May 2009 Archives

I have done a little updating to the links you see on your right. Many of the sites that I've been following have either gone stale or gone on tangents which do not interest me. Others are perfectly good, but do not update enough (save your pot-and-kettle quips, thankyouverymuch). They are listed in no particular order. Other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sites do not necessarily need to be traditional Catholic, or even Catholic at all. They should, however, be smartly written and enjoyable to read. And update somewhat frequently. Points will be deducted for sites that are slow to load or are designed with "knockout font" of white letters on black background.

I look forward to your suggestions. The list to the right are, ultimately, blogs that interest me over and over again. There are a number of excellent sites on the webs that are interesting from many points of view, I don't want to speak badly about the ones that have fallen off my list over the last year or so. I am fickle.

Feel free to pump your own site. Sites that link to mine will be linked in kind, whether in the main list at the top of the right column, or in the "tagbacks" below.

So, what else are you reading?

One of my nephews had his Confirmation in the Church a few days ago. Confirmation is the sacrament of the Holy Spirit, where a person formally receives the Holy Spirit into their lives. Catholics carry on this action that was first described in the Bible in Acts 8. When the apostles heard that a number of Samaritans heard about the Good News of Jesus, they went out to confirm them in the Faith:

Now when the apostles, who were in Jerusalem, had heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John. Who, when they were come, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost. For he was not as yet come upon any of them; but they were only baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands upon them, and they received the Holy Ghost. And when Simon saw, that by the imposition of the hands of the apostles, the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, Saying: Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I shall lay my hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said to him: Keep thy money to thyself, to perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.

A note of vocabulary may be prudent here: The Holy Spirit and the Holy Ghost are the same thing, er, are the same member of the Trinity. The terms can be used interchangeably, though in today's parlance, they seem to evoke different imagery. "Ghost" is the English version of the German word "geist", which approximates the word "spirit". But "ghost" also conjures up images of cartoonish floating white blobs, so the general trend has been to refer to the third person of the Blessed Trinity as the "Holy Spirit". Yet because "spirit" also seems a bit disembodied and impersonal, it leaves something to be desired. As well. Such is the weakness of our language, I suppose. Either term can be used interchangeably. But I digress.

In any measure, Confirmation is the charge of those first apostles that bishops carry on to this very day. Bishops of the Church are the holders of those original apostles today. Bishops are consecrated by other bishops, and thus they have a documentable lineage--and somewhere in a file of unending length, every Bishop can trace themselves back to the Biblical era. While this might seem like a clever piece of trivia or cocktail party tidbit, it actually has significant theological implications for Christianity. The term is "apostolic succession", and is considered one of the four marks of the church, "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic", that Christians (strangely, not just Catholics) profess in the Nicene Creed that sets out the basic beliefs of a Christian.

And so when bishops in 2009 lay their hands on the Confirmands today, they carry the same authority as those apostles in the book of the Acts of the Apostles quoted above. In some circumstances, bishops give this authority to regular priests who can confer the sacrament in their stead: the most notable example of this happens on the Easter Vigil every year where converts are received into the Church and confirmed by the priests in their local parish.

The bishop will cup his hands (like you would do if you were warming your hands over a candle) and place them on the confirmand's head, praying that the Holy Spirit would come upon him or her. Then the bishop will dip his thumb into a tin of chrism, a greasy blend of oil and balsam that has been blessed by the bishop, and mark a cross on the forehead of the confirmand, saying "N., I sign thee with the sign + of the Cross, and I confirm thee with the chrism of salvation; in the Name of the Father + and of the Son + and of the Holy + Ghost." In the old days, they'd give you a gentle (or not-so-gentle) slap on the cheek to toughen you up as a newly made soldier of Christ. But those days have come and gone in the new form of the sacrament.

Where the prayer above says N., the bishop will use the person's confirmation name. A confirmation name is the name of a saint that the person chooses as spiritual inspiration. Heh. I was confirmed when I was 14 years old (the conventional age for confirmation is sometime between second grade and junior year of high school unless a person converts to the Church later in life or otherwise missed their confirmation) and just wanted to choose a unique name. I picked Saint Wenceslaus. Seriously. I was a peculiar 14-year-old. Oh, I had some rationale, of course. I'm sure my Catholic grade school wouldn't have let me pick something just as a spectacle. Wenceslaus was the Duke of Bohemia in the modern-day Czech Republic; his mother was a pagan who, before Wenceslaus took control of the duchy, tore down most of the Catholic churches in Bohemia. Good King Wenceslaus (yes, of the Christmas carol) spent his short life as a duke rebuilding those churches before he was ultimately killed by his brother for faith-based political reasons. Back then, I was the Senior Patrol Leader in my Boy Scout Troop and it was my responsibility to plan and run our weekly Troop meetings. As I saw it then, the previous Senior Patrol Leader was suffocating the troop by just playing two-hand-touch football in the parking lot every week instead of holding meetings--each successive meeting was like trying to rebuild a proper Scout Troop with scouts who didn't want to be there. I thought Wenceslaus could commiserate with me. Ultimately I had a better fate than Wenceslaus; my year as SPL was up and someone else took the position from there. I wasn't murdered from someone else in the Arrowhead patrol to ascend to the throne. Lucky me!

The late Bishop Marion Forst confirmed me that year. He was gentle, kind and jovial bishop who chuckled when he read my confirmation name. He asked if I was Czech. "No, Wenceslaus was Bohemian", I replied, not knowing that Bohemia was in (then) Czechoslovakia and had a far-different context than geography. The bishop smiled and announced to the full parish, "Oh, he's a Bohemian!" Hahaha. Laughs all around! Har har! But he confirmed me and welcomed the next boy in line after I moved on, feeling lucky that I didn't get a slap. When Bishop Forst died in 2007, he was the oldest bishop in the United States. It's too bad. I would have liked to talk to him as an adult--his Excellency was among the last men on earth to have attended all 4 sessions of the Second Vatican Council. I bet he had some stories.

My nephew took the name "Boniface" as his confirmation saint. Saint Boniface was known as the "Apostle of Germany" for his work to convert the people of Deutschland. In one particularly famous story, Boniface once found a group of people worshipping some pagan god in the form of a 6-foot-wide oak tree. He took off his shirt, picked up an ax and cut down the tree while the people looked on aghast. Boniface jumped up on the stump and shouted to the crowd "How stands your mighty god? My God is stronger than he!" Boniface, predictably, was martyred shortly thereafter. I don't know what motivated my nephew to pick this medieval saint as his confirmation patron. But knowing 14-year-old-boys, I suspect it has something to do with the cool-sounding name "Boniface".

Adults who go receive the sacrament often pick a different kind of name, usually dedicating themselves to people with bittersweet stories of trial and redemption like St. Monica or with steadfast courage like St. Thomas More. Not to say that either St. Boniface or St. Wenceslaus don't have their own credibility, of course. I'm just saying that adult confirmands often have more complex reasons for choosing the saints as patrons than a cool sounding name. As one of the world's most recently canonized saints, St. Zygmunt Gorazdowski might be a real inspiration for people. But he also might get the interest of a 14-year-old boy for being the last canonized saint in the alphabet.

But confirmation is, of course, about more than just cool-sounding names and a chance to shake hands with a bishop. It is the moment where a Catholic dedicates him/herself to Christ and His Church; it is where the confirmand receives the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Gifts are particular traits that are present in a person who is filled with the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) writes:

The gifts of the Holy Ghost are of two kinds: the first are specially intended for the sanctification of the person who receives them; the second, more properly called charismata, are extraordinary favours granted for the help of another, favours, too, which do not sanctify by themselves, and may even be separated from sanctifying grace. Those of the first class are accounted seven in number, as enumerated by Isaias (11:2-3), where the prophet sees and describes them in the Messias. They are the gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety (godliness), and fear of the Lord.

The gift of wisdom, by detaching us from the world, makes us relish and love only the things of heaven.

The gift of understanding helps us to grasp the truths of religion as far as is necessary.

The gift of counsel springs from supernatural prudence, and enables us to see and choose correctly what will help most to the glory of God and our own salvation.

By the gift of fortitude we receive courage to overcome the obstacles and difficulties that arise in the practice of our religious duties.

The gift of knowledge points out to us the path to follow and the dangers to avoid in order to reach heaven.

The gift of piety, by inspiring us with a tender and filial confidence in God, makes us joyfully embrace all that pertains to His service.

Lastly, the gift of fear fills us with a sovereign respect for God, and makes us dread, above all things, to offend Him.

So we receive wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord at confirmation.

Well gentle reader, I can tell you that I was validly confirmed, yet I've spent a tremendous amount of my life since then acting totally without wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety or fear of the Lord. So was it all a scam? No, of course not. The gifts of the Spirit require sanctity to be efficacious--people have to be living a life inspired by Christ to be filled with these gifts. It reminds me of the rebuke from the ancient Jewish prophet Isaiah:

Hear, ye deaf, and, ye blind, behold that you may see. Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, but he to whom I have sent my messengers? Who is blind, but he that is sold? or who is blind, but the servant of the Lord? Thou that seest many things, wilt thou not observe them? thou that hast ears open, wilt thou not hear? And the Lord was willing to sanctify him, and to magnify the law, and exalt it.

So it is with the Lord, his gifts are freely given to those who accept them and totally ignored by those who abdicate them.

As I continue to type this post, it occurs to me that maybe Wenceslaus might still be an inspiration to me-- albeit one that I haven't considered in many years and in a way that I would have never consider until lately: So much of our world, of our Church, of our Faith has been destroyed by people with strange motivations. I will hesitate to call some "pagans", the evidence can speak for itself. Indeed, sometimes I am convinced that we need more holy leaders like St. Wenceslaus to rebuild a destroyed and devastated Church. Ack. This was way beyond my imagination as a happy and strange young kid. But so it is. And so it will be that the rebuilders and restorationists will have their reputation slaughtered by their brothers in the faith. Character assassination. Ecclesial martyrdom. We could all use another helping of those gifts.

St. Wenceslaus, pray for us.

Here and there I mention a pro-life story on this site. I don't generally engage the topic as much as other Catholic blogs for a variety of reasons. First and primarily, it's not really my focus for WhollyRoamin'Catholic.com. Second, by the time I get around to mentioning news stories, the topics have been covered ad nauseum elsewhere (and probably better). Third, I have a complex relationship to the issue of abortion that colors my point of view in ways that I think is hard for a lot of people to relate. Fourth, the issue is so externally complex that I get frustrated in the unhappy tangle of religion, politics, ethics, personality, history and hysteria--so much so that any talk about the subject is an inevitable mess.

But still, the issue exists. And as a human being and as a Catholic, I have some interest in the subject. I also have another interest.

There's a brief story about a woman who I have never really met, but whose story became inextricably intertwined with mine many years ago. Only recently have I learned that this woman has a name (yeah, I always knew she had a name. I just didn't know it until recently), but for basically all of my life, she was a nameless person. More like a reference point. She's always been known by pronouns: her/she et cetera. So it is. Part of this story is my construct, part is made of little details that I've gleaned over the years, and I've told myself this semi-true story so many times that I don't know how to separate the facts from the fiction--and truth be told, I don't worry about that too much.

Some years ago, this girl from a dinky little country town South of my own was seeing this guy from Oklahoma. I hear that it was somewhat of a serious relationship, so much so that they'd even talked about getting married at one point. As far as I know, they never did. Just one of those relationships that we all go through: dating, searching, learning. Making some bad decisions, making some good ones. I've got similar stories, I'm sure you do too. Loves come and gone and those things that don't kill us hopefully make us stronger. Hopefully, right?

Anyway, she was in college back then. Studying music and living the life of an 18-year-old in the world. Living the dream that every 18-year-old dreams, to be in college and free, off to become whatever we can make for ourselves. Those paths of girl from a small Kansas town and the guy from Oklahoma crossed a few times; and before they diverged again, the girl from the small Kansas town ended up pregnant.

It's a classic story now but it was a traumatic one then. We're talking about 1978 here. Sure, it's not Leave it to Beaver's era, but small towns in Kansas hover perpetually sometime around the year 1961--even today they're like some kind of time warp. So much more so then, right? But this was also just a scant 5 years after Roe v Wade, and Kansas was part of those first 11 states to loosen abortion laws since 1967 in the wake of the sexual revolution. It would have been an easy decision, I'm sure. Unmarried mother, unable to care for a baby. Out of town father who had his own life to lead as well. Both in a panic, both scared and confused, desperate and faced with a set of decisions that weren't prepared to make, didn't want to make and to which neither one could really commit. It would have been an easy decision, I'm sure. George Tiller had already gotten notoriety as Kansas' abortion provider of choice since he set up shop in Wichita in 1970 and his famous Women's Care Clinic had been operating since 1975. She was just a college student and didn't have any means to care for a baby--heck, as a 18-year-old, she was just a kid herself.

It would have been an easy decision, I'm sure.

But she did not make that easy decision.

Rather, she made just about the hardest choice I'm sure that the 18-year-old girl had ever made in her life. She decided to have that baby and put that young infant up for adoption. It was all handled by the doctors and a cadre of lawyers. All she had to do was make it 9 months, give birth and walk away. Other people would pay for it all. All of it. The medical fees, the child birth, the legal arrangements, the responsibilities of raising that little baby, clothing him, feeding him, raising him, picking him up when he fell, teaching him to ride a bike, sending him to Boy Scout camp, buying his first car, sending him off to college, seeing him get married one day and live for the rest of his life.

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I'm crying a bit at the moment. Because if you haven't figured it out yet, that little baby was me.

Thirty years ago this week, one scared and confused expectant mother from a little town in Kansas gave me the best birthday present that I would ever get. She made a sacrifice for which, I owe my everything. That woman took the hard way out rather than the easy way out. She knew that being pregnant meant more than a panic and was more an inconvenient situation that could be fixed by a guy in a doctor's mask--it was a little baby boy! Not some problem to be fixed!

And now three decades later, that little baby boy types these words to you, gentle reader. My thirtieth birthday is in a few days, and I owe it all to a woman whom I have never really met. A woman who had every choice that women in her same situation have now thirty years later. A woman who did not make the easy decision. Who made the hard one. And God bless her for it!

Now before you ask: yes, I've always known that I was adopted. And no, I never had those traumatic experiences that you hear about. No, I've never tried to contact my biological mother (or biological father) and no, I've never really had any urge to do so. Yes, I know that I look like other people in my adopted family and no, I don't make a big deal out of it. The people to whom I refer as my mother and father are the people who raised me and to whom I am eternally and lovingly grateful.

But as I sit here on the crest of thirty years, I want to say a word of thanks. Thanks to a woman who was pro-life when it would have been so so so so easy to get an abortion. And if you are ever in a similar situation, please choose life as well.

God bless her. I owe her my life.

Sunday is Mother's Day. Just so you know. Get your cards/flowers/phonecalls/whatever.

And if your mother has passed away, then take a moment to pray that her soul is in Heaven-- that's what we do when we say that someone "rests in peace".

Thanks Mom, for everything.

Last week, a friend of mine sent me this article about why people stop practicing their religion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, most people don't stop going to church because they have some major falling out with their church or their faith, most of them just stop because they just kind of stopped going to church. The article is reprinted below with my emphaises.

Study Shows Americans Leave Religion Due to Drift, Not Rupture
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 27, 2009; 12:11 PM

More Americans have given up their faith or changed religions because of a gradual spiritual drift than switched because of a disillusionment over their churches' policies, according to a new study released today which illustrates how personal spiritual attitudes are taking precedence over denominational traditions.

The survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life is the first large-scale study of the reasons behind Americans switching their religious faith and found that more than half of people have done so at least once during their lifetime.

Almost three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants who are now unaffiliated with a religion said they had "just gradually drifted away" from their faith. And more than three-quarters of Catholics and half of Protestants currently not associated with a faith said that, over time, they stopped believing in their religion's teachings.

Pew Forum senior fellow John Green said that result surprised researchers, who had expected policy disputes or disillusionment over internal scandals -- such as the clergy sex abuse controversy in the Catholic Church -- to play more of a role in people's decision to leave a faith. Among former Catholics who became Protestants, one in five cited the sex abuse scandal as one of several reasons why they had left the faith. But only a small percentage -- 2 percent to 3 percent -- cited it as the lone reason.

"It suggests that what leads people to leave their faith is that, somehow for some reason, it isn't meeting their needs," Green said. "Religion becomes less plausible to the person."

The study is a follow-up to a Pew report on religious identity released last year that was one of the largest polls of its kind. Researchers recontacted 2,800 of the 35,000 adults they previously interviewed for that study for in-depth interviews on how many times, and why, they had changed religious affiliations.

Researchers interviewed non-Christians, but focused their analysis on Christians, among whom they had large enough groups to permit close scrutiny, said Pew research fellow Gregory Smith.

Researchers discovered that the "churn" among the faithful and formerly faithful was higher than first estimated. In this second round of interviews, they found that some people who currently belong to the same religion in which they were raised actually had tried a different faith at some point, causing researchers to raise their estimate of the people who have changed faith at some point in their lives from 44 percent to 56 percent.

They also found that up to one-third of people who have left their childhood faith have jumped around among three or more other faiths.

The results are a "big indictment" of organized religion, said Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of a book on evangelical leaders. "There is a huge, wide-open back door at most churches. Churches around the country may be able to attract people, but they can't keep them."

At the same time, the large and growing number of people who report having no religious affiliation are actually surprisingly open to religion, researchers said. Contrary to the popular perception that many have embraced secularism, a significant percentage appeared simply to have put their religiosity on pause. Having worshiped in at least one faith already, about three in 10 said they had just not yet found the right religion.

"We tend to think that when people leave [religion] they leave," said Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University. "But a lot of these unaffiliated are unaffiliated for now. . . . It's not a one way street. It's not like after you've left a religious affiliation, you can't get back in."

A lot of things in this article ring very true to me, especially with today's Christian culture of broad Jesusy platitudes and the Prosperity Gospel teaching that Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ died at the hands of man so that you can be rich and live in a nice house. Is that an unfair characterization of Joel Osteen? Maybe so.

But that said, let me totally agree with this article--at least from the point of view of a guy who grew up as a mainstream Catholic in America. Can I tell you something that I am probably not supposed to say? Church stinks. It's boring. The songs can be stupid, the sermons are most likely dippy. I have other stuff I'd like to do on Sunday mornings--especially after a good fun Saturday night. Most people my age grew up understanding religion as a watered down Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=moralistic+therapeutic+deism) of "Jesus wants you to be nice to people!". And to a certain extent, that's true--love your neighbor and whatnot. But the problem is that for somewhere around half a century, that's been the only message of Catholicism, and I suspect, Christianity in general. Frankly, when theological reductionists boil down Eternal Salvation to broad Jesus-y platitudes, then people think that the only reason churches exist at all is to facilitate pot luck dinners--which are largely attended by old ladies that people my age don't want to hang out with anyway. You don't have to go to church to be a good human being, so you can love your neighbor and whatnot at home on your couch while watching Mythbusters. Which is more fun than showering, shaving and wearing pants on Sunday morning. Trust me. I've done a lot of both.

I don't even need to get into the living-with-someone-else's-rules thing right now. If you never show up to church, the "rules" thing kind of takes care of itself. It wasn't until I learned more about the rules, philosophy and tradition of the Catholic Church that I really recommitted myself to Religion. I had to find out the long, slow, tedious way that there's more to the Mysterium Fidei than broad Jesus-y platitudes about loving neighbors and whatnot.

There is a famous quote from G.K. Chesterton: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." It's true. Especially the more you learn about Religion. I think Jesus should have added an ninth Beatitude: Blessed are the invincibly ignorant, they don't have to mess with all this stuff. It's actually not true, soteriologically speaking, but still. The more you know, the harder it gets. And if you never go to Church at all, then you don't end up worrying about it at all.

I've been meaning to write on this topic for a long time. There are interesting statistics about the influence that husbands and fathers have on their families in religious matters. The article below originally appeared in Touchstone Magazine in June 2003.

The article appears to be presented to an Anglican reader, but there's much to teach the Catholic family as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if inconvenient or contrary to the biggest wishes of modern society, men have a role in the family, in the church and in their community that cannot be replaced. Is this news? I don't know. Maybe it is.

Emphasis mine.

The Truth About Men & Church

Robbie Low on the Importance of Fathers to Churchgoing

Most of us, I suspect, are not great students of "the small print." We employ lawyers and accountants because we recognize that carefully constructed small print may contain disclaimers, definitions, and information that effectively drive a coach and horses through our assumptions about the general argument and make utterly null and void the common understanding that we thought we had. Allow me to introduce you to a piece of very small print.

Not many will have whiled away the long winter evenings by reading "The demographic characteristics of the linguistic and religious groups in Switzerland" by Werner Haug and Phillipe Warner of the Federal Statistical Office, Neuchatel. It appears in Volume 2 of Population Studies No. 31, a book titled The Demographic Characteristics of National Minorities in Certain European States, edited by Werner Haug and others, published by the Council of Europe Directorate General III, Social Cohesion, Strasbourg, January 2000. Phew!

All this information is readily obtainable because Switzerland always asks a person's religion, language, and nationality on its decennial census. Now for the really interesting bit.

The Critical Factor

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person's religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goes up from 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father's commitment grows in proportion to mother's laxity, indifference, or hostility.

Before mothers despair, there is some consolation for faithful moms. Where the mother is less regular than the father but attends occasionally, her presence ensures that only a quarter of her children will never attend at all.

Even when the father is an irregular attender there are some extraordinary effects. An irregular father and a non-practicing mother will yield 25 percent of their children as regular attenders in their future life and a further 23 percent as irregulars. This is twelve times the yield where the roles are reversed.

Where neither parent practices, to nobody's very great surprise, only 4 percent of children will become regular attenders and 15 percent irregulars. Eighty percent will be lost to the faith.

While mother's regularity, on its own, has scarcely any long-term effect on children's regularity (except the marginally negative one it has in some circumstances), it does help prevent children from drifting away entirely. Faithful mothers produce irregular attenders. Non-practicing mothers change the irregulars into non-attenders. But mothers have even their beneficial influence only in complementarity with the practice of the father.

Father's Influence

In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife's devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife's devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father's influence, from the determination of a child's sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

A mother's role will always remain primary in terms of intimacy, care, and nurture. (The toughest man may well sport a tattoo dedicated to the love of his mother, without the slightest embarrassment or sentimentality). No father can replace that relationship. But it is equally true that when a child begins to move into that period of differentiation from home and engagement with the world "out there," he (and she) looks increasingly to the father for his role model. Where the father is indifferent, inadequate, or just plain absent, that task of differentiation and engagement is much harder. When children see that church is a "women and children" thing, they will respond accordingly--by not going to church, or going much less.

Curiously, both adult women as well as men will conclude subconsciously that Dad's absence indicates that going to church is not really a "grown-up" activity. In terms of commitment, a mother's role may be to encourage and confirm, but it is not primary to her adult offspring's decision. Mothers' choices have dramatically less effect upon children than their fathers', and without him she has little effect on the primary lifestyle choices her offspring make in their religious observances.

Her major influence is not on regular attendance at all but on keeping her irregular children from lapsing altogether. This is, needless to say, a vital work, but even then, without the input of the father (regular or irregular), the proportion of regulars to lapsed goes from 60/40 to 40/60.

Of Huge Import

The findings may be for Switzerland, but from conversations with English clergy and American friends, I doubt we would get very different findings from similar surveys here or in the United States. Indeed, I believe some English studies have found much the same thing. The figures are of huge import to our evangelization and its underlying theology.

First, we (English and Americans both) are ministering in a society that is increasingly unfaithful in spiritual and physical relationships. There is a huge number of single-parent families and a complexity of step-relationships or, worse, itinerant male figures in the household, whose primary interest can almost never be someone else's child.

The absentee father, whoever's "fault" the divorce was and however faithful he might be to his church, is unlikely to spend the brief permitted weekend "quality" time with his child in church. A young lad in my congregation had to choose between his loyalty to the faith and spending Sunday with Dad, now 40 miles away, fishing or playing soccer. Some choice for a lad of eleven: earthly father versus heavenly Father, with all the crossed ties of love and loyalties that choice involves. With that agonizing maturity forced on children by our "failures," he reasoned that his heavenly Father would understand his absence better than his dad.

Sociologically and demographically the current trends are severely against the church's mission if fatherhood is in decline. Those children who do maintain attendance, in spite of their father's absence, albeit predominantly sporadically, may instinctively understand the community of nurture that is the motherhood of the Church. But they will inevitably look to fill that yawning gap in their spiritual lives, the experience of fatherhood that is derived from the true fatherhood of God. Here they will find little comfort in the liberalizing churches that dominate the English scene and the mainline scene in the United States.

Second, we are ministering in churches that accepted fatherlessness as a norm, and even an ideal. Emasculated Liturgy, gender-free Bibles, and a fatherless flock are increasingly on offer. In response, these churches' decline has, unsurprisingly, accelerated. To minister to a fatherless society, these churches, in their unwisdom, have produced their own single-parent family parish model in the woman priest.

The idea of this politically contrived iconic destruction and biblically disobedient initiative was that it would make the Church relevant to the society in which it ministered. Women priests would make women feel empowered and thereby drawn in. (As more women signed up as publicly opposed to the innovation than ever were in favor, this argument was always a triumph of propaganda over reality.) Men would be attracted by the feminine and motherly aspect of the new ministry. (As the driving force of the movement, feminism, has little time for either femininity or motherhood, this was what Sheridan called "the lie direct.")

And children--our children--would come flocking into the new feminized Church, attracted by the safe, nurturing, non-judgmental environment a church freed of its "masculine hegemony" would offer. (As the core doctrines of feminism regarding infants are among the most hostile of any philosophy--and even women who weren't totally sold on its heresies often had to put their primary motherhood responsibilities on the back burner to answer the call--children were never likely to be major beneficiaries.)

The Churches Are Losing

Nor are these conclusions a matter of simple disagreement between warring parties in a divided church. The figures are in and will continue to come in. The churches are losing men and, if the Swiss figures are correct, are therefore losing children. You cannot feminize the church and keep the men, and you cannot keep the children if you do not keep the men.

In the Church of England, the ratio of men to women in the pre-1990s was 45 percent to 55 percent. In line with the Free Churches (which in England include the Methodists and Presbyterians) and others that have preceded us down the feminist route, we are now approaching the 37 percent/63 percent split. As these latter figures are percentages of a now much smaller total, an even more alarming picture emerges. Of the 300,000 who left the Church of England during the "Decade of Evangelism" some 200,000 must have been men.

It will come as no surprise to learn, in the light of the Swiss evidence, that even on official figures, children's attendance in the Church of England dropped by 50 percent over the Decade of Evangelism. According to reliable independent projections, it might actually have dropped down by two-thirds by the year 2000. (Relevant statistics abruptly ceased being announced in 1996, when the 50 percent drop was achieved.)

And what have we seen in the societies to which the churches are supposed to be witnessing? In the secular world, a fatherless society, or significant rejection of traditional fatherhood, has produced rapid and dreadful results. The disintegration of the family follows hard upon the amorality and emotional anarchy that flow from the neutering, devaluing, or exclusion of the loving and protective authority of the father.

Young men, whose basic biology does not lead them in the direction of civilization, emerge into a society that, in less than 40 years, has gone from certainty and encouragement about their maleness to a scarcely disguised contempt for and confusion about their role and vocation. This is exhibited in everything from the educational system, which from the 1960s onward has been used as a tool of social engineering, to the entertainment world, where the portrayal of decent honorable men turns up about as often as snow in summer.

In the absence of fatherhood, it is scarcely surprising that there is an alarming rise in the feral male. This is most noticeable in street communities, where co-operatives of criminality seek to establish brutally and directly that respect, ritual, and pack order so essential to male identity. But it is not absent from the manicured lawns of suburban England, where dysfunctional "families" produce equally alarming casualty rates and children with an inability to make and sustain deep or enduring relationships between male and female.

The Churches' Collapse

One might have hoped, with such an abundance of evidence at hand, that the churches would have been more confident in biblical teaching, which has always stood against the destructive forces of materialistic paganism which feminism represents. Alas, not. Their collapse in the face of this well-organized and plausible heresy may be officially dated from the moment they approved the ordination of women--1992 for the Church of England--but the preparation for it began much earlier.

One does not need to go very far through the procedures by which the Church of England selects its clergy or through its theological training to realize that it offers little place for genuine masculinity. The constant pressure for "flexibility," "sensitivity," "inclusivity," and "collaborative ministry" is telling. There is nothing wrong with these concepts in themselves, but as they are taught and insisted upon, they bear no relation to what a man (the un-neutered man) understands them to mean.

Men are perfectly capable of being all these things without being wet, spineless, feeble-minded, or compromised, which is how these terms translate in the teaching. They will not produce men of faith or fathers of the faith communities. They will certainly not produce icons of Christ and charismatic apostles. They are very successful at producing malleable creatures of the institution, unburdened by authenticity or conviction and incapable of leading and challenging. Men, in short, who would not stand up in a draft.

Curiously enough, this new feminized man does not seem to be quite as attractive to the feminists as they had led us to believe. He does not seem to hold the attention of children (much less boys who might want to follow him into the priesthood). He is frankly repellent to ordinary blokes. But a priest who is comfortable with his masculinity and maturing in his fatherhood (domestic and/or pastoral) will be a natural magnet in a confused and disordered society and Church.

Other faith communities, like Muslims and Orthodox Jews, have no doubt about this and would not dream of emasculating their faith. Churches in countries under persecution have no truck with the corrosive errors of feminism. Why would they? These are expensive luxuries for comfortable and decadent churches. The persecuted need to know urgently what works and what will endure. They need their men.

A church that is conspiring against the blessings of patriarchy not only disfigures the icon of the First Person of the Trinity, effects disobedience to the example and teaching of the Second Person of the Trinity, and rejects the Pentecostal action of the Third Person of the Trinity but, more significantly for our society, flies in the face of the sociological evidence!

No father--no family--no faith. Winning and keeping men is essential to the community of faith and vital to the work of all mothers and the future salvation of our children.

Robbie Low is vicar of St. Peter's, Bushey Heath, a parish in the Church of England, and a member of the editorial board of the magazine New Directions, published by Forward in Faith, in which a version of this article first appeared. For more on the subject of men, women, and church attendance, see Leon Podles's "Missing Fathers of the Church" in the January/February 2001 issue.

I am less interested in vilifying feminism as a concept than many traditional Catholics are; but I remain skeptical that a real gender neutral world can--or should--exist. I'm not talking about women having professional jobs or getting mortgages or whatnot. I'm down with that, really--at least as much as anyone should have jobs and mortgages. But when people lose the essential qualities of feminine and masculine, husband and wife, mother and father... well, you end up with an emptiness in those realms.

Husbands and fathers have a role in their family. And when they abdicate that role, it doesn't get filled by the wives and mothers--it gets distorted, askew and broken. I particularly love the line above about "feral male". Raised wild and unable to fit into the society which abandoned him.

St. Joseph, ora pro nobis.

Hat tip to Fisheaters for pointing me towards the article.