat delusional to take the step to introduce a permanent fixture into our union: a child.

Until we can restore and adequately communicate an authentic vision of marriage as the fundamental building block and the primordial relationship of society, no government policy or tax break is going to make a dent in our fertility freefall.

Unless we recapture a sense of sacred duty toward the future, and an obligation to provide for someone beyond ourselves and our immediate needs, then from a purely hedonistic perspective, marriage looks completely insane, and having a child might be considered tantamount to self harm.

Are there other factors at play? Surely.

The current economic situation presumes a dual income household in most parts of the country (and given the typical consumerist expectation of standard of living), and bucking that trend by having more than 2 kids and almost by proxy, being priced out of daycare as a viable option, means being willing to suffer the cost of a radical downgrade in “experiences” and standard of living.

Like maybe being a single car family. Or not taking vacations. Or not owning a house for the first 5 or 10 or ever years of marriage. Or not bankrolling (gasp) a trip for every single offspring through a 4-year university of their choosing.

Of course, there are more dire circumstances than the absence of a college fund. And many families can and do choose to suffer those iniquities willingly out of love, or at least resignedly through gritted teeth and furrowed brows. And those couples, in my opinion, are the real heroes in this equation. Couples who don’t just forgo the annual vacation or the college fund or the organic milk, but who live a life markedly below what is considered “standard” middle class living, foregoing even basic pleasures and nearly all luxuries and likely being ridiculed while so doing.

But if the rest of us can’t get past the vision of marriage as a “me first” vehicle for self-fulfillment and happiness that may happen to include a kid or two at some nebulous point down the road, provided all the appropriate financial failsafes are in place and the milestones of adulthood in a materialistic consumer-driven society such as ours are checked off, then we’ll make little if any headway in rebalancing our precarious fertility rate.

And so, finally, why does it matter?

Why look to the future and worry about a time that doesn’t personally concern us?

Why not just leave the childbearing to the religious zealots and the immigrants and the poor, uneducated working class to pick up the slack?

In short, does it matter that people are no longer getting married and having babies?

Being 20 or 30 years old can indeed at times feel something like immortality, the inevitable physical and mental and financial slowdown of old age will one day claim us all, if we are fortunate enough to achieve it.

So even if we have no personal interest in weighing ourselves down with the baggage of a lifelong commitment and a handful of small people who share our DNA, have we stopped to consider the consequence of an aging population outnumbering the generation or two beneath it by 50 or 100 or even 200%?

The choices we make today will engineer the society we inhabit in the future. And as everyone who has ever had a mom who drilled mom-isms into their little brains can repeat in a singsong voice, “our choices have consequences.”

And a future of upside-down demographics where the culture is overwhelmingly grey and non-productive, fiscally speaking? That’s where forced – and likely plenty of voluntary, as is the duty of a good materialist – euthanasia will probably come into play.

Look to Japan to see the social and economic cost of an upside-down population where every worker is disproportionately responsible for 2 or 3 or even 4 pensioners a piece, and do the math.

On a fundamental economic level, our failure to adequately replace the dying, aging population otherwise known as all of humanity leads to a gruesome end-of-life scenario for those of us who will not or cannot invest in the next generation.

But who cares? Shrugs the pro choice, pro radical individualism, pro what-suits-me-needn’t-concern-you camp.

I suppose that remains to be seen, whether those who are so flippant about other people’s lives today maintain that perspective on their own lives one day in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, the rest of us should be getting about the business of having and raising families, despite the temptation to count the cost – and the cost is often and increasingly dear.

But when you look a little further down the road, through the mists of time, the long-term cost looks to be far, far greater.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, current events, politics, Pornography

It’s the culture, stupid

November 10, 2017

2017 has been kind of a train wreck, hasn’t it?

Lately it seems like each week has brought news of another mass shooting, another massive sex scandal, another round of accusations and tarnished reputations and fresh outrage and calls for … something.

But I can’t help noticing that we seem to want to have our cake and eat it too, collectively speaking.

Frankly, this is the culture we’ve built for ourselves, constructed on promises of sex without commitment or consequence, violence as entertainment, and the pursuit of personal appetites at any cost.

We lament the violence done to women and the apparent backsliding of decades of feminist progress in our nightly newscasts, but the commercials between segments are filled with soft core porn using women’s bodies to hawk products.

We flinch at each new accusation of predatory sexual violence that hits our newsfeeds, many coming to light decades after the fact, while we meanwhile hound our elected officials for greater access to abortion and contraception, those necessary components fueling the sexual revolution.

We reject God and His laws, written into our very bodies, and then we rail against the cruelty and evil that springs up in the absence of a moral compass.

In short: this culture is one of our own making.

And it cannot be cured in Washington.

America – the entire world – can only return to greatness by falling to her knees.

Until and unless we get serious about pursuing personal conversion and cultivating holiness, this is what the world will look like.

This is what the world was like, before Christ, and this is the natural state to which it will return as we reject Christ. You might call it the human equilibrium, determined by the introduction of Original Sin and remedied by one thing alone:

Jesus.

The world can be saved, one soul at a time, by Christians willing to live out their faith without counting the cost, leading people to Him. But as long as Christians play at the game of going along to get along with the world, whether that means an outright rejection of the faith or a lazy complacency where we drift through life in a haze of busyness and Netflix, then this is the new reality.

Life with Christ is, as St. John Paul II was fond of joyfully reminding us, “a wonderful adventure.”

But life without Him is a nightmare.

Guys, we’re living the nightmare right now.

I have some ideas.

First, we have to get serious about our own personal prayer lives (looks meaningfully into mirror). I am the first to admit that falling into bed with my Kindle at 10 pm is immeasurably preferable to spending time with my Bible or rosary. That’s because my spiritual muscles are flabby and undisciplined, worn down by years of parenting small people and self-medicating with mindless entertainment and distraction in the evenings. I have to commit to at least a solid 15 minutes of serious mental prayer at some point in the day, offering back to God a fraction of the time He has given me. I know this, but actually doing it is another matter entirely.

Second, there are areas in my life where I have not fully given Christ Lordship. I’m thinking of a few novels I’ve read lately, grimacing and skimming over the explicit sex scenes and degraded morality but justifying continuing to read because “most of the book is fine.”

But it’s not fine. It’s not fine for me to read a book that is 10% pornographic content, justifying that the other 90% is Tolstoy (which it sure as hell ain’t). I’m no prude, and there is a place for realism and grit in literature, but what I’ve been encountering with increasing frequency in modern fiction is straight up smut: graphic, gratuitous, and worst of all, conscience-numbing. How silly to be striving to form my conscience and conform my mind to Christ’s while continuing to fill it with garbage. Maybe your garbage takes another form, but you probably know exactly what it is.

Which brings me to…tv. And movies. There’s a lot to choose from and a veritably limitless array of options, but it’s becoming increasingly necessary to just turn the thing off. I spend a good amount of time and energy devising ways to protect my kids from sexual deviance and premature exposure, and we put a lot of effort into forming this area of their personalities to be receptive to goodness and beauty. How can we spend a hour or two in the evenings fast forwarding through garbage, letting our own consciences become dulled by repeated exposure to pornographic content, homosexuality, adultery, sexual violence, witchcraft, and abortion and expect that there will be no long-term effects?

What goes into us very much affects what comes out of us.

Our consciences can become deadened and dulled by repeated exposure to garbage. What is shocking the first or seventh time it is encountered might not even raise the blood pressure the 40th or 100th time. Try popping in a DVD of a popular sitcom or drama from the 90s and then contrast it with, mmm, pretty much anything that’s popular in primetime in 2017.

You may be astonished at how much has changed in a relatively short time. By how “tame” the innuendo and violence, and how seemingly chaste the onscreen depictions of intimacy.

We’ve come a long way in a short time, thanks in large part to the internet, and very few of us have taken the time to step back and ask “is this okay?” rather than getting pulled along with the tide. It’s a small, necessary sacrifice I can – and must – make, as a parent, as an adult.

Finally, we need to be heeding Our Lady’s call to the children of Fatima and making regular sacrifices in reparation for our own sins and for the sins of others.

We each have a role to play in the sorry state of affairs of the modern world. We have been asked to pray, to make sacrifices, and to offer up suffering for the good of our neighbors. Those neighbors are our own family members, the people across the street, and the monster who shot up a church last weekend.

We live in a kind of modern fantasy of autonomy and individual freedom, when in reality, we are all intimately connected to one another by virtue of our brotherhood in the family of God.

Look, I am the absolute worst at fasting and making sacrifices. Happily, God has given me a tidy pile of stuff to offer up in the course of living out my actual life, if only I would consent to suffer willingly and intentionally rather than always proceeding directly to “thrashing about like a wounded animal railing at the injustice of it all,” which seems to be my default setting when confronted with pain.

But I needn’t waste it. I can offer up those midnight wakings, the stomach flu, the broken down cars and zeroed out bank accounts, the wrecked out bodies and the agonizing, lonely hours of solo parenting during business trips or endless Tuesdays. I can offer my little loaves and fishes to God to do whatever He pleases with, and perhaps it pleases Him to do something insanely miraculous with the crumbs.

But first I have to offer them.

Finally, we must be unashamed in our witness of faith in the public square.

Christians in the early Church were set apart form the depraved pagan culture from which they sprang because of the way they loved one another. Because of their marriages, their charity, their civic engagement and their unwavering witness to the truth.

And yes, some of them were killed for it. And they went joyfully to their martyrdoms not for love of pain, but for love of Jesus. We will probably not be martyred in a literal sense of shedding blood. But our careers? Our reputations? Our friendships and social status and financial stability?

Yeah, those are all up for grabs. We ought to be prepared to offer them willingly, if He asks. We should absolutely fight for just laws and morally sound legislation, but we should also be prepared to be increasingly marginalized as the cultural free fall – which shows little sign of halting – continues. We know how this game ends, but it might be a hell of a fourth quarter, so to speak.

I keep coming back to JPII’s most oft-repeated phrase when I read the news lately: Be not afraid.

That’s the hope we can offer to a world that is bleeding out in self-anihilation, seeming to crumble before our very eyes.

Be not afraid.

Be not afraid.

Be not afraid.

But also, be not an idiot. Be not caught doing nothing, when the Master returns. Be not a complicit accomplice in the carnage that is laying waste to a civilization.

I can’t save the world with my one little life, but I can offer it to God to do with it what He sees fit. And when He asks for something, I can give it to Him without hesitation, knowing that the steely core of the Christian identity must be a readiness and willingness to suffer as He did.