4-2. The corruption of souls by the new catechisms...
“The catechisms, My children--We find abominations, lies, and sinfulness abounding in these books. Your children, their minds are being corrupted and destroyed. The eyes are the mirror of the soul.
“Each parent has an obligation to his children to remove these diabolical books from his school. The laxity of parents, the apathy of those who have influence . . . O My children, tears shall be shed; there will be gnashing of teeth soon! I ask you, I plead to you as your Mother to prepare your household now.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, May 29, 1976
Dietrich von Hildebrand, called by Pope Pius XII "the 20th Century Doctor of the Church,” was one of the world's most eminent Christian philosophers. No other Catholic writer has so thoroughly echoed the message of Our Lady of the Roses than Dietrich von Hildebrand. The following is an excerpt from his book entitled The Charitable Anathema.
After inspecting some of the new series of grammar-school catechisms, one is led to ask if the authors really believe that theirs is the most efficacious way of communicating to children the true Christian faith. Let us examine the approach of the Word and Worship series published by Benziger Brothers. (What is said of this series can also be applied to the catechisms published by Sadlier and by the Paulist Press.)
In the Gospel according to St. Luke we read:
And a woman named Martha welcomed Him to her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who also seated herself at the Lord’s feet, and listened to His word. But Martha was busy about much serving. Ad she came up and said: “Lord, is it no concern of Thine that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her therefore to help me.” But the Lord answered and said to her: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things; but there is only one thing necessary. Mary has chosen the best part, and it will not be taken from her.”
But in the third-grade text, We Follow Jesus, Luke 10:30-42 is paraphrased as follows:
Martha and Mary were close friends of Jesus. Mary was talking to Jesus. Martha came to Jesus. She was worried about cooking the dinner. “Jesus, get Mary to help me,” said Martha. But Jesus said, “Now, Martha, do not worry too much about dinner; just do the best you can.”
Now, is this blatant falsification of the Gospel–which deliberately omits the very point and essence of the episode–supposed to be some refined pedagogical trick? Jesus’ visit to Bethany is made into something so insignificant and pedestrian that there remains no reason whatsoever for including it in the teaching of religion. Bu the result is worse than an irrelevance: it represents a disfigurement of the sacred humanity of Christ. And this is the general effect of these three new series of catechisms.
It is difficult to believe that a member of the Church in full possession of his faculties would consider such a distortion of the Gospel, of the teaching of Christ, a valid and effective means of transmitting the truth.
What would one say, if, for “pedagogical reasons,’ children were taught that Paul VI was one of the heads of state in the 1960s and was primarily concerned with international affairs, or that William Shakespeare was a sixteenth-century businessman to be remembered for his financial management of a London company, or that Ludwig von Beethoven earned a place in the history of music because he was the father of jazz?
To strip the sacred humanity of Jesus of all features that constitute the epiphany of God, to present Him as a “jolly good fellow” and ordinary person, is to preclude the growth of faith in Christ’s divinity.
The Word and Worship catechisms pretend to present the message of Christ while omitting all references to sanctification, to eternal life, to God’s judgment, to eternal beatitude, to Hell... while keeping from Catholic students knowledge of the one thing necessary. This is certainly not less of a falsification of Christian revelation and the doctrine of the Church than would be a history of the United States that did not mention the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, or the Constitution.
Is it possible for a sincere Christian to believe that the way to draw children to Christ–to the epiphany of God, Him to Whom St. Peter said: “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8)–is to tack His Name on to a list of “famous” men in the following way:
George Washington is famous because he was a great general. Daniel Boone is famous because he was a great Indian scout. Babe Ruth is famous as a great baseball player. Many men are famous for many different reasons. Jesus Christ, however, is famous because he loved people so much.
When Christian saints (those who authentically reflect the sacred humanity of Christ) and even the God-man Himself are placed on the same level as humanitarian philanthropists and controversial political figures like Martin Luther King, the very qualities that distinguish a saint from ordinary men are suppressed and obscured.
Children will never grasp the unique glory of holiness while they are exposed to such an approach. The proper way would be to show them a real moral hero such as Socrates, and then to insist on the radical difference between even such an admirable figure and a Christian saint, a St. Peter, St. John, or St. Francis of Assisi.
But the authors of these books have other concerns. For example, readers of We Follow Jesus are told that Paul Tillich was a great Christian. Now, to say the least, he was certainly no Christian–as Professor Freeman of the University of Rhode Island has clearly shown. What can be the authors’ point, except to make cruel propaganda for the desacralization of religion? And the interest in “ecumenism” in these books is completely out of place. The classroom is not the place to practice ecumenism, but to present the glorious word of Jesus, the mystery of the Church and the Sacraments, and the heroic lives of the saints. True ecumenism presupposes that Catholics are firmly rooted and educated in the Faith.
"why do these scribblers for false prophets dare to assume the right to teach the Christian religion to Catholic children?"
The falsification that characterizes Word and Worship’s portrayal of Christ in the Gospel is carried over in the presentation of Christian morality and the moral teaching of the Church. The authors consider the teaching of the Ten Commandments an outmoded legalism that has no place in a religion of love. This is in direct contradiction to what Christ taught. He said: “Keep My Commandments.” The result of the presentation of Christian morality in these catechisms is that little children are encouraged not to submit to the guidance of the Church, so that they may exercise their “freedom and responsibility.”
It is too much to expect one to believe that those who are responsible for these textbooks really intend to convey to the children the authentic doctrine of the Church. We must rather conclude that they intend to spread a new conception of Christianity, one that radically contradicts the doctrine of the Church, the Christian revelation that has been the object of faith for almost two thousand years, from the day of Pentecost to the present. But then, why do these scribblers for false prophets dare to assume the right to teach the Christian religion to Catholic children? Should they not in all honesty cease to present themselves as representatives of the Church introducing children to the Catholic Faith, when they are in fact arbitrarily substituting their secularized Christianity for the genuine doctrine of the Church? Why, if they have lost their faith in the traditional teaching of the Church, will they not stop passing off their own heresies as orthodox doctrine? If they want to remake Christianity into a worldly religion, why don’t they at least have the honesty to leave the Church and work at their devilish purpose openly?
They will probably answer that they are not heretics, that they merely wish to present a Christian faith that suits “modern man.” But the question remains: Whence do they derive the authority to replace the doctrine of the Church with this “modernized” Christian faith? As soon as they desire to change Christian revelation by adapting it to modern man, as soon as they believe that the mentality of an epoch is the measure of divine revelation, they are no longer Catholics–whether they want to admit this fact or not.
Catholic parents should not be distracted by the evasive argument that all that is at stake is a question of pedagogy and that ordinary Catholics, those who are not specialists in grammar and high school education, are incompetent to criticize this technical educational matter.
One does not have to be a pedagogue to know that the teaching of error is not the best way to lead students to truth. Further, and quite apart from the fact that the authors of these books are not teaching the doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church, the notion that one can lead people to truth by adapting it to their whims and wishes, as if truth were a product for sale or a club seeking members, is completely erroneous. In religion, such an adaptation–even for “pedagogical” purposes–can at most lead to a nominal acceptance of the Christian faith, a faith that has been so adapted, so stripped down, so reduced to a person’s peripheral worldly experience that it does not require a conversion for its reception.
Moreover, a child not only does not have hardened convictions that the Christian teacher must overcome, but he has a strong inclination toward religion. One forgets thus that the way to attract the child’s soul to God is precisely to present to him the sacred humanity of Christ in its full glory, to confront him with the world above, which surpasses all that this world can offer. This will not be to deprecate natural values, but rather to encourage the child to lift up his heart to something infinitely more beautiful than mere natural values, to glimpse the holiness of Christ’s humanity, in Whom only is the natural perfected and sanctified.
The secularizing authors of the new catechisms would have us believe that religion will appear more lively, more vital, to children if it is assimilated to their daily life. But there are many things for which the atmosphere of daily life is asphyxiating rather than invigorating. If we assimilate the notions of good and evil to the familiar experiences of agreeable and disagreeable, successful and unsuccessful, we necessarily falsify the unique nature of these moral categories. Such a reductive approach bars the way to any understanding of the true nature of moral good and evil. For the reality of Christian morality to come alive in the soul, there must be a concentration on the distinction between moral good and evil, moral goodness and sinfulness, and the mundane notions of success and failure, pleasure and displeasure. Only when the true glory of moral good and the unparalleled disgrace of sin are presented in radical distinction to other antitheses, can the soul of the child be vividly and permanently impressed with the meaning of Christian moral teaching.
It is a mere superstition to believe that religion will be made more vivid when assimilated to daily life. As we have seen, assimilation means distortion. If we want to introduce a child to the message of Christ, to permit this mystery to manifest itself in all its unique intensity, then we must begin with the child’s highest experiences and ascend by analogy to the new and different message of Christ, always being careful to do justice to its unique solemnity. We should, for example, tell children of the conversions of the great religious personalities and make them acquainted as much as possible with the lives of the saints who are the great proofs of the reality of the redemption of the world through Christ.
"Written all over these textbooks which are this very day poisoning the souls of little children is a hatred of the sacred and of the supernatural."
It is common for partisans of the new catechisms to justify themselves by insisting that they represent only necessary “experiments.” “Experimentation” will make religion more “lively” to students. For these people, the slogan of “experimentation” conjures pleasant associations of vitality, scientificness, unprejudiced and anti-dogmatic flexibility, promise for the future. For them, any insight not presented as the results of experimentation is considered abstract, unreal, irrelevant. Yet there are fields in which experimentation is not merely the wrong method and thus unscientific, but indeed totally incompatible with the nature of the subject. So it is with ethics, for example. Experimental ethics is unscientific, self-contradictory, and unethical. The very idea of letting someone commit crimes in order to study ethics is utterly immoral. And to make experiments with the souls of children is order to discover the most efficacious way of teaching religion is an irresponsible disrespect for the children and the very antithesis of a religious attitude. As long as experimentation is confined to merely technical matters–for example, to the problem of developing the memory–there can, of course, be no objections. But when the experimentation affects the content of faith, as it does in the catechisms we have been discussing when it poisons the souls of children with a distorted presentation of Christian revelation, then it becomes a diabolical game, a terrible irreverence against God and innocent children; it becomes a kind of spiritual vivisection, something far worse than medical vivisection on children would be.
But we repeat: Catholic parents should not be distracted by pedagogical arguments. The pedagogy put forward to justify the new catechisms is false. But what we are confronted with here is not a question of pedagogy. Written all over these textbooks which are this very day poisoning the souls of little children is a hatred of the sacred and of the supernatural. This demands more from Catholic parents than arguments: it demands action. The rights of Catholic parents in these matters were reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council. Their duty in the present hour is clear. They must not tolerate their children’s being force-fed a secularized Christianity. They must insist that these texts be removed from the Catholic grammar schools, and they must withhold their children and their financial support from these schools until such vicious books as the Word and Worship series are removed.
INDOCTRINATED IN HERESY
“Your children must be protected from the evils that abound in your school systems in your country and most nations throughout the world. They are being taught immorality and a loss of faith in the supernatural and the knowledge of their God. All manner of heresy has been indoctrinated into their youthful minds. It is a diabolical plan of Lucifer.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, June 18, 1979
SPEAK OUT
“Many homes shall be torn asunder by the fall of the children. Parents shall shed tears of anguish. Therefore, prevent this now while your children are at a young age. Give them a firm foundation of their faith. Be not afraid to speak out against heresy and abominations, even if you have to do this against your clergy. For many now have fallen in with the modernists, the socialists, the communists, and some the satanists. Therefore, My children, I make known to you the crisis that lies ahead.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, June 18, 1979
HERESY, APOSTASY ABOUND
“Because of the arrogance and pride of My clergy, many of Our sheep, Our children, are lost to the Kingdom of Heaven. Many mitres are destined for the abyss. Heresy and apostasy abounds upon earth.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, June 18, 1979
MOURNFUL HERESY
“Heresy, O mournful heresy! Pastors, this shall not be tolerated. You must not destroy Our young flowers, the children. You must nurture them with pure waters of faith. This faith must not be tainted by modernism and humanism. You have set upon the world a confusion of mind and a darkening of spirit.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, November 20, 1975
MUST NOT COMPROMISE
“You must not compromise your Faith. You cannot lower your standards and bring others into My Son's Church, for you bring in all manner of heresy and abominations. By your example did you gather Our sheep, and by your example now do you scatter them. I say, as your Mother: Turn back from your road, for you are on the way to perdition.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, June 5, 1976
HERESY PREVAILS
“Each man shall be accountable for his own soul. You shall not allow heresy to prevail in My House! You shall not permit the corruption and destruction of the young souls with error, fallacy, and heresy! You shall not, in the name of technology and science, corrupt the teachings given to you by those who came before you, sent by the Eternal Father to enlighten you on the path and the way to your Kingdom, the Kingdom of your God in Heaven!”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, February 10, 1976
HELL-HOLES OF HERESY
“Can you, O bishops, not spare but the little time to look into your seminaries? I say but one expression to you: they have become hell-holes of error and heresy! Clean out your seminaries, My bishops! My Son will lay upon you a heavy hand in penance! Is this what you want? Do you not have the courage of your convictions to stand by the truth of your Faith? Have you given yourselves to such foul sin, O bishops, in your personal lives that you do no longer recognize sin as being a way of life? Are you also condoning sin to become a way of life?”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, October 2, 1976
HERESY IN THE CLASSROOMS
“And what are they teaching in the classrooms? Oh, my sister, you must tell the world—all the children of earth, of the Eternal Father—that they are teaching heresy! Oh, that's untruth. Satan is deluding many and poisoning their minds. Heresy, O mournful heresy!”
- The Bayside Prophecies
St. Theresa, May 17, 1975
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