Discussion Forum
What foods bring you back and hold special meaning for you?
Every day, we are presented with grim reminders of the culture of death in which we live. Abortion, random acts of violence, gang activity, drugs, Columbine. In the face of such tragedies, it is easy for Christian parents especially to despair of ever raising children who can thrive in the modern world. But for the Christian, despair is never an option. There is hope. There are answers, and surprisingly, we can find some of those answers in our recent past.
Vad Yashem, Israel's “Department of the Righteous”, is charged with identifying and honoring those Gentiles (non-Jews) who actively worked to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. As part of their work, Vad Yashem wanted to know what motivated these “righteous Gentiles”, as they are known, to risk their lives while so many others either stood by or participated in the Nazi atrocities. The study, conducted by Drs. Samuel and Pearl Oliner and reported in the book The Altruistic Personality, discovered that the single most important factor in determining whether a person would eventually become a rescuer, a bystander, or a collaborator in the Holocaust was the parenting style these individuals encountered in their homes as children. In light of this, the Oliner's work not only answers some fascinating historical questions, but also gives modern-day Catholic parents a blueprint for raising children who are capable of true, Christian heroism: Children who can face the present “culture of death” with the same bravery and conviction that was evidenced by those righteous Gentiles who dared to challenge the evils of Nazi Germany.
The following four secrets for raising Christian heroes are culled from the Oliner's study.
1. Parents Must Walk the Walk
Surprisingly, the Oliners found that religious involvement alone was not a significant factor in predicting whether a person would grow up to be a collaborator or a rescuer in Nazi Germany. Many of the collaborators and bystanders were regular Church attendees. But after careful analysis of the study data, psychologist Dr. James Fowler observed in an article for the magazine First Things that church-going Nazi collaborators were raised in homes in which church was primarily a social activity and in which one's faith life had little bearing on “real life.” In a sense, one could say that collaborators’ parents were “Sunday Christians” who did not ask what being a Christian meant beyond simply warming a pew on the weekend. By contrast, rescuers were raised in homes in which the parents took religious values seriously, often making choices in their businesses, social and home lives that required significant personal and financial sacrifices for the sake of their faith and moral convictions.
It would seem that if we want to raise truly Christian children, we must do more than show up in Church on Sunday and memorize doctrine for the sake of memorization. We parents must ask what our Faith requires of us in the home, on the job and in the community-at-large. We must constantly seek to be better and better models of Faith in action. We must be willing to walk the walk, even when that requires us to make personal, financial or social sacrifices for the sake of Christ and His Church, because our children will do as we do, not as we say.
2. Fathers Must Lead
Statistically speaking, a significantly greater number of rescuers learned lessons of faith and morality at their father's knee. By contrast, the fathers of bystanders and collaborators left religious training to the mothers, if it occurred at all in the home. The Oliner's study seems to suggest that when fathers are not involved in their children's moral and religious education, even the best efforts of a faithful mother are effectively crippled.
We Catholic fathers must take the lead in modeling Faith in action and teaching our children the importance of having a personally meaningful relationship with Christ and his Church. To do less is to renege on our God-given responsibility to nurture our children's moral character. Parents who want to raise courageous Christian children will do well to remember that mothers cannot do it on their own, even if they have the passive support of their husbands. When it comes to faith and morals, fathers must lead.
3. Parents Must Respect the Goodness of their Children
Parents of collaborators were significantly more likely to view their children's misbehavior as the result of innate badness or manipulativeness. By contrast, the parents of rescuers tended to view misbehavior as the result of simple ignorance or clumsy high-spiritedness.
As a result of this difference in parenting philosophies, parents of rescuers tended to respond gently to their children's misdeeds. Over and over, rescuers identified “reasoning” and “explaining” as their parents’ preferred interventions. Moreover, children who grew up to be rescuers were rarely, if ever, spanked. This is in contrast to bystanders and collaborators who grew up in homes where corporal punishment (although not necessarily abusive forms of it) was the norm.
The Oliners explained this phenomenon by relying on researcher Dr. Alice Miller's findings that corporal punishment is damaging to a child's will. Early on, a damaged will manifests itself in the form of a very compliant child, but as the child matures, he lacks the ability to discern between appropriate and inappropriate authority. He only knows that he must comply with the orders of a superior regardless of what he thinks of them.
No doubt this last point about corporal punishment might be controversial, but there is strong support in Catholic tradition for eschewing corporal punishment. As far back as the early 1700's, the educational reformer St. John Baptist de la Salle, founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, strongly discouraged the use of any form of corporal punishment. This sentiment was echoed by the Christian Brother and schoolmaster St. Benildus, as well as by St. John Bosco and St. Elizabeth Seton. Twentieth Century Catholics such as Boy's Town's Fr. Flanagan and Catholic physician and philosopher (and member of the Pontifical Academy on the Sciences) Dr. Herbert Ratner have taken a similar view.
We present-day Catholic parents would do well to follow the counsel of these holy men and women by schooling ourselves in the art of gentle discipline. We must emphasize loving guidance with our children, explaining why certain behaviors or choices are wrong as opposed to merely punishing poor choices. We must gently teach alternatives to unacceptable behavior instead of just shouting “Stop that!” And we must use logical consequences such as requiring our children to clean up their literal or figurative messes instead of heavy-handed consequences that do little but give us parents a way to vent our anger.
Never Again….
In her Reflections on the Shoah, the Church joined others whose response to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany is “Never Forget…Never Again.” But in spite of these brave words, a new holocaust does face us, the holocaust the Holy Father refers to as the Culture of Death. Can we teach our children to exhibit the same courage the “righteous Gentiles” of the original Holocaust exhibited in standing up to the evil that infects the prevailing culture? The answer, it seems, is yes.
If we lead our children by example, if Catholic men reclaim their fatherhood and become the moral backbone of their homes, if we respect the goodness God has created in our children, and if we practice true Christian authority based on love and service as opposed to mere power, then perhaps we Catholic parents will have found the secret to changing the world — one diaper at a time.
(To contact Mr. Popcak about marriage and family issues you may call (740) 266-6461 or visit his website at http://www.exceptionalmarriages.com)
4. Know the True Meaning of Parental Authority
Finally, while parents of bystanders and collaborators required blind obedience and unquestioning acceptance of parental authority, parents of rescuers practiced Christian authority based on love and service as opposed to mere power. For the modern Catholic, such authority is founded on the values promoted by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical The Gospel of Life in which he wrote that families are to be communities of love in which parents and children practice “a respect for others, a sense of justice, cordial openness, dialogue, generous service, solidarity and all the other values which help people live life as a gift” (Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) #92).
It was this atmosphere in the childhood homes of rescuers that allowed them as adults to ask intelligent questions about the “authority” (i.e., the Nazis) they were being asked to follow, and instead choose a moral path, often at great risk to themselves.
Likewise, our children require us to base our authority on love, engaging in just, cordial, and loving dialogs with them. As we do, they will learn to question the “conventional wisdom” that promotes contraception, abortion, indiscriminate sexuality, recreational drug use and a host of other sinful yet culturally fashionable choices. Ultimately, this dialog makes the difference between children who will develop their own faith and morals that will serve them into adulthood, and children who simply ride on their parents’ coattails until adolescence, at which point they reject not only their parents’ authority, but also their parent's beliefs.
