My friend’s son has a peanut allergy. She doesn’t want him to die so she keeps a peanut free home and carries with her, at all times, an EpiPen in order to administer lifesaving treatment should he require it. There is nothing surprising about any of this. Indeed, it would be surprising if I reported that my friend, whose son had such an allergy, regularly filled the house with peanuts and had no way of rescuing him in the event of an attack.
Eyebrows, however, are raised when Catholic parents go to lengths to prevent spiritual harm to their children, yet why should they be? We are one being, body and soul. There’s no point saving a kid from peanuts only to deliver him to hell, out of a nut-free frying pan and into the fire.
Our children today face an onslaught of spiritual propaganda against which we must protect them, but we can’t protect them if we don’t know what’s going on.
A number of parents contacted me following the Easter period to express concern over things their children had seen or read during the holidays. “But it was a U,” said one about a film. “I couldn’t believe it was from the children’s section,” said another about a book given to her child.
Parents too busy to monitor every aspect of their children’s lives rely on the good judgement of those tasked with deciding what is appropriate, be it teachers, librarians or film makers. What parents don’t realise, however, is that the vast majority are (or have been captured by) campaigning zealots seeking to normalise the abnormal, promote the demonic and groom our kids. We’re consuming bread made for everyone produced by a minority of people with gluten intolerance and then wondering why it doesn’t taste right. The hope is that after a while we won’t notice anymore.
Disney, a brand synonymous with children’s entertainment, which has just won nine Golden Globe Awards (more than any other film company this year), has made no secret of the fact that it is prepared to lose money (and indeed has done so with recent flops Lightyear and Strangeworld) as long as it can convince and convert. Down with traditional family values, down with the patriarchy, down with gender norms, says Disney. Yes, proselytising is alive and well in the secular world where everything is tolerated and there is no objective truth.
But Catholics know what is true. We know that while it is true that our fellow man, created in the image of God, is not disordered, there are disordered inclinations and affections; it’s part of living in a fallen world. We also understand that to promote these as good will confuse a child about their proper end, causing them to stumble and us to adjust to a watery bed with a millstone for a pillow.
Its only when we can make the distinction between a person and their inclinations that we can truly recognise the dignity of every human person. What the mind-moulding media moguls seek to do is to reduce each person to their inclinations; and one must wonder why.
Increasingly, in schools, libraries, bookshops, films and on television our children are presented with material that strips them of their innocence and teaches them lies about who they are. There have always been weeds in the wheatfield, but now as Pope Benedict XVI prophesied there are more weeds than wheat. So, what can we do?
We could look at the legacy and moral witness that we have inherited as Christians from the early church. Roman civilisation thought Christians peculiar because they refused to participate in the games that were violent and led to death. They also refused to participate in the bacchanalian orgies, removing themselves from public events that violated human dignity, love and the moral teachings of God. This meant that they were approached with suspicion in a world where a person was defined by their participation in the community. They were mocked, ridiculed, rejected and scorned because they would not be accomplices to evil.
Today, any Catholic parent who chooses to safeguard their child against that which violates human dignity will be mocked and made to feel like a madman. “It’s only a kiss,” they will be told. “Love is love,” another will say. It can be a lonely place outside the city walls, but it doesn’t have to be. The harder the City of man pushes the more likely it is that the City of God will wake up to what is happening and resist.
It’s time for Christians to say “I will not participate in this, I will not normalise this, I will not be an accomplice to this, I will not deliver my child into the hands of those who seek to pervert and destroy that which is true, good and beautiful. I will speak the truth in love.”
For it is love that compels us to make those changes that mark us out as Christians, despite the cost to ourselves. It is love that rids the house of peanuts, and love that grabs the spiritual EpiPen of the sacraments when the forces of darkness wrap their talons around our children.