28th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Fr. Anthony Brankin
The last few weeks at the Masses, particularly the 11:00 am and the 12:30 pm, we did a thing called the Promise Mass—trying to focus the minds and hearts of the parents and children—teachers and staff—on the great task of teaching our children what it means to be a Catholic. First of all, The Catholic Church has always taught that every school—and that includes every public school stands always in loco parentis—in place of the parents. The school or educational program—never replaces the parents and never teaches anything that is contrary to the parents’ beliefs or values. The school—or program—is there only to support the parents. Home is primary. What the children learn at home—even before they are old enough to go to school—will last them a lifetime. They will never forget what their mothers and fathers taught them when they were so little—and that includes going to Mass.
I say this now at all my baptisms. I tell the parents and godparents and grandparents that they must teach their children all their prayers and all the faith and all the family traditions. I tell them they must teach the rosary, the sign of the cross. They must go to Mass every Sunday, go to confession often. If the parents are not married—which is more and more common these days—I tell them—point blank—get married in Church and start raising a Catholic family because that will be the only thing that will save them as the years go on.
An Education that Saves
As things get worse and worse and more and more evil and corrupt, the only thing that will save the children is their Catholic faith—as taught to them by their parents. And what the parents teach their children about God and our faith and our duty before God will be better and more lasting than anything I or our teachers could ever teach them in school or in CCD. No one will be able to snatch the faith away from our children—because those children will say—at the very moment that the world is trying to corrupt them and take their faith away, “I believe that because my mother and father believed that—and no one can make me not believe it!” But the Catholic school and CCD program at Saint Odilo is simply trying to help our parents to pass on their Catholic Faith to their children. And I will be honest, we at Saint Odilo these days have to make up for all the illness of the sixties where no one (in America at least) learned much of anything of the Faith. Whole generations were lost.
I don’t have to tell anyone here—whose children do not go to Mass—whose grandchildren might not even be baptized—what a crisis we have lived through since the time of the Second Vatican Council—and a large part of the failure from those days was a failure in episcopally approved catechism programs. We simply did not pass on the Faith—as the parents had asked. The parents assumed that their children were learning the faith— but they were rudely surprised when their children came home telling them that Adam and Eve did not exist, and that Jesus did not know who He was and wasn’t really God, and that there is no sin if you don’t believe it is a sin, and that you don’t have to tell your sins to a priest and that there was no hell and certainly no purgatory or Limbo—and that heaven was simply a state of mind—and that Catholics really did not have to go to Mass on Sunday.
I lived through it. I was in the seminary during the 60’s and 70’s. I got good grades so no one can tell me I didn’t really understand what I was being taught or what I heard and saw. I did. And what I saw was that the modernists had actually convinced the Bishops to let them—the modernists who were now in charge in all the dioceses—to get rid of all the old ways of teaching and doing catechism. No more facts of the faith. No more memorization. No more literal belief in the creeds. That’s all ideology they said! It was all about experience—our children would learn their faith—I guess—by osmosis. They would somehow experience the Trinity and experience the Church and grace and the commandments and the sacraments.
No one had to really teach them. The students no longer had to know definitions or formulae or words or phrases. We would be brought to a knowledge of Jesus by somehow seeing Jesus lived in the lives of the teachers and others. We often hear this even today—that we do not need to teach the faith as a body of set beliefs. All we need to do—they tell us—is bring people into an encounter with Jesus and Jesus will do the rest. Sorry. Jesus needs our help. Of course we must let people see and meet Jesus in us. By the beauty of our lives those outside can intuit His Beauty. But then we must be able to give the reasons for our belief. We must be able to explain coherently who this Jesus is—and who we are as His people. That means we need a real catechism. That is why there are questions in a catechism—because there are answers in the Faith—and we who say we are Catholic must be able to know and give those answers for ourselves and for others.
Did My Children Hear in Catholic School that They Did Not Have to Go to Mass?
But back in the 60’s, the modernists who did not actually believe in the objective reality of the supernatural— spent all the precious time of the children and families confusing them in the faith. You heard it. I heard it. I have taken 40 years worth of phone calls from parents and grandparents asking in disbelief—Did my children hear in Catholic school that they did not have to go to Mass? And there is no use saying it didn’t happen—because it was how we lived as Catholics in the subsequent 50 years after the Council. It is why we went from 75% Mass participation to 20%. It is why countless grandparents are forced now to look at the spiritual wasteland of their children and grandchildren’s faith lives—and why they see whole generations of their own descendants who no longer practice the faith.
Catholic parents who became Catholic grandparents are now faced with the tragedy of members of their own family having substituted television and newspapers and sports and entertainment for Mass on Sunday and for God. And the tragedy is compounded by the fact that this is occurring at the very moment we are now being confronted in unprecedented ways by a perfect storm of atheist politicians and shameless celebrities—aided and abetted by the universal use of social media.
So what we are doing at Saint Odilo School and catechism—child by child—parent by parent—is trying to rebuild the Church—re-preach the Gospel—re-teach the faith—in its purity—in its essence—without qualifications and without doubts. We will teach them all the truths that the Catholic Church teaches—and we believe in those truths—literally and concretely. No fudging—no hedging. From One God and three Persons to the Ten Commandments and seven sacraments. In other words we are trying to teach them the Catholic Faith as it is—and as their grandparents learned it— and not as the modernists would have it. That means their religion is something real—not pretend—not make believe—but more real than anything they can get from the TV or movies or videos.
Certainly our children, as educated persons, will grow into adults. And as such they should always be pursuing more and more knowledge. As well they should learn even more about the faith than what they received as children. But as much as possible—while they are at this parish, while they are children—we will give them—alongside their parents—the best start possible.