A few weeks ago we brought our kids to a drama workshop in Vancouver. The older but amazingly cool man who led it was brilliant and charming and kept the kids interested with stories of all of his travels and life experiences. He was born and raised in Germany but “escaped” as a student to study theatre.
At the end of the program, Scott and I lingered to help him gather his props and supplies. We became friendly and started asking questions about all of the programs he does throughout the world. He said he loved working in schools and seeing children become enthusiastic about the arts, but things were getting more difficult.
At this point he hesitated and lowered his voice. We are, after all, at a time in history when any word deemed offensive, no matter how true, is met with punishment and hate-memes posted on Facebook. To him, we might simply be left-wing nutballs waiting for our opportunity to make a citizen’s arrest on hate crime charges.
We must have passed some kind of instinct-led test because he went on to tell us that he was finding it hard in the school systems, where he had to watch everything he said. He was no longer allowed to call a child a boy or a girl, or to refer to mothers or fathers.
Regardless of the reality of mothers, fathers, boys, and girls, someone might say otherwise, in which case reality must be wrong. So no more referring to genders. Just, “Hey you, in the pink flip-flops, sitting on the neutral lap of the wide-hipped earth dweller of no particular biological identity …”
His next words blew me away: “It reminds me of being back home in Germany, before the Iron Curtain fell. The communist government is working to confuse children and turn them away from their parents.”
He honestly said those words. The current gender issues and workings of the school system remind him of living in the terror of East Germany. If that doesn’t terrify you, you’ve been reading too much revisionist history.
Our children are being intentionally turned away from us and, more so, from the true God.
What does it mean that so many Catholic children leave the Catholic school system as non-Catholics? There is no other purpose for a Catholic school system than to help form good Catholics.
What does it mean when so many of us who remain in the Church no longer believe in the Eucharist, but support contraception, abortion, homosexual marriage? There is no other purpose to remain Catholic than to live in but not of the world, offering charity to those who hate us, choosing hard, unpopular, scientific truths, while we suffer in joy on the path to heaven. That’s it. It’s not a social justice club, and it isn’t a democracy.
Most of our children are going into a world that successfully conforms their hearts and minds into believing that niceness is more important than truth, and, more than that, that there is no truth, just “your-truth” (which is a sorrowful contradiction).
Because they spend the majority of their waking hours with people other than their parents, children reattach themselves to the peers who surround them, and maybe to a few popular and kind adults.
Many solid Catholic parents are fighting a hard-to-win battle. It’s well known that our kids care more about the beliefs of peers they are attached to and live their waking lives with, than about those of the parents and Church who give them life.
That distorted attachment, and the poisons of socialism and modernism that have seeped into our kids’ classes and into our Church, are turning our children into smug, agnostic socialists.
“Oh, but socialism isn’t what it used to be!” people say.
They don’t realize they are living in a time very much like what preceded every other communist terror, where it appeared “logical,” “well-ordered,” and even “Christian.” Take it from a man who lived there and escaped it: we are in a friendly socialism, and it scares the heck out of him.
If you are unsure of the Church’s bold and unbending teachings on socialism, find Pope Leo XIII’s encyclicals online.
If you are unsure of what modernism is, find Pope St. Pius X’s shockingly prophetic encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis.
If you want to fight to keep your children’s attachment, read Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s book Hold On to Your Kids.
If you have teens who are talking smug-socialism, get Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro playing on YouTube repeat.
If you are an educator, check out the Principles and Choices program. It will be a game-changer in forming thinkers, and I was so happy to hear that some of our high schools are using it.
It is never too late to bring the hearts of our children back to us, and their minds back to truth.
