The future belongs to those who show up. A great many problems in the West are fostered by those in positions of authority who have little to no stake in the future. If you are a good parent, your view has to be broader than your own life.
PopeWatch: The Pope is Right
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
As a father of four I particularly didn’t appreciate this insult, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/20/pope-says-3-children-per-family-is-about-right-catholics-dont-need-to-breed-like-rabbits/
If he’s just now realizing that Europe will become Muslim soon in part because of his policies. So be it.
None of his business how many children people have.
When my wife was pregnant with our seventh child, she eventually wanted to tell people outside our immediate families. I told her not to, to just wait and let word get out. She asked me why, and I said that she wouldn’t like the response I was sure she was going to get. We live near our Catholic parish and most of the people she was going to tell, including all our neighbors, were Catholic. Well, she disagreed and told some of our “Catholic” neighbors. When I came home that night from work I asked about it and she got a tear in her eye when she told me that the most frequent response she got was “Why?”. No one was happy for her and she vowed to not talk about it anymore. Needless to say, Number Seven has been an immense blessing to our lives and some of those same Catholic neighbors have since told us they wished they would have had more kids. They always marvel how our house is crowded every weekend with cars of kids who come home for dinner on Sunday or just to hang out. I guess children are a blessing. Who knew?
https://the-american-catholic.com/2021/08/11/a-wild-ride/
FoS-
My sympathy.
I delayed telling a lot of family– and did it by the yearly letter, instead of face to face– because I knew it would be similar.
One upside of having been in the Seattle blob for the first four and a half, I got really good calluses on my soul when it comes to reactions that are, properly, best recognized as “what on earth is wrong with YOU that you respond in such a way?”
Some online friends knew about the new baby before my mother, because I knew they’d be happy. (My mom is scared.)
Only person we’ve told face to face socially is a couple in their 90s; if they think that’s excessive, they’re polite enough to at least act like it’s nice, and they like how our kids nearly doubled the number of kids under 14 in the parish!
The stopped clock that is right twice a day got this one right. I hope it does some good, especially since, as usual, his words and his actions are inconsistent. Think Jeffrey Sachs and Emma Bonino, for example.
A stopped clock, while right only twice a day is at least… reasonable… and consistent. It’s a sincere prayer that the Pope be- but I don’t hold out much hope. Reasonability and consistency wouldn’t make “a mess”.
You know with each child a parent has, they are being open and generous to God. It really is a selfless act to say yes to children. Particular if your generosity leads to a large family. Who cares what others think. They do not choose our happiness. And if they are downers with every new pregnancy, than I bet that it’s probably out of a jealousy because they aren’t as fearless and open to accepting new life in this world.
Having said that, I feel like the Pope is being negative and preachy and judgemental with his comment. He has lost an opportunity to talk about families and being open to accepting Gods calling to have children are Gods greatest gift to a couple. I mean how many people have trouble falling pregnant- his comments could sting those. He is coming across as narcy and hollow by bringing pets into his comments. It’s just downright bizarre. Enocourage parents to say yes to children and explain how this expands Gods kingdom on earth and in heaven rather than being mean-spirited about people who choose to have pets over children. A lost opportunity for a needed discussion IMHO. Pope St JP2 and Pope Benedict comments on accepting children were always beautiful, in comparison to his grumpy prickly ones.
He did say “chooses”.
I’m getting to the age where my contemporaries don’t have the kids at home any more. But I do remember singles or couples with pets they treated like children, and it is bizarre. I think dogs are great for kids, and I can understand couples getting a pet after their kids get old enough to whine about wanting one, but not before children. It’s too easy for them to take the place of children.
It’s a weird parallel, but it reminds me of couples living together before getting married. It’s pretending to make a commitment, or making a trial run at commitment. Just get married and have (or adopt) kids, or break up.
Yeah but what’s it to him what people “choose”. So what if they baby their pets. What’s it to him? He lauds population control advocates and then calls out people who have pets and not kids. He is downright weird.
Again, he’s calling out couples who choose to have pets rather than having or adopting children. Whatever else he may have said over the years, however it may conflict with this speech, this speech is correct.
(For the record: I don’t have kids, and I didn’t find his statement offensive.)
Some animals are treated like children, while other animals are treated as a mere commodity wrapped in cellophane at the supermarket. Neither is true.
I think dogs are great for kids, and I can understand couples getting a pet after their kids get old enough to whine about wanting one, but not before children. It’s too easy for them to take the place of children.
Oh, shut up.
Art, I’ll engage you when you’re being abusive as long as you’re saying something, but what is this?
I would guess it’s a response to the mildly insane idea that dogs are good for kids, but adults can’t be trusted to have them because some crazy people displace child-desire on to them.
The companionship of a dog doesn’t age out of people. I’m not especially fond of them, but my dad’s had dogs since before he met my mom.
If you’re worried about folks treating pets as children, attack the social pressures applied to those who have children, not the existence of pets.
I have 4 kids and 2 birds and I’m
offended. Why is he calling out people’s choices. He needs to mind his own business. That’s not his place. Teach the Faith, don’t criticise people’s choices. You don’t know why people choose what they choose. And the funny thing here is we have a Pope who must remain childless but thinks it’s his place to call out people about not having kids.
The Faith says more than a few things about how people should live their lives ESPECIALLY in terms of how a family should be structured and managed.
And the funny thing here is we have a Pope who must remain childless but thinks it’s his place to call out people about not having kids.
It is his place if the reason people are not having kids is selfishness or because they imagine their pets can substitute for kids.
Art, I’ll engage you when you’re being abusive as long as you’re saying something, but what is this?
This is a retort to a superlatively asinine sentiment of yours. And I’ve already used more words than it merited.
Art and Pinky.
I’m cracking up.
Oh shut up?
That’s what a child would say.
The topic is priceless when compared to the comment.
Pinky.
Pour a smidge of wine and smile.
The family here is priceless.
All of you are fun, interesting and kind.
I look up to each of you.
So many years of experience and expertise in various fields of study, work and best of all faith.
So.
Peace be with all of you.
I’ll shut up now. Thank goodness:)
“It is his place if the reason people are not having kids is selfishness or because they imagine their pets can substitute for kids.”
Yes that’s the problem with the Church today. People substituting pets for kids. Aha.
That’s what a child would say.
Funny, because when I was an actual child, my middle aged parents (among others) said that (and variations thereof) to me routinely. And for about the same reasons.
Of course one benefit in those instances where pets are preferred, is that this is a self selection that they may be unsuitable as parents to begin with. It then also follows that mores the pity for the treatment of pets who then must act as well behaved children.
So why is the Pope doing everything he can to persecute the segment of the Church that is most “open to life”, i.e., Latin Mass loving traditionalists? How many times have I seen comments on how those are the parishes where one is most likely to see young couples with multiple young children? Would they not be the folks most likely to fully embrace Catholic teaching on marriage? Yet he seems determined to stomp all over them…
It then also follows that mores the pity for the treatment of pets who then must act as well behaved children.
We have two commenters on this thread who seem to have gotten the idea in their heads that the world is swimming with people who cannot tell the difference between children, dogs, and cats.
You shouldn’t put your “human children” in kennels when you go away on vacation for a week.
… For some, that’s the determining difference.
… For others, that difference doesn’t exist.
For crying out loud.
All I know for certain is that my heart goes out to children. So many a parent has difficulty raising their children, partly because they themselves haven’t risen to the challenge of self sacrifice.
They, unfortunately, are still children themselves.
The heart Art.
Some people lack the heart to tell the difference.
A sad lot.
Now go shut up!
Some people lack the heart to tell the difference.
There are all kinds of peculiar people of which you can find examples in a country with 330 million people in it. That doesn’t mean their peculiarity is a matter of social and cultural significance.
In the course of my life, I’ve heard one person refer to a house pet as ‘our child’. She, like her guests that evening, had a sense of irony.
Irony, unfortunately, is never in short supply;
https://www.everplans.com/articles/the-10-biggest-inheritances-ever-left-to-pets
Irony, unfortunately, is never in short supply;
Leona Helmsley was a strange and unpleasant person. Her peculiarities are not prevalent social problems.
Rumour has it that Karl Largerfeld of Chanel fame and one of the most legendary fashion designers of all time left his 200mill plus fortune to his beloved cat Choupette. Yes the cats name is Choupette. Largerfeld was single and gay. How he could trust anyone to look after little Choupette and not run off with his sizeable inheritance fortune is anyone’s guess.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8384597/The-man-solve-issue-Karl-Lagerfelds-inheritance-disappeared.html
We do live in a world where people are encouraged to take the easy path. The largest industry on the internet is built on this idea, that a little pleasure without any responsibility is a good substitute for real fulfillment that requires work. There are plenty of people who get enough reward from being greeted by a pet that they will (at a minimum) delay having children, and when people are marrying in their 30’s that delay is going to count against their total. How many of them rationally think that their pets are their genetic offspring? Zero, I’d hope. But they’re happy spending a few extra years travelling in their early marriage knowing that they can put their pets in a kennel.
There are plenty of people who get enough reward from being greeted by a pet that they will (at a minimum) delay having children,
Thanks for the issue of your imagination. Been an education.
Art, I think Ezabelle might have a big misunderstanding of Catholic thinking. is this really the best time and place for you to be doing the usual thing you do towards me? I mean, it vaguely annoys me, but I can take it, but if it starts getting in the way of communicating the faith, it’s a problem.
“Art, I think Ezabelle might have a big misunderstanding of Catholic thinking.”
Well not really as I live my Faith in every aspect of my life taught from the cradle. Including marriage and kids.
People like you Pinky live theirs in Catholic theory. And they like to tell people how to be “Catholic” but don’t actual live it themselves. And they are usually single and childless. Like you are. You need to take responsibility for your own comments. I can see why Art gets frustrated with you.
Art, I think Ezabelle might have a big misunderstanding of Catholic thinking. is this really the best time and place for you to be doing the usual thing you do towards me? I mean, it vaguely annoys me, but I can take it, but if it starts getting in the way of communicating the faith, it’s a problem.
The usual thing I do is to critique something inane that you’ve uttered. The notion that large numbers of people cannot distinguish between children and pets is one to which you and at least one other person on this thread subscribe. You’ve outdone yourself with that one.
Been an education
… Would that were true …
Art, I don’t believe for a minute that you haven’t met, or even heard of the countless folks who choose pet ownership over having children. I have to hope you’re not in denial, but are just being argumentative. Dismissing given examples as “not prevalent” anomalies doesn’t give you a pass either. Satirical characters like Eleanor Abernathy wouldn’t exist if their counterparts in the real world didn’t exist first.
While there are people who displace children with pets– satirical characters most assuredly do exist without there being people who match it, when they tell popular lies.
The most popular lies are the ones that excuse someone from guilt that they feel– so Those Darn Kids flavored satires are incredibly popular, because that means the adults didn’t fail. It was society that failed. It’s not that those who aren’t having children are responding rationally to the situation, it must be that they are just feckless/lazy/whathaveyou.
Especially in the last decade or so, it’s become so common as to be a running joke that the parodies precede the real individuals. “Babylon Bee, America’s Paper of Record.”
I’m sure that Father of Seven and his wife could make a nice long list of Things They Did Wrong, according to those who don’t have to do the work. Frequently, they’re contradictory to every principle…except for the ease of the one giving the advice.
For folks who didn’t recognize that pattern long, long ago– so, pretty much anyone “normal” and “well adjusted”– the criticism of “you cannot possibly do X without Y” is going to have an effect.
It would be irresponsible to do otherwise, after all.
satirical characters most assuredly do exist without there being people who match it, when they tell popular lies.
… OK, so … there aren’t any crazy cat ladies out there? Hmm … Must’ve been fake news
slow clap
Thank you for what amounts to an open admission that you are not operating in good faith; guess your conscience is pricking you, but you couldn’t find anything that touched on arguments actually made.
Foxfire, you’re projecting.
I am under no obligation to help you prop up the windmills (or straw men) that you want to tilt at.
No, Cag, recognizing when someone engages in a fallacy and argues against something that was not actually said is part of why my husband and myself were able to ignore what people said, and instead do what was right.
Having the confidence to recognize that anyone reading this is perfectly able to see that I said nothing about ‘crazy cat ladies’– and that single women of a certain age have very little to do with the discussion of couples choosing not to have children because they have pets– is a great benefit of the internet. You cannot use the tactic that works so very well in person, where one tells a blatant lie with confidence and will persuade some of those watching that they misheard or misunderstood what went before, does not function so well when the conversation is there in black and white.
when someone engages in a fallacy and argues against something that was not actually said is part of …
… And this is exactly what you did, Firefox. If you’ll look, you’d see this post is about the Pope talking about people who choose pets over children.
Some on here are suggesting that phenomenon doesn’t exist. That premise is laughable.
I chose to demonstrate this by pointing out that characters like Eleanor Abernathy exist because crazy cat ladies exist.
You saw an opportunity to debate the definition of the word “satire” for some reason. I was unwilling to take the bait and climb down that rabbit hole, so I restated my original argument, with a touch of sarcasm. That doesn’t mean I’m not “operating in good faith”, it means I’m unwilling to have that debate with you. It would be a pointless and unproductive distraction to the topic at hand.
The pontiff’s verbal feints toward orthodoxy are word service for papolators and other cheap dates. Notice that, unlike Grammick and Bonino, he never praises actual people who live the Faith.
And, as has been noted above, anybody who gives Jeff Sachs a Vatican appointment does not have a genuine beef with Catholics or others who are childless as a lifestyle choice.
It’s an increasingly-worn psyop by a pontiff who invariably follows such statements with heterodoxy.
To wit, two days after chiding the childless, he does this:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pope-francis-is-queering-the-catholic-church/
It’s all a game from the Gaslighter-In-Chief.
Art, I don’t believe for a minute that you haven’t met, or even heard of the countless folks who choose pet ownership over having children.
There aren’t ‘countless’ such people, except in your imagination.
I have never met such a person. I’ve known childless people with pets, like the woman I described. I’ve no clue why she at 39, nine years married, had no children; I just thought it was sad. She and her husband were both business executives. She’d earned a degree at a conservatory, concluded she didn’t perform well enough to earn a living at it, and somehow landed a position as a sales representative for Coca Cola. She’d held positions at a succession of companies over the succeeding 17 years, all but the first, I believe, in the burg where she’d gone to school; that’s when I lost track of her. At age 30, she’d married to a chap who had grown up locally. They were both quiet people; they’d worked out a division of labor where she did all the talking in social situations. Whether they had a medical issue or whether they’d decided not to procreate or whether they’d run out the clock because life’s what happens when you’re making other plans, I couldn’t tell you. They’d invested in a handsome old three story house which had plenty of space for books and children, but there were no books and no children. She was quite concerned with healthy living, so there was an exercise room in the house and she paid meticulous attention to what her husband ate (in part because he was already having heart trouble at age 40). He seemed the gentler of the two of them; she gave off a vibe of I-am-one-moody-piece-of-work, but I honestly never saw her be rude to anyone. Neither seemed to have a trace of a sense of humor. No, it wasn’t an excess of affection for their dog which kept them from procreating.
I think the true faith and issue is not choosing a pet over children.
It’s doing whatever they can to not have a baby; whether it’s through the use of condoms, birth control, abortions or voluntary neutering.
I certainly could be wrong.
Cag, this is the comments section, and I responded– obviously effectively, since you’ve regressed to grade-school tactics– to things which you wished to stand unchallenged.
I dealt with two-bit nuisances like yourself before I could type. The only discomfort you induce is embarrassment at someone thinking and behaving so poorly.
T. Shaw-
Being “open to life,” as the phrase goes.
:wry: The doctor’s office for our latest child is having a meltdown over that phrase. Thankfully, the nurse practitioner that will be providing the non-delivery care is just delighted to see anyone having kids, since her one little girl was supposed to be impossible.
I also know several women who have suffered greatly, first because they wanted children– many children!– and were not so blessed; secondly, suffering because people assumed they were living selfishly and deliberately ensuring there were no children.
The lady who was scolded for not having more than one trophy-boy when she’d just lost yet another child in the first few months of pregnancy is an especially painful example. (When you have a pack of kids and are willing to let strangers hold the littlest, you get to hear a lot of folks’ regrets.)
The science fiction author Sarah Hoyt has been quite open about their struggles to carry a child to term, in part because of the damage done to her uterus during the first (c-section) delivery.
Medically speaking, her second son is supposed to be impossible. But they only have two, and have always had cats, so folks have made assumptions. She hasn’t maimed any of them yet, although a couple only survived because she was busy trying to make sure her very quiet husband didn’t do so.
Foxfire, you sure get nasty when people don’t do as you would like.
… again, I’m under no obligation to jump through your hoops. That this bothers you so much should be cause for self reflection