Where I'm Going

I've had a few epiphanies lately that have come out like Jackson Pollock paintings on this blog.

My blog posts all make perfect sense. Like this.

In an effort to draw them together, let me outline three themes that interest me right now. Feel free to comment and laugh.

The Catholic Church is fighting the last war

The Church has no idea what it is facing in postmodernist American culture. When you read conversion stories, they all detail how the convert was searching for the Truth. Postmodernism tells us that there is no Truth, there is only your truth. 

If you're searching for the Truth, then, you presuppose that the Truth exists. What happens when academics, politicians and the media tell you that everyone has their own truth and truth is relative? Wouldn't you stop looking for Truth because you would assume it wasn't there? In effect, they have hidden its existence and done their best to make sure as few people as possible engage in the search.

Postmodernism is the enemy. As long as it holds sway, the Church is screwed.

Traditional marriage is being killed in the supply chain

First, traditional marriage is the only hope for our social ills. I calculated that Baltimore alone required 6600 dedicated mentors to deal with their inner city crises. The only place to find them is in the beds of the kids' moms.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

Friends of mine run Rise Up Industries where they take newly-released felons and give them a job, training, counseling and more. They work with ten men at a time. 10. The program takes 6-12 months. That's the level of effort to tackle the problem well downstream of the destruction of traditional marriage. The problems caused by the destruction of the family are many orders of magnitude larger than what fifty such devoted teams of people can handle.

I have come to the conclusion that marriage is being killed in the supply chain. That is, young men are opting out of the effort to become husband material because it makes sense to do so. Until we recognize that, we're not going to make progress restoring marriage which means we can expect continued deterioration in and the expansion of high-illegitimacy neighborhoods.

The Catholic Church will die if it doesn't learn how to keep customers

This one is simple. If you've got adults coming to church and children going to your schools, you cannot lose 50% of them. No business in existence can afford to lose 50% of its customer base and still survive. The Church doesn't understand this and is taking no steps that I can see to deal with it.

Within Cursillo, I know dozens and dozens of men who regularly lament that their children have left the faith. No one from the Church ever told them what to expect as the children got older. No one told the kids what attacks they would face. No one, parents or kids, was ever taught how to deal with these attacks, much less turn the tables on them to evangelize.

This isn't a difficult problem, either. The number of primary reasons that young adults leave the faith is less than five and various Catholic activist groups have developed programs and methods to deal with them. The Church must adopt a much more proactive stance in educating its laity so they have the tools to keep their kids in the faith.

Similarly, there are relatively simple outreach programs that can be used to find adults who have stopped going to Mass and at least contact them in love and concern.

If this matters the way the Catechism says it matters, then this is worth doing.

Anyway, that's where my thoughts are taking me. It also outlines some goals for concrete things I want to do with the rest of my life.

So there.