I take it as self-evident that the desire to do sexual things with children is wicked and perverse. That includes self-display, enticement, and talk – and where the talk takes place does not matter, except that if it is public, in a school, or on television, or on posters at your local fast-food joint, the harm done is incomparably greater, because it reaches more children, and it acquires all the force of public approval.
The attacks on the innocence and sanity of our children are now relentless, coming from all directions. We may ask what kinds of people would want to warp the imagination of a child, for example by flashing before them in pretty colors the madness of attempting to alter your sex, with mutilation and a brew of tissue-growing and therefore carcinogenic drugs. Go to your local school and see. Then consider this. If you cannot trust someone not to lace your child’s lunch with arsenic, how can you shrug and say that you can still trust him with breakfast or dinner, or indeed with anything? Someone who wants to read to children stories of perversion, with that spoonful of sugar that makes the poison go down, will be noxious in innumerable other ways. We are not talking about sins of intemperance, short-sightedness, impatience, and irresponsibility, to which the best of us is prone. We are talking about a radical evil.
Well then, what is to be done? The first thing is to get the children out of the bad air, out of the near reach of evil infection. No excuses. It is not as if the public schools, and most private schools, otherwise do a creditable job teaching young people about grammar (abandoned), geography (abandoned), English literature before 1900 (mostly abandoned, especially poetry), mathematics (a mess of incompetence for all but the best students), history (corrupted by political passions), or foreign languages (four years, to learn how to ask for the lavatories in Tijuana, but not to read Cervantes). The schools are wicked and inept. The arrogance has grown all the greater, the farther the schools are removed from direct accountability to the parents – and the parents themselves are by no means all sane and wise.
Meanwhile, genuine Catholic schools must go begging. Think of the sacrifices the teachers and administrators must make to found a faithful school and to keep it going, in the face of predictable hostility from the state. We used to have the teaching orders of sisters to do the needed work, at little cost to the parish. Those orders are gone. But the need remains and is far greater now than when the first Catholic schools and colleges were founded. We do not now confront the difference between two ways of practicing the natural virtues and learning the faith. We confront the difference between celebrating wickedness and attempting to revive and to foster what broken body of natural virtue survives; between a practical atheism or satanism, and an orientation toward the three-person God, who has made all things in due measure and order.
Therefore, I call upon my readers to do these things. If you have children in a school that is
not confessedly and counter-culturally Christian, get them out of there. Get rid of the arsenic; we can discuss a healthy diet later. If there is a true Catholic school nearby, support it. Make it an object of your charity. Volunteer to help keep the grounds. Offer to teach a class. Help to publicize the school. Go there, see what they are doing. They are in the vanguard; pray for them.
DR. ANTHONY ESOLEN,professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of Liberal Arts (Warner, NH), is author and translator of over 20 books, including Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World;
and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.
His most recent books are Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind
and The Hundredfold,
a book-length poem centering upon the life of Christ.