Month: October 2002

October 4: St. Francis of Assisi
One way to observe St. Francis’ day is to visit your local Franciscan friary or Poor Clare convent and attend its “Transitus” service, commemorating the “Passing” of St. Francis into eternal life. These are usually held on October 3 in the evening; contact the community for time and location. Not all Franciscan communities will have the service; sometimes two or more houses in an area will hold one service together.

Doing the right thing
Barbara and David Thorp are a couple of my favorite Catholics. He’s a long-time evangelist who has served the Church across the country through the Charismatic Renewal movement; she’s a licensed social worker who built the Boston archdiocese’s Pregnancy Help service from the ground up. This year she accepted perhaps the toughest job a layman has in the archdiocese: bringing the Church’s help to victims of abuse by clergy.

After hearing the stories of 150 alleged victims of clergy sex abuse, Barbara Thorp said the hardest part of her job is simply listening.
“I can’t tell you the number of men I’ve sat across from, weeping, and how disturbing it is to have a 40- or 50-year-old man shedding the tears of a 12-year-old boy. It’s heartbreaking,” said Thorp, head of the Office of Healing and Assistance for the Archdiocese of Boston.

As a follow-up to my earlier review about unsolicited comments about incoming babies(http://catholiclight.blogspot.com/2002_09_22_catholiclight_archive.html#85500136), here’s the latest one. My wife Paige and I were at the radiology office today, looking at our latest offspring, and the radiology doctor is amazed that we have two little kids with another on the way. “You’ll have three kids under five!” she says. “Actually, three under four,” Paige corrects. “You’re crazy!” saith the doc. She repeats this assertion several times.
The doctor then tells us that she’s got an eight-month-old who doesn’t sleep through the night, and who always throws her food over the side of her high-chair. She can’t bring herself to discipline her daughter, and she won’t let the baby cry herself to sleep. Our daughter, Anna, is two years old, and has a willful streak you wouldn’t believe. However, if she does something bad, we scold her. If she does something really bad, we spank her. When she was about eight weeks old, we let her cry herself to sleep when she went to bed — and like magic, she’s slept through the night ever since. Who, ladies and gentlemen of the world, are the crazy parents?
My point isn’t to gloat about our superior parenting skills, but rather to say that making little kids behave isn’t horribly difficult. I hang with a lot of toddlers these days, and Paige hangs with many more, and in our experience there’s a stong correlation between good behavior and judicious encouragement and punishment. When they are tiny, they respond to, “If you eat your dinner, you get to eat a cookie,” or “If you draw on the wall again, you get a spanking.” I’m told it’s harder for teenagers, who have allegedly reached the age of reason.
The doctor represents many who love to over-dramatize their childrearing struggles. It really saddens me to hear parents roll their eyes and go into their sob stories about how hard it is to raise their two darlings. I think to myself: two kids? With clothes washers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, power locks in cars, and non-rectal thermometers, two kids are kicking your parental butts? Your great-grandmother probably raised at least four or five, and she probably didn’t have any modern convenience except for indoor plumbing, maybe.
The reason it’s sad is because they’re using their exhaustion — which probably comes at least in part because they consider leisure activities like television as if they’re holy obligations — as an excuse not to have more children. Don’t misunderstand: I know how hard it is to run a family even with labor-saving devices. Some kids are worse-behaved than others; some are born with disabilities; some families aren’t materially blessed. My heart goes out to anyone bringing up children under truly difficult circumstances. Most people around here don’t fit into that category.
When I hear stories like the doctor’s, I think, at least she has to deal with the consequences and I don’t. But I’m forgetting that someday her kid will be released into the world, and we will all have to live with the brattiness.
(By the way, somebody should give me a remedial class on Blogger, and tell me how to make my dang URLs into gen-u-wine links.)

The Apostrophe Protection Society
Making compulsive proofreaders’ lives a little easier since 2001.

John’s earlier comment brought to mind a Jonah Goldberg column last April that said Martin Luther was, in many respects, a forerunner of the Islamic fundamentalists of today. I won’t repeat his points, because he did it so well, but it’s interesting that a man who is neither Catholic nor Protestant can see why authority is inescapable when settling religious matters. He seems to be something of a Catholic sympathizer these days (Goldberg, not Luther).
I’ve read that some non-political Islamic groups want to re-establish the caliphate, so maybe the CIA could support them. Then again, within the first few decades of Islam, there were two competing caliphates, Muslims starting warring against each other, and it was off to the races!
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg040302.asp