St. Joseph the Worker: We Are More Than What We Do

    They say that necessity is the mother of invention but, as today's feast of St. Joseph the Worker shows us, sometimes measures taken for practical purposes can point to deeper truths.

Holy Family Father and Son, by Corbert Gauthier

    The memorial of St. Joseph the Worker is a very recent addition to the liturgical calendar. Pope Pius XII, who wanted to present a Catholic alternative to the Communist celebration of May Day, instituted it in 1955.  Who better to counter the self-proclaimed "vanguard of the workers" than a great Saint who was also a laborer, a man known for his patience and perseverance, but also his piety?  As such, St. Joseph is also the ideal embodiment of the Dignity of Work.  He shows us that work is not simply something we do to survive, or that connects us to a certain economic class, but is an essential part of our humanity, a way in which we act, at least in a small way, as co-creators with God (see St. John Paul II's Laborem Exercens).
     At the same time, we can see that while a worker may be honored for his work, he is not defined by it.  Here the Catholic view stands in sharp contrast to the outlook of Marxism, where a working person's primary identification is with his class, and he finds meaning by working toward the "workers' paradise" of a fully communist society; since the realization of the workers' aspirations is the Greatest Good in this worldview, those who are seen as obstacles (such as members of the Capitalist Class) deserve to be extirpated.  Western market-driven societies have their own false anthropology in the phenomenon of the workaholic, whose whole life centers on his career, and who sees no meaning beyond it.  
     Christians, however, see our primary identification as adopted sons an daughters of God: equal in dignity (regardless of externals such as class, sex, race, etc.), called to love, and all of us members of the One Body of Christ who are are made in the image and likeness of God the Creator. What we do is an expression of what we already are, particularly when, as Christians we dedicate our work to the Greater Glory of God (Ad Maiorem Dei Gratiam), as St. Ignatius Loyola put it.
     Now look at St. Joseph.  There have probably been carpenters more skillful than Joseph, or more productive, but none of them have feast days. We honor him today in his role of worker, but that's not why he is a Saint.  He's a Saint, and a great Saint, because he cooperated in God's great work of salvation.  Today's feast reminds us that we can all aspire to sanctity, even humble laborers, and that whoever we are, and whatever we do in this world, what we do for the Kingdom of God and who we are in the eyes of the Father is what matters in the end. 

4th Day of Christmas: Holy Innocents and Holy Innocence

Today is the 4th Day of Christmas. In the family group of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus we see God's plan for the family (more on that this coming Sunday, the Feast of the Holy Family).  Today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents shows us how much The World (here in the person of King Herod) respects God’s plan. Today's feast commemorates Herod’s slaughter of every male child two years old and younger in Bethlehem, by which the wicked old despot was trying to snuff out the Messiah that, according to the Magi, had been born there. The Holy Family, however, escaped when Joseph was warned in a dream (see Matthew 1:18-25).

Massacre of the Holy Innocents by Francois-Joseph Navez

The most obvious present-day reflection of the murder of the Holy Innocents two thousand years ago is the wholesale massacre of unborn children by the millions through abortion today. The horror of this slaughter, and the callousness of its perpetrators, was brought into sharp focus in the past couple of years by the release of undercover videos documenting the flourishing commerce in the body parts of the abortion industry’s tiny victims.

We see a subtler echo of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents in those youngsters who have dodged the abortionist, but are robbed of their Holy Innocence by our pornified pop culture.  Children today are directly in the path of a constant flood of degraded and degrading sexuality that pervades entertainment and advertising, blares out of televisions in airports and doctors’ waiting rooms, and has commandeered the curriculum in public (and to a remarkable degree in private, even religious) schools.  We can see the results in the ongoing dissolution of the family and the attendant host of social ills that inescapably follows.

Here’s where the Holy Family can show us the way.  Just as Joseph and Mary brought Baby Jesus to Egypt to protect him from Herod’s soldiers, we can work to provide some safety for our own children, and other children in our care. It’s true, of course, that even measures such as internet filters and homeschooling can provide only so much protection.  Moreover, critics are quick to point out that nobody remains a child forever: eventually we must all face the world’s challenges.  Quite true - and the Holy Family did not linger in Egypt, nor did the grown Jesus remain an obscure carpenter in his parents’ home.  Nevertheless, aside from one incident at the temple in his twelfth year, he waited until His Time Had Come before he took up his Cross and walked the path to Calvary.  Blessed Pope Paul VI talked about the childhood of Jesus when he visited the Holy Family’s home town of Nazareth.  Blessed Paul said, in part:

 How gladly would I become a child again, and go to school once more in this humble and sublime school of Nazareth: close to Mary, I wish I could make a fresh start at learning the true science of life and the higher wisdom of divine truths . . .

Blessed Paul VI in Nazareth

      May the silence of Nazareth teach us recollection, inwardness, the disposition to listen to good inspirations and the teachings of true masters. May it teach us the need for and the value of preparation, of study, of meditation, of personal inner life, of the prayer which God alone sees in secret.

  Next, there is a lesson on family life. May Nazareth teach us what family life is, its communion of love, its austere and simple beauty, and its sacred and inviolable character. Let us learn from Nazareth that the formation received at home is gentle and irreplaceable. Let us learn the prime importance of the role of the family in the social order.

The child Jesus was formed and educated under the protection of his family before he went out into the world as a man.  In our world the pimps and pornographers of the popular culture have no more regard for the well-being of our children than Herod did for the children of Bethlehem. Is it too much to ask that we allow them a taste of Nazareth while there’s time?

(To read about babies saved from abortion by Christmas Carols and to hear a hauntingly beautiful version of the 16th century "Coventry Carol", a song inspired by the Holy Innocents, go HERE at Principium et Finis)

A Tribute Vice Pays to Itself (Vasectomy Showers, etc.)

An Age That Knows No Shame 

  The celebrated 17th century wit François de La Rochefoucauld once opined, “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue”.  In other words, we lie about what we are doing because we’re wise enough, at least, to be ashamed of it.  What can we say, however, about an age that knows no shame?

   I’m referring here to an article from Britain’s Daily Mail, whose headline blares:

Forget baby showers! Young couples are holding 'vasectomy parties' to celebrate the start of a childless family, and ask guests to name their CAR instead

   While the Daily Mail further tells us that “The cost of having children is deterring a growing number of couples from expanding the family unit”, the comments of the seemingly happily self-sterilized couples in the article suggest other motives:

        Instead of the traditional baby shower, couples also invite friends to 'car showers' where guests help them name their new car.

They also play board games like The Price Is Right, where they talk about what they can buy now that they've saved money by not having kids.

Clearly, it’s not that they don’t have money, they simply would rather spend their cash on toys for themselves than on their own progeny.

   Now, in order to equate one’s child with a car - or not really equate, actually to value one’s own child as less than a car - one must engage in a certain amount of dehumanization.  We can’t simply say that “I prefer playthings to my own sons and daughters”, so we instead we say things like:

        ‘All a baby shower is a party to celebrate that you had sex,' wrote another user [of the blog WereNotHavingABaby.com]. 'That a sperm managed to hit a fertile egg. A vasectomy shower is a party to celebrate soon to be sex.’

   Nobody, including almost certainly the person who first wrote it, really thinks that a baby shower is intended to celebrate “That a sperm managed to hit a fertile egg”.  People have baby showers to celebrate the creation of new life, to welcome a new member of the family, and as a way of sharing  that life with the wider community.  A “vasectomy shower”, likewise, doesn’t celebrate “soon to be sex”, it “celebrates” the decision to render that sex barren and empty, a meaningless self-indulgence. It is an attempt to glorify, or maybe better yet justify, saying “no” to life.

   Not all vasectomy party supporters put the matter quite so crassly, of course; some aim for a more reasonable-sounding tone.  One woman, for instance posted the comment:

I had swallowed the motherhood mandate hook, line, and sinker and I had never given myself the space and time to question whether I really, really want children.

   In some ways this last comment is sadder than the in-your-face defiance the more outrageous sterilization promoters.  She seems to have truly come to believe the current conventional wisdom that what she “really, really wants” should be the paramount thing.  There is no sense  that she owes anything to any children she might otherwise bear, to her family, to her community, or to her God.

Non Serviam!

   We all want what we want, of course: that’s the way of our fallen human nature.  Our wishes and desires are among our strongest motivators. At the same time, healthy societies have always recognized that if they are to flourish, or even just survive, more is required.  Individuals need to see their own fulfillment as tied in with and subordinate to that of their society. There have always been positive incentives (calls to heroism, public acclaim, etc.), and also negative consequences: our modern word “idiot” comes from the Greek ἰδιώτης (“idiotes”), from the adjective meaning “one’s own”.  The idiot was one who rejected the community to make his own way and set his own standards.

Gustav Dore's depiction of Satan cast down from Heaven

   The revelation of Jesus Christ raises the issue to an even higher level.  Christ tells us not merely to find our own fulfillment within the larger community, but that “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) . . . and he backed it up with his own death “for the many”. For the better part of two millennia the central image of Christianity, God’s self-sacrifice out of love for all, has dominated not only the Church but, to a great degree, Western culture itself.  We can see it in the visual arts, and in music, but also in certain cultural expectations.  When we really, really wanted to follow our own desires in defiance of right order, we knew that we were were also defying the Will of God, and turning our backs on Christ’s willing acceptance of death for our sake.  That didn’t always stop us, of course, but often it did.  Even when it didn’t, the knowledge of the standard Christ set for us on the Cross fed and strengthened the voice of Conscience calling us back.

   That history is important, because it means that our current state of shamelessness is of a different order than that of the age of Caligula and Nero.  The Romans of two thousand years ago were rejecting the the human wisdom of their forbears, which was foolish and destructive: one consequence is that the old patrician nobility of Rome, including families that had been prominent for centuries, virtually died out by the end of the first century A.D.  In our case, we are rejecting not mere human wisdom, but Divine teaching and the example of God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, his gift of Himself offered up for us on the Cross.  We are following a different example, that of Satan, into whose mouth the poet John Milton puts the words, Non Serviam!, “I will not serve!”.

Giving The Devil His Due

   We don’t see these exact words come from the Devil’s mouth in the Bible, but they had been associated with him long before Milton composed Paradise Lost because they so accurately sum up the nature of Satan’s rebellion.  And they do in fact come from Sacred Scripture, in the book of Jeremiah, where we see the prophet chastising the wayward people of Judah:

Your wickedness will chasten you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the LORD your God; the fear of me is not in you, says the Lord GOD of hosts.  "For long ago you broke your yoke and burst your bonds; and you said, 'I will not serve.' Yea, upon every high hill and under every green tree you bowed down as a harlot.  Yet I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?” (Jeremiah 2:19-21)

Michelangelo's "Jeremiah"

   Since Non Serviam (as it appears in the Latin Vulgate translation) so perfectly captures the attitude that led Lucifer to his fall, these words naturally came to be associated with the Devil.  To take it a little further, if it was “evil and bitter” for God’s chosen people to abandon his ways, surely it is the same for us Christians, who also were planted “as a choice vine, wholly of pure seed.”  The chastisement that inevitably flows from our collective refusal to Christ’s call to self-sacrifice is abundantly clear, if we’re willing to see it.  It is evident in the disintegration of the institution of the family and all the needless misery that follows, we can see it in the dying populations of the formerly Christian countries of Europe and, soon, North America, and in many other social ills. Even worse, it is manifested in the decline of Faith, and the likelihood that many souls will be therefore lost forever.

Principalities and Powers

   Jeremiah’s image of harlotry itself fits perfectly with our present situation.  After all, isn’t our era’s great refusal of our Lord’s call to service precisely about indulging sexual desire without responsibility, or consequences, or any limits that we don’t choose for ourselves? Which brings us back to the vasectomy showers, a celebration of sexual pleasure without self-sacrifice, without true union, without real love.  Non Serviam! And just as Satan looks to ensnare all of us along with him in his apostasy, the public glorification of sexual rebellion in vasectomy parties is intended to break down the walls of shame in order to make the repugnant seem acceptable . . . and, ultimately, good.  

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis (Buenos Aires Herald)

. . . and if you publicly oppose that newly enshrined “good”, or even refrain from

endorsing it with sufficient enthusiasm, there’s hell to pay.  That has been the strategy of the revolutionaries in every battle of the Sexual Revolution.  That is why not so long the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires (who has since been promoted to a position of some prominence in Rome) said that the push to “redefine” marriage was "a move by the devil, looking to confuse and deceive all children of God" (article here).  The same judgment applies to other innovations, such as the public celebration of sterilization, that seek to undermine traditional sexual morality. The degradation of our moral norms and the dismantling of social institutions that embody them is, quite simply, diabolical.

Vasectomy parties and and the like may strike us as ridiculous, but they’re not funny.  They might be only a small step on the proverbial Highway to Hell, but who wants to go that way?  More than that, the fact that such a thing can be reported with, apparently, no shame attaching to its promoters is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.  After all, despite the carnality of the battlefield, “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Whose battle standard do we want to follow?

"I Tremble For My Country When I Reflect That God Is Just . . ."

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . .”  - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781.

    Among the most wonderful of the many graces God has bestowed on me in this lifetime is the privilege of fatherhood.  In just a few short years I’ve seen my children go from the enchanting helplessness of infancy to robust young man and womanhood.  I’m always a step (or two, or three) behind the curve, it seems: I constantly find myself surprised not only by how big they are, but by how they’ve grown on the inside.

    Which brings me to the topic of this post.  My son John, now sixteen years old (just short of seventeen) has developed a number of interests: movie-making, writing, science, apologetics, Thomistic Philosophy (he likes to peruse some volumes of the Summa Theologica we picked up at a library book sale), and current events.  Given the decline of morals and the decay of social institutions all around us, he recently found himself, like Jefferson, trembling for his country in the face of God’s justice, and decided, as the proverb says, that it’s “better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”  

    In John’s case, that light is a prayer candle: given that so many of our problems are rooted in the decline of faith, he is urging as many people as possible to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet for the sake of our country.  We live in the United States, but we encourage those of you living in other parts of the world to pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet for your own country as well, because we are all experiencing many of the same things, and we are all subject to God’s justice. My Son has set up a web page HERE explaining his idea, and I have agreed to help him spread the word.  Please take the time to look at John’s page, and join us in this prayer campaign.  

    Thank you, and God Bless.

Never Underestimate The Power Of Prayer (from Principium et Finis)

The Dalai Lama, anti-prayer warrior

I was powerfully reminded recently of the old saying, “Never underestimate the power of prayer”. I had just been reading about the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, who has been urging people not to pray for France or for the victims of the recent Islamic terror attacks in Paris (a theme that has been taken up, much less gracefully, by more secular sources after the terror attack in San Bernadino California).

            Bemused by the apparent incongruity of a renowned religious leader discouraging prayer, I tracked down this news article, which quotes the Dalai Lama as saying:

We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It    is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place . . . We need a systematic approach to foster humanistic values, of oneness and harmony. If we start doing it now, there is hope that this century will be different from the previous one. It is in everybody’s interest. So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments.

            To be fair, the concept of an omnipotent Creator God who really hears our prayers appears to be foreign to the tradition in which the Dalai Lama was formed; we should not expect him to embrace a Christian concept of prayer. At the same time, St. Peter tells us to “to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), and therefore it is proper to point out several false assumptions implicit in the Buddhist leader’s remarks . . . 

To read the rest of this post, please visit Principium et Finis HERE

Teenage Werewolves and Other Mythical Beasts: A Catholic View

Enter The Teenager   

        We tend to take the environment in which we live for granted, to unthinkingly assume that the way things are now is how they are always supposed to be. For instance, I was born just a couple of weeks before the Cuban Missile crisis, and grew to adulthood in a world overshadowed by the Cold War and a seemingly intractable rivalry between the West and the Communist Bloc.  Those of a certain age will identify with my sense of amazement when the apparently permanent Communist Bloc simply vanished in the space of a few short years.  Our tendency to think of the contours of the world we know as fixed and eternal can blind us both to current problems and to future possibilities, but even worse than that: as Catholics we should know that the things that really are fixed and eternal are beyond this world, and they alone give us the context in which to consider worldly things in their true perspective.   

      Consider, for instance, the curious creature we know as "The Teenager", a term that does not simply mean an adolescent (with all the interesting quirks that go along with that stage of development), but a distinct "identity" with its own Teen Culture.  Some years ago I read an article by Thomas Hine called “The Rise And Decline of the Teenager” (here) that crystallized for me something that I should already have known from studying history: that our understanding of the teenager, and what it means to be one, even that there is such a creature, is a very recent product of our historical circumstances.  Hine says:

Most adults seem to view this conflicted, contradictory figure of the teenager as inevitable, part of the growth of a human being.  Yet many people now living [in 1999] came of age before there was anything called a teenager.

A Failed Adolescent

     Hines writes from a secular perspective, and I don’t go along with all of his conclusions, but there is quite a lot of valuable information in his essay.  He traces the birth of “the teenager” back to the Great Depression (the word first appears in print in 1941 in Popular Science magazine), when for the first time a majority of adolescent Americans were actually enrolled in high school; previously, most young men at this age would already be working full time, and most young women would have been married or working in their parents’ home.  The teenager, as Hines plausibly tells the tale, is largely the product of universal (mostly public) high school attendance.

     The article is more concerned with the development of teenagerdom than with exploring its ramifications (he may do more analysis in his books and on his website, which I have not explored), but he does offer some interesting insights.  For instance:

Indeed, the teenager may be, as Edgar Z. Friedenberg argued in a 1959 book, a failed adolescent. Being a teenager is, he said, a false identity, meant to short-circuit the quest for a real one. By giving people superficial roles to play, advertising, the mass media, and even the schools confuse young people and leave them dissatisfied and thus open to sales pitches that promise a deepening of identity.

The word "adolescent" means "becoming an adult", but teenhood is presented to young people as a destination in itself, directing adolescents away from their true mission of taking their place in the grown-up world (hence the "failure"). Hines goes on to say:

We stopped expecting young people to be productive members of society and began to think of them as gullible consumers.  We denned maturity primarily in terms being permitted adult vices, and then were surprised when teenagers drank, smoked, or had promiscuous sex.

Boys To Men?

     There is a lot to think about here.  While there are and have been certain natural features of adolescence, such as impulsiveness, emotionalism, and (dare I say it) a certain arrogance, the idea of a “youth culture”, distinct from (or even in rebellion against) the adult culture is a new and, I would argue, destructive phenomenon. Adolescent males in particular had traditionally exhibited their youthful “spiritedness” in an impatience to join their fathers and participate in the World of Adult Men. Their eagerness to enter this august company, to take on the “identity” of a grown man, was their impetus to integrate productively with the rest of their society. Its markers were not just work, but marriage and fatherhood, and therefore taking on responsibility was the public proof of Manhood.  Now, as Hines points out, the young are encouraged to see adulthood as a time to give free rein to the sort of self-indulgent irresponsibility that is so attractive to adolescents.  One might add that the near-universality of college attendance seems to be extending Teenhood even further into adulthood, with the result that we are seeing ever more Perpetual Teens.

What Are They Teaching in These Schools?

Michael Landon in the film I Was A Teenage Werewolf

     It seems clear to me that we don’t want our adolescent children to self-identify with the secular “youth culture.” When I first read this article our oldest child had just turned three, and we had already decided to teach him and his siblings at home.  We were primarily concerned with the formation of character and instruction in the Faith, and homeschooling seemed the best way to avoid the pitfalls of the teenage peer culture.  At the same time I understand that homeschooling is not going to be the answer for many, probably most, Catholic families. Good Catholic schools are a much better option than the public schools (not all Catholic schools are “good” ones, unfortunately), especially schools that take the faith seriously.  In the best Catholic schools you won’t find sexual morality being taught by Planned Parenthood, there will be less left-wing indoctrination (much will depend, of course,  on individual teachers) and the Catholic faith will not only be taught, but be a living reality in the school.

     On the other hand, any institutional school, however good, will inevitably contribute to some of the negative outcomes noted above. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone; I have taught full-time in Catholic schools for the past twenty-eight years, and I would have quit long ago if I didn’t think they were, on balance, a good thing. Nonetheless, there will be a powerful attraction to the peer culture, and many, probably most, of your sons’ and daughters’ classmates will have been influenced much more by secular values and the consumer culture than by traditional Christian belief and practice. 

Parents Are The Primary Educators

     Whether we send our children to Catholic school or teach them at home, we are their primary educators, and God has given us parents, not the schools (and certainly not the popular culture) the graces to direct their formation properly (see St. John Paul II's Letter to Families).  If we do send our sons and daughters to school we need to make an extra effort to help them form their identity as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, of their family, and of society, not their peer group. One way is to see that they are involved in activities outside of school that involve people of different ages.  For example, when my sons were younger we took part in a Catholic ConQuest group with a lot of boys of different ages, but also a number of fathers who not only directed activities but also participated along with their sons, the adult men acting as guides and role models for the boys.  Also, however good the religious instruction may be at the school, it’s not sufficient; the parents must take a direct role in the instruction of their children and offer an example of living a Christ-centered life (and it’s vitally important for fathers to be the high-priest of the domestic church: see here).  If we who are concerned for the well-being and eternal salvation of our children don’t take the lead, then the secular culture, which cares for neither of those things, will step in.

     Too often I have seen parents throw up their hands in the belief that there is nothing they can do.  But there is: teenagerhood, unlike biological sex, is not an immutable fact.  At the age when young men and women should be well along in the task of conforming themselves to the responsibilities of adulthood, it is unhealthy for them and corrosive of a healthy society to be accustoming themselves greater irresponsibility and self-indulgence. While each of us all must go through his or her teens, none needs to be a Teenager.

Morality and Poverty

Some political commentators like to draw a distinction between between "economic issues", among which are political approaches to poverty, and what they call "social issues", including things like marriage, family, abortion, sexual morality, etc.  In the Catholic view, it is clear that all of these issues are connected; for secularists, whether coming from the right or the left, it is not so clear although, occasionally, one of them stumbles upon it. This piece is about one such discovery. An earlier version of it first appeared last April under the title "In Mother Jones, of All Places" on my blog Principium et Finis.

The Left-Wing Rag

Radical activist, the original Mother Jones

     Back in my secular, radical college days I used to enjoy a leftish publication called Mother Jones, your proverbial Left-Wing Rag.  I had not so much as gazed upon said publication since somewhere around the transition between President Reagan’s first and second terms, when the other day  I happened across a recent copy, and decided to look inside, for old times’ sake.  There among the expected articles about the balefulness of the sinister plastic companies, and a hit job aiming to show that Louisiana’s Republication Governor Bobby Jindal is a wacko because he’s a believing Catholic, and so on, I found a most unexpected piece called “What If Everything You Knew About Poverty Was Wrong? [link]”  I say unexpected not because everything I know about poverty is wrong (necessarily), but because the factual content of the article actually validates much of what is being said about poverty by people on what its author, and the magazine, would consider “the right”.  I take this as a hopeful sign that maybe, maybe, we can start having a conversation about poverty that rises above the usual political divisions.

You Never Know What You Might Find . . . 

     The article, written by Stephanie Mencimer, is a profile of poverty researcher Kathryn Edin, a Johns-Hopkins University sociologist who decided she could better understand the poor if she moved into the most poverty-blasted area of East Camden, New Jersey (although herself a Methodist, one of Edin’s long-time heroes is St. Francis of Assisi).  The article would have us believe that in doing so Edin discovered things previously unknown:

. . . Unlike academics who draw conclusions about poverty from the ivy tower, Edin has gotten up close and personal with the people she studies – and in the process has shattered many myths about the poor, rocking sociology and public-policy circles.

 What are some of these explosive findings? Here’s a sampling:

-. . .most moms on welfare were already working under the table . . . they didn’t get legal jobs because  of a straight-forward economic calculus: Low wages drained by child care, transportation, and other expenses would have left them poorer than they were on welfare.

-In a society that increasingly saw marriage as a choice, not a requirement, low-income women were embracing the same preconditions as middle-class women.  They wanted to be “set” before marrying . . .

-The low-income women in Edin’s study reported that decent, trustworthy, available men were in short supply in their communities, where there were often major sex imbalances thanks to high incarceration rates.

-They believed that if they waited until everything was perfect, they might never have children.  And children, says Edin, “are the thing in life you can’t live without . . .

And what did Edin learn about the fathers of the children?

-“Rather  than viewing fatherhood as a burden, the men almost uniformly saw it as a blessing . . . ‘these guys thought that by bringing children into the world they were doing something good in the world.’”

-“When the babies were born, most of the men reported a desire to be a big part of their lives.  Among black men, 9 in ten reported being deeply involved with their children under the age of two, meaning they had routine, in-person contact with their  kids several times a month.  But that involvement faded with time.  Only a third of black fathers and a quarter of white fathers were still involved with kids older than 10.”

Why do these initially well-intentioned fathers lose interest in their children over time?

“Among the reasons, Edin identifies unstable relationships with the mothers . . . the men also frequently struggled with substance abuse and stints in prison”

A factor not referenced in the article itself, but which comes up in the comments is that a father of children with a series of mothers is naturally going to pay more attention to the children of the woman with whom he is currently involved.

The Third Wheel (or is it Rail?)

     Of course, there’s also a third party involved in these relationships, the government:

Government rules also stood in the way of meaningful fatherhood.  The welfare system tends to view an unwed father solely as a paycheck, not a co-parent . . .

“At every turn an unmarried man who seeks to be a father, not just a daddy, is rebuffed by a system that pushes him aside with one hand while reaching into his pocket with another,” Edin and [her husband, sociologist Tim] Nelson write.

     What I find most interesting about this article is that, when you take out the leftish rhetorical flourishes (e.g., swipes at former President Ronald Reagan and the Clinton era welfare reform), what the author is describing is not that different from what someone like conservative economist Walter Williams is saying, as I discussed in an earlier post [here].  Even when the article tries to rebut the very argument Williams is making it doesn’t quite work.  For instance:

“You hear people say there’s not material poverty in the Us,” says Nelson;  census data, the argument  goes, shows that most of America’s poor have TVs and air conditioning.  But the people their finding in Cleveland and other study sites, says Edin, “aren’t in the census.”

Aside from the fact that by simply discounting the census data you’ve thrown out the only quantifiable evidence you have, this misconstrues the actual argument.  Walter Williams and others aren’t saying that there’s not real material poverty, rather that the causes of poverty in the United States are not primarily material.  Williams say:

What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Now compare that with what Kathryn Edin has discovered: people working “under the table” because the welfare system penalizes employment, government incentives and social pressure simultaneously discouraging marriage (“One of the women had even been chewed out by her grandmother for marrying the father of one of her children”) and encouraging the bearing and rearing of children out of wedlock; fatherhood denigrated both by the system and society; men and women who really do want to be good mothers and fathers, but repeatedly making choices that have the opposite effect. For instance:

The low-income women in Edin’s study reported that decent, trustworthy, available men were in short supply in their communities, where there were often major sex imbalances thanks to high incarceration rates.

The social science research tells us that children raised in single-parent families are more likely to be unemployed, drug-addicted and imprisoned, and because of the consequences of that mothers are making choices that perpetuate and multiply the problem.  Could Williams have come up with better examples of “unwise choices” and “pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state”?

LBJ launched a "War on Poverty" - why does it look more like war on the poor?

     The question now is “where does this leave us?”  That’s a huge question.  Today I’ll just point out that seeing this particular article in Mother Jones gives me some hope that we can start to treat poverty less like just another arena for political combat, and really look at it for what it is.  It seems to me that it is beyond the power of any government or political program to solve the problems of persistent poverty.  The culture of poverty in the inner city is really just one manifestation of a spiritual problem, or collection of problems, that is affecting our entire society.  Lord Acton famously said that “the vices that addle the rich devastate the poor”.  Outside the inner city there’s a whole lot of addling going on, and it’s doing real damage up and down the social scale, even if it doesn’t look as dramatic in the suburbs as it does in East Camden.  While both government and private charity have an important part in alleviating the short term consequences of social disintegration,  the long term the solution is up to us. 
     And what can we do? A good place to start is to lead lives grounded in prayer, strengthened by the Sacraments, tempered by virtue, and exemplified by our love for our neighbors, and most particularly the least fortunate.  This means making choices we may not want to make, but it also requires that we put our trust in God, in the Lord who died for us and for our sins, and whose rising we celebrate this Easter season.