| Waldstein on Forming Values "We Parents Must Wake Up and Take
Action"
MEXICO CITY, 19 JAN. 2009 (ZENIT)
Here is the text of the address given today by Michael Waldstein, Max
Seckler Professor of Theology at Ave Maria University, Florida, at the
6th World Meeting of Families, under way in Mexico. The address was
titled: "The Family: Forming Human and Christian Values: Overview of USA
and Canada."
* * *
In his letter to the World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope
Benedict wrote, "Today more than ever, the Christian family has a very
noble mission that it cannot shirk: the transmission of the faith, which
involves the gift of self to Jesus Christ who died and rose, and
insertion into the Ecclesial Community. Parents are the first
evangelizers of children, a precious gift from the Creator (cf. Gaudium
et spes, n. 50), and begin by teaching them to say their first prayers.
In this way a moral universe is built up, rooted in the will of God,
where the child grows in the human and Christian values that give life
its full meaning."
The vision of this statement is clear and strong. Do families in the
United States and Canada live up to it? Do they introduce their children
to the sincere gift of self to Christ? Do they help them become mature
members of the Ecclesial Community? The positive side needs to be
mentioned first. Many families do follow their mission with admirable
strength and devotion.
At the same time one must admit that many families fall short of
their mission. The United States and Canada built up extensive systems
of Catholic schools. Catholic parents have traditionally delegated much
of their responsibility as educators to these schools and they are still
delegating it. The schools, however, have changed. Like all academic
institutions, they have become increasingly secularized, which severely
compromises the transmission of the faith.
Strong efforts are being made in some places to strengthen the
identity and effectiveness of Catholic schools. A few weeks ago,
Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, published a pastoral letter
that is spearheading a renewal of the Catholic school system in his
diocese. He sees the urgency of the situation and is calling for broad
cooperation in the renewal. Yet this is only one diocese among many.
A more fundamental problem, however, arises from the strong reliance
of most parents on the schools. Children spend much time at school and
relatively little time with their parents. Only during vacations is the
situation different. Since the life they share with their parents is
often reduced to a minimum when school is in session, it is not easy to
build up such a life during vacations. Parents and children often do not
know what to do with each other during vacations.
There is another major force that is taking much of education out of
the hands of the family, namely, the global youth culture. It is
important to realize that this youth culture is a new phenomenon. It
only began after the Second World War.
Two forces are perhaps the most formative in this youth culture. One
of them is the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution is a child of
the dominant utilitarian and consumerist adult culture after the Second
World War. Utilitarianism and consumerism inevitably destroy the link
between sex and love, between sex and procreation by reducing the other
person in erotic experience to a means for pleasure. In the formation of
the teenager, the piercing sexual passions of adolescent children were
suddenly released into destructive premature relationships. Instead of
being introduced into a culture of love, children were and are abandoned
to a culture of the use of each other for pleasure or, to use their own
preferred word, fun.
The second major force, intimately connected with the first, is the
rise of a new music produced specifically for adolescent children. It is
a music tailor-made for the absence of deeper personal formation of
sexual passion by authentic love. This music and its cultural trappings
could not have achieved the power it achieved without a large economic
muscle behind it. American and European adolescents after the Second
World War were perhaps the first generation of children who constituted
a strong market by themselves in distinction from the adult world,
because they got large amounts of discretionary money from their
parents. The parents were happy enough to let the children do what they
wanted while they themselves pursued their professional lives. The
removal of women from the home and their induction into the work force
increased the cultural vacuum in which children lived. It also increased
the economic power of this vacuum. The entertainment industry exploded,
aided by technological progress, especially by the invention of the
radio and the television. Music turned out to be the single most
important article of trade in this exploding market. It is a music that
consistently conquers market share by preying on the most intense and
most immature passions of adolescents, above all on erotic passion and
on anger. The hearts of children were simply abandoned to the formative
power of this music.
What should we do in this difficult situation? Many parents feel
completely helpless. They see their children taken out of their hands
and increasingly formed by another culture. Sociologists call this
phenomenon the "generation gap." History as a whole shows that the
generation gap is not a normal developmental phase. The normal situation
is for children to grow in the culture of their parents and their
society. The generation gap is without precedent. Children in Jewish
communities grew up Jewish; in Catholic communities they grew up
Catholic; in Buddhist communities they grew up Buddhist. Now Jewish,
Catholic and Buddhist children grow to be one and the same thing: they
become copies of their peers in the global youth culture.
We parents must wake up and take action! We must recall that it is
our inalienable duty and therefore also our inalienable right to educate
our children. In his encyclical Divini illius magistri of 1929 Pius XI
writes, "The family ... holds directly from the Creator the mission (munus)
and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable
because inseparably joined to a strict obligation, a right anterior to
any right whatever of civil society and of the state, and therefore
inviolable on the part of any power on earth" (Divini illius magistri,
59, DS 3690). Following Vatican II, John Paul II insists on the same
point. "The task of giving education is rooted in the primary vocation
of married couples to participate in God's creative activity: by
begetting in love and for love a new person who has within himself or
herself the vocation to growth and development, parents by that very
fact take on the task of helping that person effectively to live a fully
human life. As the Second Vatican Council recalled, ‘since parents have
conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obligation to
educate their offspring. Hence, parents must be acknowledged as the
first and foremost educators of their children. Their role as educators
is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure
in it. For it devolves on parents to create a family atmosphere so
animated with love and reverence for God and others that a well-rounded
personal and social development will be fostered among the children.'...
(Vatican II, Gravissimum educationis, 3). The right and duty of parents
to give education is [1-] essential since it is connected with the
transmission of human life; [2-] it is original and primary with regard
to the educational role of others, on account of the uniqueness of the
loving relationship between parents and children; [3-] and it is
irreplaceable and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely
delegated to others or usurped by others" (John Paul II, Familiaris
consortio, 36).
The first and most important step is for us parents to embrace our
duty and our right. We must defend this right as indeed inalienable. The
second most important step is to spend time with our children, to build
up a shared life. Only in a loving shared life can we transmit to our
children what is dearest to us. The third most important step is to
become involved in the education of our children. Archbishop Wuerl is
calling on parents in his diocese to become involved in helping to renew
the Catholic school system. For the majority of Catholic parents, such
involvement in the children's schooling is the form this third most
important step will take.
In describing the situation of the United States and Canada, however,
I must also point to a more radical way in which parents are becoming
involved in the education of their children, namely, homeschooling.
According to recent credible estimates, there are about two million
families in the United States that educate their children at home. My
wife and I have eight children. We have been and are educating them from
first grade all the way up to the end of high school. Four of them have
already entered universities. The main reason why we began home
schooling was the report we heard from close friends about the effect of
home schooling on their family. The children, they said, became more
friends with each other, because they shared the same experience of
schooling in the home. The parents also became more friends with their
children, because they shared more of their life. Like many other
homeschoolers, we have seen that the global youth culture is not an
irresistible force. It is possible to pass on our own Christian culture.
The generation gap is not inevitable.
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