“Let the little children come to me…for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 19:13-14)
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian artist and writer who spent eight years in the Soviet Gulags said, “the strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on the level of its industrialization. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted it will not be saved from collapse by any perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”
A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
The fiercest battle being waged in our country is for the hearts, minds, souls, and the very bodies of our children. The battle is accelerating as parents wake up to the reality that their children, naturally trusting of authority, are being indoctrinated, groomed, and sexually exploited. The resulting mental health issues skyrocketing among our nation’s youth is sending parents a clear warning – something has gone terribly wrong. Anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts are no longer uncommon with suicide rates rising fastest among 10–14-year-old girls.
Everywhere you turn targets have been placed on the backs of children to satisfy the blood lust of ideologues, pedophiles, big pharma, the abortion industry, large corporations, social media, the porn industry, and of course the rich and powerful whose thirst for money, power, control, and sex is never satiated. But none have placed more targets on the backs of children than the public school system and the teachers’ unions. Americans, who were sold on the idea that to properly educate children they must be turned over to the “expert class,” have come to realize that the goal of academic excellence has been hijacked.
America’s public schools have become toxic—morally, intellectually, and politically. While it seemed to happen overnight, it has been decades in the making as ideologues, mainly Marxists, saw an opportunity to create a new utopia without God. They began their long march, by infiltrating the universities, teachers’ colleges and finally the entire Public School System and the teacher’s unions.
Perhaps the most influential figure in modern American education is John Dewey, who moved the Frankfurt School, founded by Marxists, to Columbia University. Dewey was a socialist and staunch atheist and spent time in the Soviet Union and upon his return to the States he wrote a book on his admiration for and desire to replicate the way in which their system was used as a political tool. How they were able to so quickly embed a collectivist mindset into children and how they began to dismantle the need for a family unit. “Our special concern here is with the role of the schools in building up forces and factors whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life.”
Dewey eventually came to be known as the Father of Progressive Education. His lack of understanding of the dignity of the human person, and his disdain for religion, animated and informed his view of education. Dewey believed that — more than an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic – education should be a tool for social engineering and the raising of the consciousness of children toward activism. He taught the philosophy of education at the Teacher’s College at Columbia where he was able to have a vast and profound impact. By 1950, already a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts across the country had been trained there and returned to their districts to spread these theories throughout the nation. (cf. Awake, Not Woke, pg. 174.)
Prayer was strategically removed, as was the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by the voice of parents. Love of God, family, and country were replaced by slogans and fads that would change along with the ideological spirit of the day. As a result the modern public-school classroom is no longer focused on academic excellence and critical thinking. Instead, classroom time is taken up indoctrinating children into a cesspool of neo-Marxists critical theories under the guise of DEI, SEL, CRT, CGT, GQT,[1] and a host of other alphabet soup labels. (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Social Emotional Learning, Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Critical Queer Theory)
While all this is nefarious enough, they often distract us from the particularly disturbing push to expose children to pornography on a mass scale. This is intentional and systematic. The “experts” know that pornography can be used as an effective tool to destabilize a society, wreak havoc on marriages and the family, and eliminate God from the culture.
The ”experts” understand that the earlier children are sexualized and robbed of their innocence, the easier it is to make pornography “Perfectly Normal.” As Tom Hampson wrote, “children cannot rationally weigh the pros and cons of the various perspectives on sexuality. Children have neither the knowledge nor the reasoning capacity to consider these issues since the reasoning center in the human brain does not fully develop until age 25.”
Jonathan Van Maren wrote, “I’ve been giving presentations on pornography for a decade, and during that time I’ve heard a thousand versions of the same heartbreaking story. A young boy stumbles across porn on a computer, smartphone, iPad, or some other digital device. The primal power of the sexual imagery that he does not fully understand but pulls him in nonetheless captures his imagination; draws him back over and over again; and eventually, renders him an addict. The average young man with a long-standing porn addiction, in my experience, first watched or saw porn in Grade 6. In the past several years, however, I’ve increasingly encountered young people who got hooked on porn at younger and younger ages. Once I spoke with someone who got addicted at age 8; another who shared his story with me started at age 5. At age 15, struggling to get free, he’d already been looking at pornography for a decade. The porn industry robbed him of his childhood, which he will never get back.”
A common lie told to the young is; there’s nothing wrong with pornography and watching it doesn’t hurt anyone. The truth is that it’s hurting everyone in our society, but let’s start with the individual. Porn violently attacks both body and soul. The way porn attacks the soul is by the fact that it is the opposite of God’s plan for self-giving love. The opposite of love is not hate, it is lust, or desiring to use a person as an object. Pornography is the opposite of love, and so the opposite of everything that you have been created for. I’ve lost count of the people I know whose relationships, including marriages, have been destroyed by pornography. And while pornography is not a drug it works like one in the brain. Sexually stimulating images release powerful neurotransmitters. In less than a second the brain is flooded with a chemical cocktail including: Testosterone, Oxytocin, Dopamine, Epinephrine, and more. Over time one’s brain is rewired like an addict resulting in the need of a high and the belief that promiscuity is normal and over time the abandonment of the hope of ever finding true love.
Already back in 2016 the state of Utah declared pornography a public health hazard. The resolution that passed identified a number of harmful issues that impact individual and public health. Among these are: low self-esteem and body image in adolescents; the objectification of women in which girls are taught they are to be used and boys taught to be the users; the normalization of violence, abuse and rape; an increase in the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution and child pornography; and harmful impacts on brain development and functioning, including “deviant sexual arousal” and difficulty forming relationships. Unfortunately, these claims merely support research that dates back several decades.
Still, if you think that pornography is the rotten core of the tree that Solzhenitsyn spoke of, it is not. As he would go on to write, the rotten core is that “Men have forgotten God.”
Evil is nothing new of course, but the face of evil changes. Far too many adults, including parents, have chosen to ignore or even embrace the ideologies that act like hypodermic needles, injecting evil into the human heart, into relationships, into the culture, politics and beyond. Men have forgotten God and with no restraint on evil it is accelerating throughout our nation and the world. Already children are facing a very uncertain future that will not include the freedoms and opportunities that were available to past generations.
So my heart goes out to young people, sent out like lambs to the slaughter, with no moral instruction, to face neo-Marxists ideologues dressed up as “educators.” Children, without a moral compass to guide them to the truth and help point them to the good, come face to face with a moral abyss. Lacking a well-formed conscience, they are easily filled with any ideological fad that comes along and accept the lies concerning their identity, the meaning of marriage and the family, authentic love, the meaning of sex, and more. “Relentless indoctrination in moral relativism has left more than two-thirds of young people without a belief in truth or objective right and wrong.” (Get Out Now, by Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan)
Pope John Paul II, a prophet for our times, already identified this back in 1994 when he wrote in his Letter to Families,
“Unfortunately, various programs backed by very powerful resources…aim at the breakdown of the family. At times it appears that concerted efforts are being made to present as “normal” and attractive, and even to glamorize, situations which are in fact “irregular”. Indeed, they contradict “the truth and love” which should inspire and guide relationships between men and women, thus causing tensions and divisions in families, with grave consequences particularly for children. The moral conscience becomes darkened; what is true, good and beautiful is deformed; and freedom is replaced by what is actually enslavement. In view of all this, how relevant and thought-provoking are the words of the Apostle Paul about the freedom for which Christ has set us free, and the slavery which is caused by sin (cf. Gal 5:1)!
Make no mistake about it, we are in a Spiritual Battle that Sister Lucia, the main visionary of Fatima, clearly defined in her letter to Cardinal Caffara and John Paul II when she wrote, “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family.’ Do not be afraid, she added, because whoever works for the sanctity of Marriage and the Family will always be fought against and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. Then she concluded: ‘Nevertheless, Our Lady has already crushed his head’.”
Finally a 2-step plan of action! First, don’t leave children in a Godless vacuum! Share the Gospel with them, pray with them and reclaim Sunday as a family day that begins with Mass or Church service. A spiritual battle must be fought with spiritual weapons!
Second, take responsibility to educate them about the beauty of love and sexuality that is taught within our Christian Faith! A simple way to begin is for parents and children to participate in “LoveEd”! LoveEd was created so that churches and parishes could empower parents to effectively teach their children both the science and the theology of human sexuality.
[1] Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Social Emotional Learning, Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Critical Queer Theory.
