My Son/Daughter Went to College and Abandoned the Faith And the Sexual Revolution

01-08-2023Weekly Reflection

A young woman, Megan Besham, wrote in the December 2022 issue of the magazine, First Things: “Like many a wayward daughter of middle-class America, when I was in college I took up academic culture’s invitation to throw off the moral restraints of my Christian upbringing. I experimented with all manner of substances and licentiousness—even with feminist theory, which almost proved intellectually fatal. “This was the second of two essays about college and the Faith. The first essay was by a different young woman, Veronica Clarke, who chose her college because it was “unapologetically Catholic.

Chances are, though, a Catholic young man or woman might attend a secular university/college, or a nominal Catholic college, which is probably more dangerous to the Faith than a purely secular college, because, even though there are individual faculty and individuals committed to the Catholic Faith and some Catholic things go on, the institution is not committed to the Catholic Faith and there are policies and faculty of the school itself, which contradict the Catholic Faith and not only in theology but in practice. A pseudo-Catholic institution does not commit to the Catholic Faith, although it might have had a glorious Catholic past.

Suffice it to say in that regard that the process of the secularization of Catholic colleges did not just happen. Fr. Michael Buckley S.J. writes: As a matter of fact, Catholic universities have long since recapitulated much of the history of their secularized peers. One may recall the address of Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, to Catholic educators as far back as 1937: "I find it necessary to level against you a scandalous accusation...You have imitated the worst features of secular education...What I say is that Catholic education is not Catholic enough." Hutchins directed this charge while recognizing that "the Catholic Church has the longest intellectual tradition of any institution in the contemporary world, the only uninterrupted tradition and the only explicit tradition; that is, it is the only institution which is conscious of its tradition. What I say is that this tradition must not be merely an idea, but must be practiced." In contradiction to this rich intellectual tradition, Hutchins found Catholic higher education adopting the worst of secular education: athleticism, collegiatism, vocationalism and anti-intellectualism. In these four areas, he stated: "I believe Catholic education is as bad as, maybe worse than, secular education.

Hutchins was prominent educator at the University of Chicago and was not a Catholic. He opposed the deification of college- football as the mark of a college and defined collegiatism as “the production of well-tubbed young Americans. They don’t have much in their heads, but are acceptable as decoration of at least one political party and make good additions to a house-party. The Church has an authoritative teaching document as to what constitutes a Catholic university/college called Ex Corde Ecclesiae from Pope (St) John Paul II. It can be read here at https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae.html

Megan Besham returned to her Christian faith by being challenged by Catholic literature: The Lancelot Grail along with her turning to God in prayer. She said that the diagnosis of Lancelot’s failings were her own. Here was the diagnosis: “[The Lord] gave you such good fortune that success has crowned your every undertaking… And you were so careless of your trust that you baselessly forsook Him….” Veronica Clarke was already stanchly Catholic and chose an unapologetically Catholic college. Nonetheless, many young men and women in ever increasing numbers do abandon the Faith either while in college, or, if they had already abandoned it, were confirmed in their decision by their experiences in college. Given the secularization of colleges including many (most?) formerly Catholic colleges and universities, the question is posed: what is secularization?

Mary Eberstadt, in the December 30, 2022 issue of National Review, tackled this as the question. Why are the millennials (born 1981-1996) and the zoomers (mid 1990’s to a little past 2010) abandoning the Church? Rejected by her are the following: faith is a consolation prize for the poor and backward and higher education and material prosperity drives out God. True materialism can drive out God when money and possessions become an idol. However, she notes data that the more educated and well to do actually are more religious than less educated people. Even during the 1960’s those at the upper end led in church-attendance and not just among Christians. Mormon observance increased as education and income increased she points out. This was also borne out by Msgr. George Kelly’s,book Battle for the American Church. Eberstadt’s essay involves the thesis of a book called How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. As she says it: “Belief and practice across the West went over a cliff between 1963 and 1966. Why?” Atheists and others continue to maintain that higher reasoning drives out the superstitions of Faith. Eberstadt counters about the reason many collegians abandon the Faith:

The more likely dynamic is that, thanks to the new intolerance, the social and other costs of being known as a believer in the public square mount by the year and students take note. Intimidation in higher education, multiplied over many years and campuses, has become another unseen catalyst of secularization. Cancel culture gives intimidated young people including those raised in a faith, one more reason not to go to church. From New York to Paris to Sydney to Buenos Aires, it manifestly is doing just that. Ahh, it’s that dastardly peer-pressure again, which doesn’t just affect college-students! But to answer the larger question what happened to religious practice between 1963 and 1966 she provides, perhaps, the bull’s-eye answer: what happened was the sexual revolution and the decline of and attacks on the family.

Most colleges have a “hook-up” culture: casual sex allegedly without consequences or commitment. By the way, there are always consequences and harm in this behavior the biggest being mortal sin: the loss of union with God, the Blessed Trinity. God instructs us to avoid sexual immorality because of the harm it causes the individual and others. Christian teaching she remarked remains on a collision course with the sexual revolution. She noted: The promise of sex without consequences may be the strongest collective temptation humanity has ever faced. There is no end of the clever forms of self-delusion that men and women can invent to convince themselves that the post-revolutionary order is the “only” order sanctioned by progress. And they are aided in that effort by clerics, who yearn like most people to be liked in all the better places, and who will make two plus two equal five, if that’s what it takes. A well known moral theologian used to describe such clerics as the Father Friendly /Rev Friendly types. See also the article, “The Church Must Speak Out,” at the American Thinker website. It can be accessed here: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/the_church_must_speak_out_.html

With respect to self-delusion, recall that one of the “children” of lust is blindness, spiritual blindness, not physical blindness as some used to foolishly claim was taught in Catholic schools. Note: spiritual blindness can include pseudo-religions and religion substitutes in order to justify sexual lifestyles. Political correctness rules on many campuses as the “official religion.” Consider also this famous passage of Scripture: 3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 2 Timothy 4.

Eberhardt goes on to say: For six decades now, the West has been running a disruptive experiment on its own. It has internalized and broadcast messages inimical to human well-being, such as that families are inevitably problematic and hence negotiable; that having offspring does not matter; that reproduction may even be a bad thing; that there is no difference between the natural family order and “choosing” one’s own ”family,” the flip side of which is the ending with impunity of the lives of fetuses, grandparents, and others whose chief vulnerability is being smaller or weaker in a world where the strong increasingly rule. She goes on to describe a crisis of loneliness in the material rich West and a record-breaking use of psychotropic drugs licit and illicit among the young. It’s worth repeating again and again: Pope Paul VI was a prophet when he predicted that the use of contraceptives would bring about this devaluation of human life, children, family, and a great lessening of respect for women, not to mention fostering irresponsible men and a crisis of fathers. Countless children are growing up without fathers. Often in the media fathers and men in general are ridiculed or seen as the enemy as it reflects extreme feminist ideologies.

Is this an inevitable decline of religious practice among the young? Nothing is inevitable. God is the Lord of history. The Nazi Reich was supposed to last a millennium. It collapsed. People thought Soviet communism would rule the world. It collapsed. The communism being projected by the government in China, while in the ascendancy now, will collapse. Any human construct not built on the truth and in rebellion against the Lord of history will collapse. The issue will be how many will be damaged and hurt by consenting to the lie especially about the true religion, human sexuality and the family. The servant of God Sister Lucy Marto wrote to Cardinal Carlo Caffarra: ...the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. And then she concluded: however, Our Lady has already crushed its head. Genesis 3:15 Of course she, as the new Eve, will crush the head of the serpent by her cooperation with God in the Incarnation of His Son and her whole-hearted acceptance and cooperation with the will of God.