On the absence of children in the church
April 1, 2010
Vox Nova readers may be interested in a new post I have up at Rock and Theology entitled “Seen (Sometimes) But Rarely Heard: On the Presence and Absence of Children in the Church and in Theology.”
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If you would like to see a parish full of children, attend a mass celebrated by by priests of the FSSP, ICKSP or SSPX. In these places chlidren nearly always outnumber the adults.
Missed my point. I’m guessing you didn’t actually read the post.
According to the Catholic Church, life begins at conception. According to contemporary science, it is almost certainly true that the majority of “people” conceived do not live long enough to implant, let alone to be born. But ever setting those aside — to avoid a debate over embryology and such — look at all the miscarriages and abortions that occur. And the Church can’t say what the fate of those who die before being born (and baptized) is. For centuries, the answer was Limbo. (It may never have been official doctrine, but as a child in the 1950s, if I had dared tell one of my grade school nuns I didn’t have to believe in Limbo, I can only begin to imagine the trouble I would have been in.) But now Limbo has been abandoned, and still the Church can only hope (but not say with any degree of certainty) what the fate is of the unborn who die.
So even in this day and age, when abortion for many people is the issue, there is no answer to the question about the fate of the unborn who die. It seems to me a significant gap in the explanatory aspect of Catholicism. And if you include all the lost embryos that fail to implant, Catholicism can only tell us what a minority of human beings exist for. As I always point out, the old Baltimore Catechism says, “God made me to know, love, and serve him on this earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” But for those who die before they are born (or even before they are implanted), it is impossible to know, love, and serve God on this earth, and we can only hope that they will be happy with God forever in heaven.
In Cormac Macarthy’s THE ROAD, the child is constantly reminding (even though he is parroting) his father that they “carry the fire.” SInce reading that book, I have wondered how having children of my own might change or destroy me, in a good way of course, and how they might remind me about “the fire.”
Thank you for the great post, Michael.
I used to drive through Langley on my way to visit my cousins! Thanks Mike. I will be more conscious of Toby and Oscar as theological sources. Just tonight Toby asked me why Jesus was on a cross in our living room. Yesterday he said he wanted to read about the First Supper before reading about the Last one.
David – Thanks for those thoughts. But how do they relate to my post?
Brett – I think you’d dig that record!
David – Thanks for those thoughts. But how do they relate to my post?
Michael,
You were talking about the absence of children from church and theology. My point is that theology hasn’t figured out a place for the very youngest (and possibly largest number) of children. Also, children below the “age of reason” are, in a certain way, of little interest theologically, because they can’t make moral decisions. All that matters is whether they are baptized or not. Further, we had a discussion here not long ago about how there will be no children after the resurrection. Eternity without children!
My point is that theology hasn’t figured out a place for the very youngest (and possibly largest number) of children.
This is an interesting insight.
Also, children below the “age of reason” are, in a certain way, of little interest theologically, because they can’t make moral decisions. All that matters is whether they are baptized or not.
Presumably you are critiquing this idea? I’m not so sure that the statement is true, but if it is, it certainly should be critiqued.
Further, we had a discussion here not long ago about how there will be no children after the resurrection. Eternity without children!
Wow, here at VN? Must have missed it!
Must have missed it!
Michael,
It was kind of a mini-discussion, and it began approximately here. Of course, what heaven is like (if there is a heaven) or what existence will be like after the Last Judgment (if there is one) is pure speculation, even if it was someone like Aquinas who cam up with the answers. (In my opinion.)
Michael,
I did read your post, and I don’t think I missed your point.
I’m guessing you have not spent much time with traditionalists.
Ben, but you did in fact miss my point. I could hear the “whoosh” sound all the way in West Virginia.
I read the post, and I think Ben does have a point. It’s hard to have a culture of children when there are no children. One would wonder what a culture of children would be like in places like Western Europe or Japan where children are becoming less and less visible.
We Americans, especially the non-white ones, tend to reproduce more frequently, but to talk about a “culture of children” seems to be a double edged sword. Yes, we want children to be safe, and we want them to be appreciated. But let us be quite frank in saying that childhood is so commercialized that it becomes rather problematic to start doing things in order to “think about the kids”. Indeed, the very title of the blog this was originally posted on seems to evoke these issues. I am sure that you are not involved in overly commercialized rock ‘n roll, but the genre in and of itself is a mass creation of late capitalism in which “kids” are conceived of as a market, and a very important market, in order to milk middle class disposible income.
Indeed, our idea of “childhood” is very much the creation of marketing concepts. Back in the day, there were no “kids clothing sections”, no hours in the day with “kids programming”, no sense that children are deprived of childhood because they had to work. (I was out in the fields at age three, and both of my parents picked cotton in their childhood). Obviously, no one wants to exploit children, but the point of childhood is to prepare children for adulthood. And in the context of church, maybe this means that they just need to stop fidgeting and behave. To worry too much about childhood as a construct of captialist ideology is a rather pointless exercise, pace the cameo appearances of “kids” in the Gospels.
Michael,
I went and read your post again. Appearantly, I still don’t get it. I thought you were talking about ways to model the church that respects the full value and contribution that children make as members of our Church. I speak with the experience of having been an active member of a variety of different parishes across the litrugical spectrum (I’ve only been attending the extraodinary form for 3 years) when I say that it seems to me that traditional communities actually do this better than most other parishes.
It seems self-evident to me that a family with 6-10 children is very child focused and child centered. Nearly all of the activinites of this sort of family are going to be focused on the needs and development of the vast majority of its membership.
Further, it should be obvious that a community dominated by such families is goig to be child centered and child focused and that the Church will serve the needs of the children well. The only place I have been able to find such a community is among traditionalists. In most other parishes there are just too few children and they end up being either ignored alltogether or patronized by things like the “Childrens Litrgy of the Word”.
Just because we don’t hear the kids singing at Sunday Mass, which makes up less than 1% of the hours in the week, doesn’t mean that children aren’t a central focus of the community.
I wouldn’t think that you would need the reminder that the faithful are the Church in as full and true a sense as the clergy, and that the activitites of the faithful outside of the liturgy are nonetheless the activites of the Church in the fullest sense.
Traditionalists are very involved in the lives of our children. We make sacrifices so that their mothers can be home with them. We refuse to warehouse our kids in mammon’s re-education camps all day long so that both parents can climb that corporate ladder in the vain attempt to satiate their consumerist appetites. We also avoid placing our children in public schools whose underlying values deny the infinite value of the immortal souls of our kids.
Arturo, I totally agree with your point about “childhood” being a construction. That idea was certainly in mind when I wrote the post.
…the point of childhood is to prepare children for adulthood.
This statement seems to reinforce the ideas you intend to critique, in my opinion.
On the “Rock and Theology” blog, perhaps you could read more of the blog and see the topics we raise there before you assume too much about it.
All of that said, I don’t know how the points you made have anything to do with Ben “having a point.” Ben seems to be saying that in certain communities there are a lot of kids at Mass, so therefore I am wrong. My post is not about a desire “to see a parish full of children.” It is about a desire to see children as fully present as subjects in the church and in society. “Being there” /= presence.
Ben –
I wrote my comment above as you were writing yours apparenty. Thanks for explaining your view a little more.
I still disagree with you.
I thought you were talking about ways to model the church that respects the full value and contribution that children make as members of our Church.
Yes, that’s a good rephrasing of what I am trying to say.
It seems self-evident to me that a family with 6-10 children is very child focused and child centered.
This does not seem self-evident to me in the least.
Further, it should be obvious that a community dominated by such families is goig to be child centered and child focused and that the Church will serve the needs of the children well.
Why is that “obvious”? There is no guarantee, for example, that the leaders of that community are tuning in to the real needs and potential contributions of children.
I also take issue with the term “traditionalist” with reference to one particular interpretation of the tradition. But that is another discussion.
I guess the fact that children a hundred years ago were merely dressed as “little adults” means that they were voiceless and without self-expression.
Children today are dressed as “little adults.” Don’t believe me? Try finding a pair of shorts for your toddler daughter that are not “low cut.”
That aside, I don’t see the point of your last comment. I think children in the u.s. and probably elsewhere, both 100 years ago as well as today, live in a world “not for them,” as I said in the post.
I don’t know the extent to which the way children are dressed indicates this as I haven’t thought about it too much. If you have some insight into this, by all means let us know.
Michael,
Yes, finding clothes is a very real problem. Often my wife has to sew them. We have older ladies in our parish who help younger ladies learn how to sew, since most people have been robbed of this skill by the wal-martization of our educational system.
My wife makes some of our daughter’s clothes too, not just because of the kinds of clothes available in stores, but out of the joy of doing things herself, the crafty, DIY ethic thing. Rather than looking it like she “has” to make clothes, she gets to make clothes.
Which points to an interesting intersection of DIY/anarchistic/punk/radical ethics and the ethics of those you are calling “traditionalists.” Both traditions are interested in practices of “withdrawal” (DIY, homeschooling, etc.) but for very different reasons.
I don’t think the reasons are very different Michael.
I expect that in both “camps” there is an underlying sense that we have had our humanity violated by the impersonal and diabolic forces at work in the modern and post modern worlds and that human beings were meant to live differently. We want lives not so thuroughly contaminated by the filth of greed and violence. I expect that both traditionalists and radicals want to make life less of a struggle for thier children.
There could certainly be some overlap in identifying “diabolic forces.” But I think that when it comes to describing the world we want we would probably part ways in many respects.
Just because you have lots of children doesn’t make you child centered. I’ve been a member of Ben’s parish since its founding 15 years ago, and from that inception I’ve wanted a dialogue mass specifically for the reason’s Michael Iafrate brings up in his article.
The novus ordo parishes don’t have children because they’ve made their peace with the world contracepting and aborting their children out of existence, but those errors of the typical novus ordo types doesn’t make those who typically attend the FSSP any less in error.
It would be interesting, Michael, if you could ellaborate on why you think it is not at all self-evidence that a large family would tend to be child focused.
Certainly, I could see that having a large family is not a guarantee that the family is child focused. But at a minimum it would seem likely that a large family is rather more likely to be child focused than a small family. After all, it is (as is widely noted) rather easy in this day and age for a couple to make sure that they have few children. Given that simple provision of basic needs for a large number of children is rather more intensive than for a small number of children, it would seem that a couple who considered children a distraction from their desire lifestyle would have fewer, and that in most cases couple who have large numbers of children do so because they in fact have adopted a lifestyle and philosophy which centers on rearing children and functioning as a family (rather than as a couple who happens to have a couple of kids hanging around in the background.)
Is your claim that large family size is not at all indicative of being focused on children? Or that it is not 100% indicative?
Or perhaps more that you think that you probably have philosophical disagreements with most people who have large numbers of children, and thus they are not “child-centered” by your definition even if they are by their own?
Darwin – I think you (and others) are missing my point. Others, though, seem to be getting my point just fine.
The concern I raised is about the presence of children in the church and society as subjects. I don’t think large families are indicative that society or that the church includes children as subjects. It certainly indicates that children are valued in some way — possibly as objects, as I said — but not as subjects. I am not arguing that either society or the church should necessarily be “child centered.” The church or society could be “child centered” in distorted, oppressive ways, ways that are damaging to both kids and to women for example.
I don’t necessarily have “philosophical disagreements” with “most people” who have a lot of kids. I am concerned about certain ways of thinking about kids, or not thinking about kids. I expressed some of them in the post.
“See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.” Matthew 18:10
That sound pretty hopeful, and from a very good source, too!
So the Church’s teaching on the value of children as well as the teachings on the fate of unbaptized (and unborn) babies seems quite reasonable.
If you disagree, then why do you think it is not, my friend?
Bruce, you too have missed my point.