It is good that children receive Confirmation before First Communion. It shows that the Church believes in the power of God’s grace. One can wonder whether at least some of those opposed to this practice have lost their faith and no longer believe in the reality of Divine grace. Although it is true that grace perfects nature and doesn’t destroy it; it is also true that grace is not nothing, that it is not merely symbolic with the efforts of Catechism teachers doing all the work.

One can also call into question the adequacy of modern catechesis. One of the tendencies of the modern approach to ideas is to constantly dumb-them-down and reduce them to their lowest common denominator. Perhaps there is also at work here Occam’s principle of parsimony, an influence of empirical science on theology.

An interesting phenomenon today is that Catholic neo-modernists often drive out of the Church those who would embrace orthodox Catholicism if it were taught correctly. And not only out of theChurch, but into the waiting arms of Evangelicals especially those involved in the Mega churches. There is a very large Mega church where I live and sadly it is made up of thousands and thousands of ex-Catholics. The pastors of these Mega churches [in my hometown one is an ex-Catholic priest] are not passive about education. The youth in these Mega churches are actually prepared for battle against secularism and also what the Evangelicals [falsely] regard as the apostasy of the Roman Catholic Church. One must give them credit for their zeal. Often the children from these Mega churches are better prepared for the aggressive onslaught of secular propaganda dished out in colleges and universities than our Catholic teens. And they are evangelical too, and not averse to what is called ‘sheep stealing;’ the attempt to lure Catholics and mainstream Protestants out of their current flocks and into the Mega church.

I wish I could say that Catholic teenagers were prepared for the assault which these Mega church missionaries make on the Catholic faith through Bible ‘proof texts’ taken out of context. Sadly, many are putty in their hands.

But even worse is the reception young Catholics receive in secular and also [sadly] Catholic universities. A classical music scholar once noted that “classical” composers needed to earn their living by appealing to audiences, even if those audiences were nothing more than Kings and Queens and royal patrons. The scholar noted that contemporary composers of serious music do not have to please anyone because their income stream does not depend on it but only on their salaries as tenured professors. Young Catholics in the university are in the hands of professors, who if they choose to, do not even have to teach things that are logical. Believe me, there is nothing, no matter how bizarre, that has not been held by some college professor somewhere.

Truth is not the most important value on a college campus, except perhaps in the engineering and applied sciences. Truth is actually seen as a terrible handicap. How can that be, you ask? Well the supreme principle in university academics is the somewhat Darwinian adage: ‘publish or perish.’ Graduate students are under enormous pressure to publish, to publish in the most prestigious journals. Untenured professors are even under more pressure to publish. And how does one get published? Through originality and novelty. I cannot publish an article saying that St. Bonaventure was correct in his basic philosophy. It would be impossible for me to do so. One gets published by disagreeing with someone, by coming up with something new and different. I think of the two gentlemen scholars of late who propose that we should legalize the killing of new born babies since they are hardly different from babies in the birth canal. Now I have no idea whether these men really want to see newborn babies slaughtered. But I would bet anything that they wanted to get published and that saying something so outrageous was their ticket.

One then becomes involved in this vicious circle. Novelty sells no matter insane the idea because novelty gets published. Then students are expected to master the plethora of novel ideas and theories, to appreciate them. It isn’t hard to see that eternal truths are going to have no interest whatsoever, unless of course they can be repackaged in a way to make them novel, for example, the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna is “new” to Westerers. So truths are welcome as long as they come from some exotic place. The pursuit of truth within one’s own tradition, however, is absolutely anathema; unless one can find something “bad” in one’s own tradition. Pro-choice folks who absolutely hate St. Thomas Aquinas are interested in his theory of animation of the human soul, although it is based on even older Aristotelian scientific theories that no one follows today.

And so what of Catholic youth? It is also interesting that it is often those with the best education who refuse to give it to the young. I had a Dominican professor who had a wonderful education in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, which he read in the original Latin. But he offered no classes on St. Thomas Aquinas. When I asked him why, he said that he was bored with St. Thomas and that he was currently interested in Christian/Marxist dialogue, pacifism and Soren Kierkegaard. Now it is one thing to study Mr. Kierkegaard when one has had a good foundation in St. Thomas Aquinas and the perennial philosophy. But it is something quite different to take a Catholic with perhaps a 5th grade catechism understanding of the Faith and then skip the whole history of thought up to Mr. Kierkegaard. And of course, Catholic faculty are under the same ‘publish or perish’ gun as their secular brethren. So innovation and novelty were the order of the day and are still the order of the day. Education then becomes a kind of intellectual concupiscence which produces nothing but theory-junkies who have no interest in truth at all. Perhaps that is why relativism is so popular. To be a member of the “academic club” one must have contempt for one’s own tradition while showing tolerance for anyone who hates and despises that tradition. Do you say I am painting things with too broad a brush? Perhaps. But it is not as farfetched as you might think.