This has been an exceptionally interesting thread to read. Please try to pardon this blogger's presumption, but the answer concerning what has become of the children is as clear as crystal to me. It does very much involve prayer and learning a vocational skill, but the correct answer is simplicity itself: Bad education. Horribly bad education. Because contemporary Catholics do not know good education from a hole in the ground.
And it's clear the problem isn't the parents, or not significantly so. Because Catholic parents lazily turning their children over to the clergy to leave the parents free has been a recipe for Catholic success since time immemorial. That is a challenge the Catholic Church can deal with.
To cut to the chase, what this amounts to is that the contemporary Catholic clergy is corrupting the youth. Because that is what self-centered money-grubbing time servers do. They essentially lounge about and corrupt the youth with thoroughly bad education that causes precisely the situation vividly described in this thread.
The bishops are not selecting the best candidates for seminary and also not making good use of the wealthy. The laity is not demanding that the clergy do their job and make a deathly serious effort to provide the absolute best Catholic education humanly possible, and then some, and as if everything depended on it. Because it does.
The situation of the younger generation is clear as day. The personal vocation of Our Lord is education. The Mass and Breviary exist, before all else, to be the heart and soul of Catholic education And while the Catholic life is a warfare, as the Good Book says, it is a warfare above all else for a life of initiations, which is to say, an entire lifetime of Catholic education, and an education so noble as to be fit for an Eternal Youth in Heaven, no less.
This topic of "Whither the youth?" is so important that not only our destinies but the destiny of the world depends on it. No small topic this. And in the end it is for this that the Catholic clergy exists, and for nothing else. The Catholic sacraments are an education in themselves, forming something like the basic structure of Catholic education. Catholics need to reorient our clergy from destructive frivolous fund-raising to a constructive focus on Catholic education.
And our enemies have proven to be quite aware of the need for this change in our priorities as well. This blogger has known numbers of SSPX priests who have done their level best to achieve the required quality education for our youth, but unfortunately they have been all too consistently undermined by their superirors who have used every weapon in their arsenals to lower educational standards as much as they can, by emphasising “numbers”, which is to say foolish unprofessional money-grubbing.
Despite everything the materialists among us want to pretend, Catholic success depends on men, not on money. The ceaseless mania with numbers and money prevents what is most needed for Catholics, a healthy and intelligent focus on the nobility of our men.
No group on earth is so wealthy and successful as the Roman Catholics. We should teach our actual glorious apocalyptic history instead of substituting vulgarised sensational versions of Catholic prophecy convenient for fund-raising purposes in place of that incomparable Roman (meaning White Pan-European) past. We should teach the great auctores of our great Catholic literature and stop replacing them with minor writers who represent the Freemasons, not the Roman Catholics (meaning: the likes of Emerson, Dickinson, Thoreau and Mark Twain be damned!). We should grasp that Catholic liturgy is primarily the heart and soul of our education, and not a superstitious confection-making designed for Judaised apostate self-satisfaction. We should rip apart the vulgar superstitions of the prevailing Marxist pseudo-science and replace it in our education with the incomparable light of genuine Roman Catholic science. The same with languages, philosophy, math, vocational training and every other aspect of our proud Roman pedagogy.
The reason this is not happening is anti-Catholic persecution, plain and simple. A real education of our younger generation always rouses the fiercest oppostion, especially from among our none-too-loyal Catholic leadership. The primary function of Catholic bishops is to teach and they are falling down badly in their fulfilment of their own all-important pedagogic obligations.
The Catholic laity should find and support Roman Catholic bishops who are serious about their responsibility to provide the direction and patronage necessary for effective Catholic education.
But Catholics should also suffer no illusions: Catholic women will have to shed many prayerful tears and Catholic men will have to shed much Roman (and non-Roman) blood for that to happen.
Topic: Where have all the children gone? (Read 5619 times)