Chairman's Blog
What exactly is wrong with sex ed for four-year olds?
There is a lot this weekend in the Catholic press and online about a proposal to establish mandatory sex education in schools for children from the age of four. Since the reasons Catholics and others are worried about this are not always articulated very clearly, I thought I would try to set at least some of them out.
The problems can be summarised under three headings: the content of typical sex education; the classroom context in which this education is delivered; and the role of the state vis-a-vis parents. In this post I'm only going to talk about the first of these, the content, although the others are important as well.
Interviewed alongside SPUC's excellent Antonia Tully, a certain Lucy Russel (sp?) on BBC Radio Cardiff (listen here), who campaigns for sex education (sounds an interesting job), tried to reassure listeners about the proposal by saying that, of course, it would be 'age appropriate'. Four-year-olds would not be told about sex positions, but about 'holding hands', and asked about whether they were comfortable with people holding their hands and so on.
This is helpful because it reminds us that, contrary to many claims made about sex ed, it is not primarily about giving young people necessary information. No useful biological information is going to be imparted to four-year-olds. With older children the sex ed programme competes with an avalanche of information available off the internet. (There are ways of stopping this flow of information, at the level of the state and of the family, but the sex ed people show little interest in doing this.) No doubt there are gaps in information gleaned at random from Google, but the educators' most urgent task, as they see it, is to set the information children are getting anyway into some kind of moral or ideological context. The reason the sex ed industry wants to get their hands on children as young as this is to lay the foundations for their favoured ideology of relationships.
I want to make as clear as possible that the educators' concern is a comprehensible one, before I show what the problem is with their response. The problem which is emerging among young adults is a sexual culture which is totally amoral, in which people seek to satisfy desires fuelled by pornography, with the help of dating aps like Tindr, without any regard for the harm which may be done to their partners or offspring. The task set by the Government for sex education is to place some kind of moral restraint on this culture, by insisting on 'responsible parenting' (i.e. contraception), and a concern for consent in sexual relations.
It should be noted that the common criticism that state-sponsored sex ed is 'values free' is the reverse of the truth. It is of course impossible to give values-free education: even the choice of what information to impart reflects and fosters certain values, namely judgements about what is important--that is, valuable--and what is not. Sex ed, indeed, is as much as possible a purely values-focused education. You can see why they don't shout this from the housetops, however, since if you admit that what you are going to do is to inculcate a carefully-engineered set of values to children as young as four, who clearly have few resources to assess or reject what is offered or decide for themselves, then it inevitably raises the question, from parents, of whether these values correspond to their own.
So let's take a closer look at the values, which can best be described as an ideology of relationships. What the Government wants is fewer 'unwanted pregnancies' and fewer rapes. Admirable aims, one might think, in themselves, but in the interests, I suppose, of efficiency, they try to take the shortest possible short-cut to achieve this. The problems with promoting contraception should be obvious to the readers of this blog, so I'll focus on the question of rape, which is what is ultimately at issue with the education in hand-holding to be given to four-year-olds.
The way to combat rape, the reasoning goes, is to emphasise the importance of consent. But in order to make the message more palatable, and not look like an old-fashioned taboo (which, of course, it is), this message is accompanied by the constant reiteration of the idea that, given consent, everything is ok. The need for consent is the only limit on the morality of sexual acts, or, to express this in a different way, you can do whatever you (and the other people involved) are 'comfortable' with. If you don't feel comfortable with a particular proposal, you can and should say 'no'. If you do feel comfortable, then go ahead, that's fine (with the appropriate contraception in place, naturally).
One problem with this, which could easily be missed, is that it is unlikely that either the people who created this ideology or those who deliver it in classrooms actually believe it. It is in fact only believed by sexual libertines of an almost sociopathic extreme; ordinary men and women have at least a troubled conscience about sexual infidelity, for example, and promiscuity, and much more than that about incest, bestiality, and a few other things which I hardly need to mention.
If you don't believe me, just consider what reaction you would get if you called the average 25-year old woman a slut. She will reveal a certain moral sensitivity to that accusation: she cares about whether her sexual standards are perceived as too low. For it is not just a personal thing, a matter of taste, how many people you choose to sleep with: it is something which has a social importance, which is reflected in the way that others view you. Or so your 25 year-old friend will explain, a little breathlessly, when she has finished crushing your skull with the nearest blunt instrument.
It is a problem that the teachers delivering the message do not believe the message, both because it is an indication that the message is not readily believable, and because they will not make good advocates for it. The core message of sex ed is actually make-believe, which is part of the reason it does not have the effect on children that its designers hoped it would have. It is a sort of official ideology to which everyone must pay lip-service, but which everyone snaps out of as soon as they are off-duty.
Another problem with the ideology is that it is undermining of many legal limitations on sexual freedom, particularly the age of consent. When footballers go to bed with 15-year-olds they do so after more than a decade of education in the maxim: 'if there is consent, then it is ok'. Internalising this message can land you in prison for a long time.
Another problem is raised by domestic abuse. Thanks to the 'Fifty Shades' books and films, sado-masochism must be officially ok: it's just a matter of consent, isn't it? Whatever kind of brutalisation or humiliation is involved, it is all empowering and feminist-approved if there is consent. The problem is that within an abusive relationship the concept of consent can get a little over-stretched. Did I just write 'abusive relationship'? The sex ed ideology wants to replace any objective notion of an abusive relationship with a subjective understanding: it is ok if both parties consent. If everything comes down to consent, if there are no objective criteria (clinical depression? bruises?), you are literally handing a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card to a sufficiently manipulative abuser. The use of psychological pressure to establish and maintain some kind of 'consent' is the very first thing that happens in abusive relationships.
Even worse is the related problem of child abuse. As Caroline Farrow puts it at the end of her post on the subject, sex ed as we know it is a 'groomers’ charter', because it undermines children's natural sexual reserve. The idea is that the best way to protect children from abusers is to emphasise to the children that they have the right to say 'no'. This plays into the hands of the abusers, however, who want nothing better than an opening for conversations with their targets in which these intimate matters can be frankly discussed, and their 'consent' winkled out. It isn't real consent, of course, because, as the law correctly says, young children are incapable of giving consent to sexual acts. You'd think that this would be enough to throw doubt on the idea that they need to hear about nothing but consent, consent, consent, all the time in sex ed. In any case, what the abuser of children, like that of adults, typically wants is some form of guilty acquiescence, and he (or she) is going to have the best chance of getting it if the child thinks that the only thing wrong with a proposed act is his or her own feelings of discomfort, which may be alleviated by familiarity.
What the child needs to know is that the paedophile's proposals are wrong and that people who make those proposals are bad people. What an adult in an abusive relationship needs to know is that a partner's cutting them off from their family and friends, psychological degradation, and physical assaults, are wrong and the person who is doing does not, really, love them. You might assume that our modern sex educators would be keen to tackle these problems, but what they are doing is handing the keys to the trust and intimacy of the most vulnerable over to manipulative abusers.
Riddle me this, you sex ed campaigners. If a young woman does not feel comfortable about performing a sex act, but feels even more uncomfortable about enduring peer pressure, bullying, and ostracism, if she does not perform it, and accordingly, after considering the matter, performs the act: what sort of consent was that? Sex education, by robbing her of any objective moral compass apart from her own decision to do it or not do it, has opened her up to blackmail and manipulation like an oyster. And the reality is that performing sexual acts on demand for the school bullies is not good for young people's self esteem, personal development, or mental health. I want to say to these sex ed people: you idiots, can't you see what you are doing?
It is a sad day for education when proposals like this are taken seriously, but the current situation has been a long time in development. Parents need to find out exactly what their children are being exposed to in sex education in school, and take responsibility for protecting their children.
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How not to treat a lady
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| So what's the quid pro quo? |
Over on Catholic Gentleman, Sam Guzman has re-posted a discussion of 'How to treat a lady' written by John Cuddeback, a Philosophy prof at Christendom College. On Cuddeback's own blog it is part of a series. It doesn't say a great deal of substance, but here is its conclusion.
Women are deserving of special reverence not because of weakness, but because of strength. In women, a man can intuit the presence of something that transcends his comprehension. It is in reality something of the divine, something that is somehow his to cherish, to serve, and to protect. Just what it is, and how best to respond to it, he will need to spend a lifetime trying to discover.
I've discussed this kind of thing before, but I'll go over it again because clearly this needs repeating.
What Cuddeback is presenting is described by bloggers of the 'Manosphere' as the view of a 'White Knight' or 'trad con' (at least, those are among the more polite terms they use). They regard this kind of sentiment as indicative of an attitude of servility on the part of men, enabling and sustaining the peculiar position taken by women in today's West: a position which one might call privileged, except that it doesn't reliably contribute to their happiness. I'm not going to defend this view in this post, but Cuddeback ought to be aware that he is wandering into a minefield. In certain circles soupy stuff about girls being made of sugar and spice and all things still seems pleasant old-fashioned gallantry, and emphasising it may appear to be an obvious way to get men to behave better. In other circles it can get you burnt at the stake. If Cuddeback realises this, he gives no indication of it.
The Manosphere arguments should at least be addressed. I've posted about the 'man crisis' a few times. The idea that men are indelibly privileged, and need to be taken down a peg or two, looks a lot less convincing from the wrong side of a University degree or a divorce court. What I want to point out here, however, is how un-Catholic Cuddeback's position is.
It should be obvious that the notion that women are superior to men in some moral or spiritual sense, that they have more of the 'divine' in them, is theologically insane, and finds no place in Scripture, the Fathers and Doctors, or the Magisterium. All these sources, in fact, are refreshingly candid about women's faults, just as they are about men's. Cuddeback's effusion has no connection with the Catholic tradition, but it isn't difficult to identify its source: it is the Romantic movement of the 19th century. It is this movement, reacting against the exaggerated rationalism of the Enlightenment, which created the angelic feminine ideal, against which Feminism reacted in turn.
Feminists will tell you that the idea that women are, as the Romantics implied, incapable of violence, immune to sexual temptation, pre-disposed to self-sacrifice, and marvellously intuitive, is actually oppressive to women. They have a point. The Romantic ideal holds women to an unrealistic and higher standard of behaviour, and tells them that a range of options which have been arbitrarily defined as masculine, such as the intellectual life, business, and politics, are incompatible with being a proper, feminine, woman.
If you need convincing on this point, consider this. In order to engage in a masculine profession, of the law, Portia in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice has, in a certain sense, temporarily, to repudiate her femininity: she dresses up as a man. St Joan of Arc does the same thing to be a soldier. The women of the late 20th century who went to work in the financial industry have done something pretty similar. To be taken seriously, they generally felt (and still feel) they needed to avoid dressing in a feminine way. The early 20th century 'blue stockings' of acedemia felt, in a slightly different way, that because what they were doing was considered unfeminine, they would make a virtue of it and make it clear, by the unfeminine way they dressed, that they didn't care. Now, I don't think either gender-specific vocations, nor people transgressing those boundaries, are necessarily unhealthy; it may simply be part of life's rich tapestry. What I'd draw attention to is the far narrower limits of femininity at the start of the 20th century compared to the start, say, of the 16th century. The influential 15th century scholar Christina de Pizan, or the 15th century painter St Catherine of Bologna, or indeed Portia when running her considerable household, did not feel it necessary to de-feminise themselves. The change of attitude had more than one cause, but it was crystallised by Romanticism.
A reassertion of the classic Romantic ideal of womanhood would, therefore, land Cruddeback in a lot of trouble with feminists, but he doesn't appear to be doing that exactly. What often happens with 'trad cons' like him is that their Romanticism has been through a feminist, politically correct filter. They want to give women all the good qualities without implying that the flip side of those very qualities also applies. Cruddeback's espousal of this approach is suggested by his claim that men should protect women, but not because women are weak. How does that work? Why could there be a special obligation to protect these feisty, gun-toting, modern females? Oh, because under all that bravado they are divine and good, and not bass-asses at all. This really doesn't make any sense.
The key word in the paragraph I quote above, however, is 'serve'. Men should 'serve' women, not (of course not!) because they are weak, but because they are superior. Now this is actually quite scary. Cruddeback thinks that men are by nature the slaves of the superior sex, just as some have held that certain races are by nature the slaves of a superior race.
What this is, I suppose, is an echo of the idea that men serve women as part of their leadership of the family, since in the Christian conception the leader serves the community he governs. Indeed, it is in this context, and only in this context, that the protection (etc.) of women by men makes sense. The problem is that Cruddeback makes no mention of male leadership. You might think that in a post about 'how to treat a lady' the potential or reality within marriage that, according to the Christian tradition, women are to obey and men to govern, would merit a mention. But not only does Cruddeback not mention it in this post, but a search of his blog, 'Bacon from Acorns', doesn't throw up any hits either. It has been airbrushed out of his view of male-female relations.
Fine, Prof Cruddeback, indulge your dark fantasies of female domination. But please don't associate them with the Catholic tradition. And, Sam Guzman, don't imagine they have anything to do with being a 'Catholic Gentleman.'
Related: Alice von Hildebrand on women's moral superiority to men.
Label: Patriarchy.
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LMS Easter Triduum in London
Taking place in St Mary Moorfields in the City of London (EC2M 7LS), at more consistent times than at the past: Tenebrae at 9pm, and the main Triduum services at 6pm on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
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Pilgrimage to Caversham and the Ember Saturday: 11th March
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The Narrative of Victimhood: Transsexuality
This is from a few months ago on my Philosophy blog. Recent flurries of activity on social media prompt me to offer it to a wider audience.
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I've just noted on my other blog that living as a transsexual has been categorised by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as incompatible with the Faith. This is about the argument in favour of tolerating or promoting this lifestyle.
The transsexual phenomenon is not entirely new, but it is taking on a new form and become a cause celebre with astonishing speed. From a common-sense point of view it seems sheer lunacy: people can now simply claim to be the sex opposite to that indicated by their biology, and have this assertion officially recognised, with or without any medical diagnosis or intervention (not that either would make any real difference).
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New book on the Faith and the New Age
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| View from the choir loft: Milton Manor, Latin Mass Society annual Mass |
I've discussed Roger Buck's earlier book, The Gentle Traditionalist, here.
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A smaller, weaker, impurer Church
Reposted from December 2015, since that Ratzinger passage is once more doing the rounds on Facebook.
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| An international pilgrimage: the traditional pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres. |
From time to time people like to quote something Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1969. Here's the key passage (source):
The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
I always like to oppose signs of false optimism, so I'll say something about this.
In relation to Cardinal Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict, this passage has to be read in light of his intellectual development. In 1969 he didn't have the same views as he did when he became a cardinal in 1993 or Pope in 2005. He might or might not have later actually disagreed with this passage, but his writings certainly took on a very different tone and emphasis. To put it crudely, he was a bit of a liberal in 1969. It is to his credit that he had the flexibility of mind and intellectual honesty to continue developing his thinking, in light of new research and the unfolding of events, as the decades passed.
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| An association of Chant choirs: the Gregorian Chant Network. |
The reference to the 'Church of the political cult' is an example of liberal thinking and language. It is a disparaging reference to the role of the Church in society and politics, particularly in Catholic countries, in the old days. The loss of 'privileges' and 'edifices' noted in the passage was not, it should be noted, something which liberals saw with regret. They consciously and actively repudiated the Church's privileged place in society, which she had had in 19th century Spain, Second Empire France, and the like. They thought that political privileges and elaborate institutions made the Church worldly (in need of 'spiritualisation'), made her look arrogant in relation to other religions, and needed to be set aside for the sake of more effective evangelisation.
In light of this, at the time widely held, view, the passage makes a very different kind of sense to that sometimes, I think, attributed to it by conservative Pope Benedict fans. To a large extent it is not about the disaster of post-Conciliar collapse - which wasn't so visible in 1969 - as about the liberal hope for purification and growth following the sloughing off of the privileges and institutions which were cramping the work of the Holy Spirit. Of course, the two things are closely related. When Pope Paul VI talked about the 'autodemolition' of the Church, he was talking about the way that liberals were deliberately and joyfully smashing the place up, convinced that this would lead to a new springtime. The liberal attitude has not gone away entirely. Even now, bishops planning for the institutional disappearance of the Church in their dioceses give their discussion documents jaunty and optimistic titles like 'Leaving Safe Habours'. Only if we leave all those fusty old things like schools, hospitals, and parish churches, behind, can we really get going with our evagelisation. Hanging on to the old institutions is playing it too safe. If smashing up half of them didn't have a positive effect, then we should try smashing up the remaining half.
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| A pro-life witness: outside the John Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford. |
Pope Paul VI wasn't so sure this was a good idea, as the reference to 'autodemolition' in his famous, but somewhat mysterious, 1965 sermon indicated. What we have seen since then is the very effective destruction of the Church's institutions and place in society, but absolutely no sign of 'purification' or a 'great power' flowing out: quite the contrary. One reason is that secularised, formerly Catholic institutions don't always leave the Church's institutional orbit. For example, the completely secularised 'Marriage Care' counselling service of the UK, whose philosophy is radically opposed to the teaching of the Church, still gets a privileged place in the Church, in advising bishops, on parish noticeboards, in terms of references in Catholic newspapers, and in Catholic directories. The same is true of the Catholic school system. Such secularised institutions bring completely worldly thinking into the heart of the Church.
There lies at the centre of the liberal project a confusion about the Church's engagement with the world. In the old, confessional Catholic state, and to an extent in non-Catholic countries like the UK where there were well-developed Catholic institutions, the Church used to engage very closely with the world, but on her own terms. There were Catholic schools, hospitals, prison-visiting charities, and all sorts of professional associations, all with a genuine Catholic ethos. A slackening of that ethos would lead either to intervention and reform or repudiation. That was the way that a (relatively) pure Church made herself known to a perhaps hostile world. This manifestation made it possible for non-Catholics to recognise the Church's unique character, and what she had to offer, in even quite brief encounters with Catholic institutions. Non-Catholics who had experienced a Catholic hospital, or who had wandered into a Catholic church during Mass, came away with something to reflect about. When Malcolm Muggeridge decided to send his son to a preconciliar Downside School, the headmaster warned him that the boy was very likely to ask to be received into the Church: most non-Catholic pupils did, he said. And so it came to pass.
The liberal conception of engagement, by contrast, is exemplified by the fictional Pope Kirill in the film, The Shoes of the Fisherman (a 1968 film of a 1963 book), going off to mediate between Russia and China in a business suit, explaining that if you look like the people you are talking to, they are more likely to listen. The idea is that by making concessions (supposedly only concessions on outward, disciplinary, non-doctrinal matters) the Church can 'gain a hearing' with the world. The result has been, however, that there is nothing for the world to hear. Catholic schools, hospitals, and even liturgies have become next to useless as means of conveying anything about the truth of the Catholic religion, the Church's insight into human nature, or the supernatural virtues which the Church makes possible, to non-Catholics, or even to Catholics, because they have deliberately made themselves worldly.
And so it is that liberals criticise the old institutions of the confessional state for sitting down with secular leaders to negotiate privileges, like the opportunity for religious to catechise Catholic children at French state schools during the school day, state support for Catholic hospitals or leper colonies, or having crucifixes in courtrooms, because this kind of thing led to the Church becoming 'worldly', and even to the Church making concessions such as allowing state influence over the appointment of bishops. Instead, they propose that the Church sit down with secular leaders to evangelise them, having first made the evangelists themselves as worldly as possible. As a matter of fact, the Church continues to spend a huge amount of time and energy negotiating over Catholic education and the like - the column inches in the Catholic press on the subject of free transport for children at Catholic schools must surely exceed those on all matters of bioethics combined - though with a weaker bargaining position than before. Meanwhile, the appointment of a bishop unacceptable to the secular power is about as likely as snow in Hell. How this is supposed to represent progress, I am unable to explain.
What Joseph Ratzinger was certainly right about in 1969 was that the new situation would absorb much energy in introspection, and would lead to a crisis which would take many years to resolve. Where he was wrong is in the idea that the Church can evangelise without institutions, 'edifices', relying instead on individuals. Catholicism is an incarnate religion, and the Church is herself a human, as well as a divine, institution. Wherever Catholics set up shop they create institutions: first the family and the parish and diocese, and then schools and associations of all kinds. It is through human contact that the Gospel is spread, and institutions can manifest the Church, humanly, more effectively, convincingly, and consistently, than isolated individuals. We are inviting non-Catholics to join an institution, after all, and not simply become a personal friend. If the Church is to recover her evangelical zeal, she must rebuild her institutions, just as she did after the French Revolution and the English Reformation.
As you build new Catholic institutions, the key thing is not to let the liberals get their hands on them: they will instinctively destroy them. They can't help it. It is their nature.
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| A Summer School: St Catherine's Trust |
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Easter Cards from the Latin Mass Society
This year, for the first time, the Latin Mass Society is selling Easter Cards. Make this part of your preparations for the the greatest feast of the Church's year!
Pack of 6 cards for £3.99; make sure you are logged in to the website for your member's discount.
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Juventutem Mass in London 24th Feb
7:30pm Friday 24 Feb: Mass will be celebrated by Fr Armand de Malleray FSSP.
Music by Cantus Magnus directed by Matthew Schellhorn:
Messa da Capella a quattro voci Monteverdi
Sicut cervus Palestrina
Sitivit anima mea Palestrina
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A pre-history of the Guild of St Clare
It seems the Guild of St Clare has a pre-history: there existed, up to about the time of Vatican II, a 'St Clare's Guild' for sewing in Catholic parishes in the United States. I'd be interested to hear more about this Guild from those who have any information.
On a regular basis, the Guild would meet to sew what I recall were "pads for cancer patients". There may have been other projects that they worked on, but I recall that one. As to the spirituality of the group, I have no clue, nor whether it was promoted by my parish (Nativity of Our Lord) or the Archdiocese of St Paul Minnesota.
What I recall was a large number of women gathering at the house on an occasional basis and hand sewing. My Mother would refer to it as the St. Clare Guild, and she participated in it probably until 1960 or so. That was a time, of course, when many women did not work outside the house but would involve themselves in charitable work.
There was quite a bit of adult catechesis at the time as well. My Mother also belonged to a parish sponsored "women's discussion club". There were many such discussion clubs set up by my parish on a neighborhood basis. Members were asked to read chapters of books written by Catholic authors (it was the time of Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen) and gather to discuss what they had read.
In addition to the women's discussion club, there were discussion clubs for couples and both of my parents participated in the one for our neighborhood.
Comment: Any group of skilled ladies doing vestment repairs would have suffered the same fate as groups of skilled singers: under the new dispensation they were no longer needed, or only for things which would not have motivated them to hang around. The new spirituality did for any groups based on spiritual matters.