Essays in Idleness

“If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you. …  If you had been of the world …” it would have been different.

You could have sold out quite profitably. It wouldn’t appear to you that you were selling out, for you would long since have been of the devil’s most popular party, and the commands and arguments of such as Jesus Christ would have drummed upon your deaf ears.

So it goes — among the thousands of Catholic parents who will come out today and tomorrow to protest the “Pride” flags that flutter above the province’s Catholic schools. The school boards approved them, and much other propaganda, from their desire to be fashionably demonic, or from cowardice in the face of their confident enemy.

Most know very well that this view is taken in direct defiance of consistent Catholic (and Christian, and all other religious) teaching through the centuries to the present day; and that the children over whom they have temporary legal custody will be twisted or scandalized. But they also know that they have the power to do what they please; that the funding has been appropriated from the parents themselves; that the legislation upon which Ontario’s Catholic schools were founded is a dead letter.

If Catholic parents want their children educated in Catholic beliefs, they must set up their own schools — again. And have them taken over or shut down, again, by the agents of progress.

The children graduate into a “brave new world,” where the traces of Christian civilization have been erased. They will be taught to hold their parents in contempt, and to rebel against all “old-fashioned” moral discipline. Their personalities become glib and smug — except where they have reasoned their way into older and wiser positions, against the peer pressure.

But there is hope in this. The “Pride” flag represents madness. It cannot sustain itself over time. There will be terrible wreckage, but in the end, sanity and goodness will hear its voice again.