Comments for The Youth, the Pope, and the Media at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 11 out of 11 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:55:24 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5234 The phrase "be in the world, not of the world" keeps coming into my mind while reading this article and the comments. I think I disagree with the statement that it is the role of parents to "shelter" their children. It is the role of parents to form their children so that they can live in the world and be a positive influence in and to it. Granted, formation may include sheltering, but not entirely. I'm all for limiting tv and video games but not to the point that they literally have no idea what they are. I've seen that happen. We can't just keep things away from our children without telling them why. Children need to know, to an extent, what is out there. Otherwise won't they be caught of guard once they experience it? And children need alternatives. Parents need to read to them, to play sports with them, take them hiking, build things, etc. They need to know right from wrong and to have a properly formed conscience. - marcus Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:11:41 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5223 I like the cave analogy for these times. Three cheers for the young men and women religious who are heroically leading them out. Each soul counts. - Edmund Sat, 06 Nov 2010 09:38:53 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5222 Gramp, Jacob's point of view is deeply corrupted. WE have officially entered a new dark age where those with the most IQ points arrive at the same concusions as Hitler. As parents our duty is to imitate Christ as did the saints, and leave what is owed to Ceasar to Ceasar and his minions. Pax Christi vobiscum, achilles - Achilles Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:07:06 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5221 Lee writes: But television was junk affecting impressionable minds in the fifties. I was there and lived through it. Where do you think the Woodstock generation came from? There was a constant walkdown of our morals, a walkdown that continues. ========================================================== I was born in 1942, and grew up watching The Hit Parade, The Honeymooners, Show of Shows, Bishop Sheen, I Married Joan, Howdy Doody, Amos N Andy, etc. Are you seriously going to compare that with what is aired today both on network and cable? Lee, I don't dispute that it's been downhill since Woodstock, but it was a sharp descent from the 50's to the '70s and now we're in the deepest moral abyss in our lifetimes. I am not pointing fingers here. When you point a finger, there are three pointing back at you. Parents, however disciplining, cannot TOTALLY control the actions of their children. If this were the case, we would not have so many runaways, "delinquents" as we used to call them, disrespect, patricide and matricide, etc. At some point -- and it used to be earlier in the "old days" -- children must bear responsibility for their own actions. There is only so much parents can do. I give the last word to: Proverbs 23:22 "Listen to your father, who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old." - Grump, aka Gramp Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:35:46 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5220 Jacob, you can not possibly be serious. Your post today was much clearer than yesterday. Television is about 10 gabizillion times worse today then it was 40 years ago. The commercials, content tethered to hedonism and narcissism, it is incredible. Your indictment of Grump is way off the mark. The facts are, even though the 60's generation narcisis has made quite an impact on the current dissolution of morality, our current degradation stems much more from the flawed antrhopology of many self conscious philosophers such as Hagel, Marx, Freud, Comte, et al. and the social utopian social constructors that believe in progress and the perfectability of man have steadily wasted our moral capital inherited from our Founding Fathers. TO deny that our current problems are not much more severe than they were in past decades is a much greater problem than anything you incorrectly attrubuted to Grump. It is as Augustine said in the City of God, either you "love God to the contempt of self, or you love the self to the contempt of God," Man trying to elevate himself above God is the problem Jacob. - Achilles Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:28:20 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5218 Grump, According to Jacob you blame the younger generation, but frankly I don't see it. Where? You do write: "You simply can't restrict the junk that impressionable youngsters are exposed to nowadays." But television was junk affecting impressionable minds in the fifties. I was there and lived through it. Where do you think the Woodstock generation came from? There was a constant walkdown of our morals, a walkdown that continues. Therefore, as a young parent in the late 70's I also was very concerned about television and the "culture." Providentially, we lived across the hall from a young Korean couple who also had a baby boy. From their apartment came very strong cooking odors and a lot of Korean chatter. It occurred to me one day that their child might as well be growing up in Seoul. And with that came the realization that I could create in my own home whatever culture I wished. Parents, especially fathers, don't realize the power they have. The culture of their home is TOTALLY in their power. They are the gatekeepers. They can give their kids such a formation that by the age of 12 or 13 they totally despise the popular culture, or at least the seamier aspects of it. Many dads will say in response that they don't want their children to live sheltered lives, but they exist for no other reason than to provide sheltered lives for their children. If they raise them on the lives of the saints and other heroes, if they expose them to good literature such as the Chronicles of Narnia etc., by READING TO THEM in the evenings, they will elevate their tastes, undergird their morals, baptize their imaginations and preserve them completely from being swept away by "the culture." This is the way Therese Martin was raised, the way Solanus Casey was raised and many, many other strong people of the pre-television era. We can do the same thing. There is nothing standing in the way except a lack of leadership. - Lee Gilbert Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:43:17 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5217 Not "blaming" anyone, Jacob, merely giving a point of view. When I went to school, the worst offenses you could commit were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, wearing improper clothes, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. Contrast to today’s main problems -- drug and alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, assault and guns in the schools. In those days, there was no Internet, no texting, no computer dating, no day care centers, no group therapy, no word processors, no credit cards, no gay parades, no ATM machines, no talking back to your parents or teachers, no TV talking heads and no reality shows. I did my best as a father and my kids turned out very well. We made mistakes, of course. Every generation does. But, consider that the further we get from the original Pair, the more imperfect we become. In the next 40 years you will be able to repeat the same mistakes and then add your own and then you, too, will complain about the new generation you raised. - Grump Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:47:44 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5214 Grump you seem to answer your own sentiment with your name choice. You're telling me when you were young and they wouldn't let black people eat with you that was the promised age? When abortion and "the pill" became common occurrences (the fifties), that was a great era? I also have a tendency to romanticize the past but at your age you should be past such delusions. One of our biggest problems is that the last two generations have been deeply flawed yet spend all their time blaming their kids that they didn't raise them right. You guys built this society we have right now...you can't all of a sudden blame us just as you're turning it over. Let's hope in thirty years we'll have enough virtue to take responsibility for the problems we've maintained or created..rather than taking the coward's way out and blaming our children. - Jacob Fri, 05 Nov 2010 06:31:51 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5212 Lee, I sympathize. When my kids were growing up, they only watched Sesame Street. (That was 30 to 40 years ago). Today, it must be impossible to keep children shielded from the onslaught of evils that flow electronically into every home. It was a good start throwing the bastard out, as you put it. But unless you can pull the plug on your TVs, take away their cellphones, Ipods, etc., you simply can't restrict the junk that impressionable youngsters are exposed to nowadays. At 68, I feel a bit like the German poet Goethe, worn out and pessimistic that a great age has passed and am left to repeat his words in 1818: "I thank God that I am not young in so thoroughly finished a world." - Grump Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:06:34 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5211 A Tradionalist friend of mine, an attorney, was asked to teach CCD for high school students preparing for Confirmation in an upscale Novus Ordo parish. In his first meeting, after speaking of Christ for about ten minutes he was asked by a student: "Is Jesus still alive?" Another student volunteered she thought He was dead. - Bill Fri, 05 Nov 2010 02:57:51 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/the-youth-the-pope-and-the-media.html#comment-5207 "If some aspect of the media can be harnessed to bring the pope and his message to Catholics...." Right. Ala James Dobson, let me role play with you for a moment. Our family of five children, two of them adolescents, live near a college campus and provide room board to a very interesting and personable young man. He has an incredible fund of funny stories and magic tricks. He's good looking, very athletic, plays the guitar, and my two teenagers worship the ground he walks on. But here's the thing, whenever he is entertaining us or interacting with us, there is ALWAYS something that's a little off, just a little. Perhaps it's a little laugh at the expense of the Church, a story that's slightly off color, or thinly veiled amusement at our going off to Church on Sunday morning. It is dramatically affecting my family. Only since he arrived have my children started asking me why we have to go to Mass on Sunday. How can I harness his incredibly winsome personality to bring the message of Christ and His Church to my family? What should I do? I am at a total loss. Any Catholic father saying that over a beer at the Knights of Columbus would have everyone looking at him in complete disbelief. Somebody would say, "What, are you kidding me? Throw the guy out!" Until Catholic fathers decide that the Catholic formation of their children is more important than televised sports, and until they do the sort of thing you did with those three young people- imparting to them the holy lore that makes a Catholic life possible and attractive- then we are going to continue to experience the same dramatic attrition that we have for the past five decades. I should think it would be far more possible to harness the incredible power of baptized and confirmed Catholic fathers than the power of the media, which after all function and thrive primarily as vectors of the world, the flesh and the devil. Anticipating this possibility in 1949 Pius XII in his allocution on Radio and Television quoted the pagan poet Juvenal: “Nothing impure in the home!” After we have “thrown the bastard out,” our wits will likely clear sufficiently to see what to do next, which is probably as completely obvious. - Lee Gilbert Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:29:52 +0100