I was going to move on to other topics of interest after my last post, but an incident here in Steubenville made me realize that I had not yet said nearly enough.
I have one daughter who just turned nineteen months old, and currently don't have a car. We live walking distance from the Franciscan University campus, so I often go there to mail my packages, let my daughter play on the grass, and sometimes attend daily Mass. I generally like how Franciscan students treat my daughter, though I do occasionally get nasty looks when I breastfeed her. A particular priest always looks horrified when I feed her, but I've tried to ignore this. On Tuesday, just after publishing my last post, I decided to take the baby to the evening Mass. It turned out to be a Latin Mass celebrated by the priest who seemed to object to my breastfeeding. I sat in the front row, because I wanted a sip from the Celiac Chalice and that was the most convenient place to get it. During Mass my daughter began to fuss, so I let her run around in the foyer, but I returned to my seat during the Our Father so that I would be able to receive Communion from the chalice without cutting in front of anyone else in line. As I sat down, my daughter began to fuss again. She fussed loudly, but I didn't want to leave before Communion, so I tried to soothe her in my seat. As Father was holding the Host just before saying "Behold the Lamb of God," he suddenly turned and stared at me. I was unnerved to say the least, but I stayed where I was and kept trying to soothe my daughter anyway. Father smiled and stared even more pointedly. I realized that he was offended by my daughter's noise. I was, of course, embarrassed. I even tried to muffle the baby's cries by gently putting my hand over her mouth, something I would normally never do. Father continued to stare at me, with the Body of Christ forgotten in his hands. He refused to continue the liturgy until I got up and fled to the foyer. Then he went on as if nothing had happened.
I could not believe that my daughter had been expelled from Mass simply for acting her age. I could not believe that I had been expelled and denied Communion for practicing my vocation as a mother and exposing my child to the Mass. I could not believe that a priest, a Franciscan no less, would dishonor Christ by putting the liturgy on hold just to humiliate a mother and child. And I realized how very anti-life even American Catholics have become.
Abortion did not become legal because this country suddenly became possessed in the 1970s. It did not become legal because of "promiscuity" in the 60s. The 50s were a very promiscuous decade. Abortion became legal and widely accepted because society had already abandoned mothers and children. This was a slow, gradual process beginning at least as far back as the Industrial Revolution and fed by too many diverse social elements to mention. There was a time, not terribly long ago, when women and children were revered and welcomed by society, in part because they were visible in every part of society. Families worked together in their own homes and farms. Extended families all participated in childrearing. Mothers took their children with them wherever they went. They took them to church and to work; they breastfed them in public. Everyone knew what children were like, so if a mother could not care for her child herself, others helped. Whole societies raised families-- not in some kind of socialist government-imposed way, but simply because that was the right thing to do and no one gave it a second thought. As time progressed, families began to be fragmented in their day-to-day activities. Families no longer worked together as a group; fathers went to work, mothers stayed home, and children went to school and daycare. Extended families and cultures no longer raised children; childrearing became the job of the mother at home alone and aided by advice from pop psychologists and pediatricians. Parenting techniques became more and more cold and clinical. A person could go his entire day without seeing a mother and child interacting. Eventually, a child was viewed by society as a noisy and difficult burden, because that is what a difficult job becomes when the job is completely hidden. Children became somebody else's problem, somebody else's burden. Getting rid of the burden before it appeared to annoy society naturally became a socially acceptable option. As abortion became a more popular option, children and motherhood became even less socially acceptable. That cycle continues to feed itself to this day. It has even poisoned the devout Christians who consider themselves pro-life; many of them don't realize how much their expectations feed into the Culture of Death. We as a society have forgotten that children are part of society. We do not welcome them in society. We deliberately humiliate mothers who insist on making their motherhood part of society, and somehow we still claim to be pro-life. We will never see an end to the Culture of Death until we regain a fundamental acceptance of mothers and children.
It does not matter how brightly painted a compass needle is: if it does not point north, it is worthless. And it doesn't matter how vocally pro-life a person or corporation claims to be. If they have no fundamental respect or even tolerance for women and children, they will never be pro-life and will never make any progress against abortion. If you interrupt the holiest moment in the holy sacrifice of the Mass to expel a crying child, you are not pro-life, nor are you Christian. That child is a human being, and human beings belong in day-to-day life-- particularly in Mass. If you cannot stand the appearance of a breastfeeding woman, you are not pro-life. A baby has a right to eat, and there is nothing repellant about that. If a university claims it can't afford to provide maternity leave for its professors, a daycare, or any accommodations for its students who are mothers, and yet somehow finds the money for extensive advertising, pristine landscaping and a brand-new division 3 athletic program, the university is not pro-life. It doesn't matter how many students pray the Rosary outside the local abortion clinic on Saturday mornings, or how many buses you send to the annual March for Life. If you cannot tolerate or accommodate mothers and children into day-to-day life, wherever they happen to be, you are only serving the Culture of Death.
This culture-- our culture, Catholic culture-- must change completely if we ever expect to change the culture of our country. We all must practice what we preach-- not in the pulpit, the picket line or with the ballot alone, but in our hearts and minds; in what we do with our money; in how we treat our neighbor. This is our only hope for survival as a society. Moreover, it's the only moral option.
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