January 26, 2001
This is being written in
California, where I am conducting my adult-education courses in
Santa Clara, Pebble Beach, and Atascadero. Although I had an
amazing set of adventures en route out here via a van given to
me last July by Dr. and Mrs. Paul Wolpert of Sioux City, I will
save a recitation of those adventures for another column.
However, I have not had to face any of the blackouts or
brownouts that have plagued parts of California in the past few
weeks. Although I am a New Yorker to the very core of my being,
there is important work for me to do on the road, and I am very
grateful to the Scholz Family Foundation for underwriting my
adult-education programs (and the work of my newsletter,
Christ or Chaos).
After the conclusion of the
Wanderer Forum in Carmel on January 14, I saw quite a sad sight
as I returned to the hotel in Dublin that served as my
headquarters for the first two weeks of my stay in the Golden
State. A long line of toddlers was crossing Dublin Boulevard,
supervised by several women. It was obvious that the children
were pre-schoolers who had been placed into a day-care
program. Some of them looked really lost. If one wants to know
the root of a great many of the problems of the young today, look
no further than to the fact that children — who desperately
need to know they are loved by their parents — are shuffled
off to the care of strangers for the better part of their young lives.
Think about it: a child
could be placed in a day-care program as early as 6:30 or 7 in the
morning and not be reunited with his mother or father until ten
or eleven hours later, giving him only a few hours with his
parents before he must be put to bed. That would have a
tremendously deleterious impact upon a child’s
development. Our Lord did not spend time as a Child in
Nazareth simply to wait until He embarked upon His Public
Ministry. He was teaching us that each person in the family has a
role that is appropriate to the mission he or she has in that family
(a father, a mother, a child, a brother, a sister). The Holy Family
of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph is the model for all families, bar none.
Children need the
presence of a manly but loving father who is seen as the natural
breadwinner of the family. They need the presence of a loving but
firm mother who understands that the most important
“empowerment” she can realize is the one she
received from the vocation of motherhood. A mother has the
power to shape little souls for good or for ill. A mother who
models herself after the Mother of God will make endless
sacrifices to train her children to be saints, to help them love God
through His true Church above all other things. Her physical
presence in the home during the day is essential to a child’s
spiritual well-being and development. And it is essential for her
husband to understand that while he is the breadwinner of the
family, his presence is vital for the formation of the young souls
brought into the world as the natural fruit of the couple’s
married love. He is not to be engaged in all manner of
extracurricular activities with the “boys” after
work. His place is at home with his children, teaching them
formally with their instruction (as befits the responsibility of
parents as the principal educators of their children) and
informally by the example he sets as head of the household.
As we know, there has
been a concerted effort over the course of the last hundred years
to destabilize the family. It began during the Industrial
Revolution, when children were forced to work at hard manual
labor in order to help support their families. It included the
creation of public schools by Masonically controlled state
legislatures in the 1830s and 1840s as an attempt to undermine
the natural-law right of parents to be recognized as their
children’s principal educators. The push for
“liberalized” divorce laws in the latter part of the
nineteenth century also was part of that effort. That push —
when coupled with the propaganda promoting contraception in
the 1920s and 1930s — greatly advanced the destabilization
effort, introducing children to the wonderful world of
step-parents and step-siblings and half-siblings. Indeed, the situation
is so confusing today that some children feel entirely lost as a
result of having had a succession of stepfathers and stepmothers
and siblings whose exact relationship to themselves sometimes
defied their grasp.
Feminism has played its
own insidious role in that turn of events, convincing many
women that they do not have any inherent worth or dignity
unless they take their place in the work world with careers. As I
have noted on many other occasions, women are fully competent
to do the same sort of intellectual tasks associated with men (and
many of them do such tasks far better than men). However, God
has so ordered the world that He expects women in their
childbearing years who are married and have children to be at
home with their children. (That is so in most instances; there are
careers, such as nursing and other related fields, that may not
necessarily conflict with the overriding duties of motherhood).
However, the fact that many women believe they must work has
placed them in competition with men for high-paying positions,
forcing many mothers who want to stay at home to educate and
care for their children to find jobs to help supplement their
family’s income. Thus, day-care centers and programs
have arisen as a means of providing care for children that should
be provided to them in their own homes by their own mothers.
Obviously, there are
instances today when it is not possible for mothers to stay at
home. Women who have chosen life over death for their unborn
children conceived out of wedlock have to provide for themselves
and their progeny. Other women have been abandoned by their
faithless spouses, who have decided to start new families with
others (the logical fruit of contraception and divorce; those two
evils feed into and off one another). Still others have been
widowed and have not been provided the means by their late
husbands to care for their families. My discussion of the
importance of mothers to be at home with their children is in no
way meant to cast any aspersions upon those women who are in
extraordinary personal circumstances.
In many instances,
however, many mothers want to work simply to be
“fulfilled,” not understanding that the most fulfilled
woman in history was our Lady, who was full of grace from the
first moment of her own conception in her mother’s
womb. The atomistic individualism that is such a big part of the
feminist movement has rejected a mother’s loving
self-sacrifices in imitation of the Mother of God, who is the model of
all legitimate femininity, and instead has emphasized a
narcissistic notion of career fulfillment as a necessary part of a
woman’s psychological well-being. The Devil wants
women to abandon their children in order to be
“fulfilled” in a career outside of the home. He wants
children to be subject to the ideological brainwashing that is the
bane of almost all day-care centers, which stress the deification
of the environment, “tolerance” of
“divergent” lifestyles, and the promotion of leftist
political agendas.
Indeed, the desire for
“fulfillment” outside the home is what gave even
greater impetus to the acceptance and practice of contraception
by married couples. When one tries to fool with one’s own
physical nature, however, there are dire consequences. Women
who have postponed child-bearing (or spaced out such
child-bearing) using various contraceptive devices and pills are
increasingly finding themselves unable to bear children at all. The
artificial prevention of conception has thus led many women to
seek the artificial conception of children by means of in vitro
fertilization, surrogate motherhood (whether through in vitro
fertilization, the use of donor eggs and sperms, or other practices
so evil and insidious that they will not be mentioned here). An
entire Orwellian industry has arisen to feed the demand for
babies on demand: the fertility clinic.
No woman has a right to a
child. Even a loving couple who have been wedded together in
the bond of a valid sacramental marriage in the Catholic Church
do not have a right to children. Children are bestowed upon a
couple as the natural fruit of their married love, but they are sent
as God sees fit to send them. Those couples who are faced with
infertility can devote themselves more fully to the promotion of
the Faith (as was the case with Dietrich and Alice von
Hildebrand) or they can adopt children, providing children not of
their own generation the home and the love that they need. My
own mother, who died 19 years ago this March 18, was put up
for adoption shortly after her birth in 1921. And while she did not
have the happiest of circumstances with her adoptive father, the
vaudevillian Sioux Indian Chieftain William Red Fox, she
nevertheless had a home. Infertility is not a curse. A cross,
perhaps; but not a curse. No one has the right to choose to use
immoral means to conceive a child, no matter how desperately a
child is desired.
In 1987, the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a statement on this matter.
Titled Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life), the
document stressed the simple teaching of the natural law that a
child has the right to be conceived within the context of faithful,
monogamous married love. A child has the right to a stable
home, one where he is surrounded by the love of his parents, who
understand they have the obligation to prepare each of their
children to spend an unending Easter Sunday of glory in
Paradise. The proliferation of various methods and practices for
producing children in test tubes and petri dishes outside the
womb has created a situation where children are being robbed of
that right.
The irony of all of this is
really inescapable: children must be “planned” as
objects that will fit neatly into a couple’s lifestyle and
career decisions. Naturally, the children can be disposed of in the
local abortuary if they do not fit, or, if they are permitted to be
born, they can be shunted off to the day-care center and given
some occasional attention. But just as children must be planned
carefully to conform to materialistic and hedonistic agendas, it is
now the case that single women, divorced women, women
seeking to make some quick money, and women who practice
lesbianism can “order” children on demand by
artificial conception. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley had a lot
of natural insights about where the path of scientism and
evolutionism and socialism was taking mankind.
An entirely new field of
law is emerging and being embraced by attorneys, many of whom
are on the prowl for new and inventive ways to make money
from the moral degradation rampant in our society: fertility law,
which is becoming a branch of family law (along with custody
law, paternity law, etc.).
For example, take the case
in the United Kingdom of the child who was conceived artificially
and advertised for adoption on the Internet. Several people have
now come forth to claim the child as their own: the people who
paid for the adoption; the people who donated the egg and the
sperm; and the woman who actually bore the child in her womb
after he had been conceived in the laboratory of the fertility clinic.
This case is so complicated that even the usual suspects in the
world of feminism and positivism and relativism don’t
know who has “rights” to the child in question. Alas,
that is the nub: the Devil wants complexity to replace the
simplicity of God and His laws. It is much too simple to believe
that a child should be conceived as the natural fruit of human
conjugal love in a valid sacramental marriage. Oh, no, we are
much too sophisticated for that, aren’t we? The Devil
wants a simple thing such as the conception and rearing of a child
to become as complicated as possible, so complicated that people
lose sight of the intrinsic evil of the methods used to conceive a
child artificially.
There is a direct
connection between little children being led like cattle across
Dublin Boulevard in Dublin, California, and the transatlantic
legal battle over custody of a child artificially conceived. For a
world that views it as normal and good to transfer the
responsibility of child-rearing to strangers will see no problem
with a child’s being conceived and put up for sale to the
highest bidder. When we lose sight of the fact that a child bears
with his immortal soul the Divine impress, then it is easy to
consider him an object to be shunted off to others or planned
carefully in the laboratory.
Many bishops in Europe
have forcefully denounced the increasingly draconian measures
that are undermining the family and the sanctity of marital
relations — and subjecting scores more of children to
unhappy and unstable lives. It is time for the bishops of the
United States to stop issuing silly pastoral letters about arcane
subjects and concentrate on the real evils taking place in
universities and hospitals and clinics within their very dioceses.
May our Lady, who is our
Life, our Sweetness, and our Hope, pray for us that we may be
ever vigilant in defending the roles proper to each member of a
family — and in assuring that motherhood is revered as the
vocation that fulfills a woman in the likeness of Mary of
Nazareth herself.
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