Waffle Syndrome and the Betrayal of Barb Webb

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 12:45 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Kathy Schiffer has been covering the story of the firing of Barb Webb, a teacher at Marian High School who was dismissed after she became pregnant. The story is much more complicated than that, for as Ms. Webb explains herself, all the other pregnant teachers at Marian don’t get fired.

Why are students, parents, alumnae, and faculty up in arms over this event? Because it’s a break with tradition. Nobody minded that Barb Webb was in an active, public lesbian relationship. Nobody minded when that relationship was solemnized with a wedding ceremony. It was only when she crossed over the unspoken line and conceived that she became magistra non grata.

I haven’t seen anything but conjecture on the means Ms. Webb used to conceive, though IVF is being suggested as the likely way; the old fashioned (consensual) method of sperm donation would be problematic as well, though less so since no one gets killed.

If this alone is the case against her, then it suggests that for all Marian offers a full four-year theology program, they have been neglecting quite a few topics. Understandably so — if you can’t get so far as to clear up misunderstandings about the nature of marriage, then it follows that you’d omit to discuss what ought to happen on the wedding night as well.

It’s All So Heady Until Someone Gets Hurt

Who’s hurt by a little progressive-Catholic glossing over of moral theology in the name of “diversity” or “openness”? Barb Webb was hurt, and so are many others in her position.

When you don’t know where you stand, the floor can fall out from beneath you at any time.

When the Catholic faith is promulgated openly and without apology, nobody wonders what the score is. You know what the standards are. When difficult situations are confronted promptly and directly, instead of sweeping them under the rug, there are no nasty surprises. Fornication, IVF, and homosexual behavior are not some new thing that suddenly descended on the state of Michigan in early August, causing the IHM Sisters to wring their hands and wonder what to do.

The new thing that happened was that the leadership at Marian decided to suddenly develop a fit of piety in a context where the Catholic faith had clearly never been taken seriously before.

Neither Justice Nor Mercy

I’m 100% behind the Catholic faith, all of it, neither to the right nor the left, no favoritism or selective hearing. (I didn’t say I’m good at it — I’m behind it, not ahead of it.) I’ve been perfectly clear here on this blog that I stand with the Church in opposition to same-sex unions. Be assured I’m equally on board concerning IVF and fornication. But being Catholic means you treat people with respect, even people with same-sex attraction or bad theology. Treating people with respect means being open about what the standards are and applying them fairly.

It means not doing the fake-friend thing, but doing the real friend thing. Real friends are honest each with other about where their differences lie, and what the limits of cooperation can be. It means that when conflicts arise, you discuss them. When there are misunderstandings, you work through them and move forward. It sure doesn’t mean that you use maternity benefits as a shut-up-and-put-up bribe.

You can’t be a Catholic school and not teach and practice the Catholic faith in its fullness. When you try to pull that stunt, people always end up hurt.

Parents, it’s your job to teach your children about sex.
Intimidated by that task? Here are some suggestions to get you started.
Courage, the Catholic go-to organization for those experiencing same-sex attraction.

The Mass is Not Your Evangelization Event

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 12:54 pm By Jennifer Fitz

FID

Over at Sherry Weddell’s intentional disciples forum, Fr. Guarav Shroff (whose blog you should read) posted a link to an article from the Homiletic & Pastorial Review on The Liturgy and the New Evangelization. It’s worth reading the whole thing, which looks dense and intimidating but isn’t actually that bad if you make yourself a cup of tea and relax while you read. But here’s the quote that is behind the story I’m about to tell you:

Without an initial acceptance of the Gospel, and understanding of the Paschal Mystery, the liturgy may be beautiful and intriguing, stirring up the deep desires of man’s heart, but he is not able to know the Gospel, and understand the liturgy taking place, without the Good News being explained with charity and zeal first. It is clear in Sacrosanctum Concilium that there must be an initial evangelization outside of, and before, active participation in the liturgy. The Council Fathers state:

Before men can come to the Liturgy, they must be called to faith and conversion. … The Church, therefore, proclaims to unbelievers the message of salvation to the end that all men may come to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent, and may repent and turn from their own ways. 32

The faithful must give this message to others before inviting them to liturgy. Simply inviting a person to liturgy, with no explanation beforehand, or, worse, to adapt and change the liturgy in an effort to attract and present individuals with an initial evangelization, is a perversion of the purpose of liturgy, and is not an effective means of evangelization. It may be true “that for most parishioners, ‘the Mass will be their only contact with the parish or the Church,’” 33 but that does not mean that the Mass is the vehicle by which the parish should be seeking to proclaim the Gospel for the first time to non-believers, and those who have fallen away, or were never initially converted to the Lord.

(Emphasis mine.)

Now of course I just wrote the other day about how a decent liturgy is a prerequisite to evangelization. For all the reasons you should have read in the HPR article, I stand by that assertion. But my own story matches exactly with what these guys are saying: The Mass is not your outreach event.

How a Baptist Deacon Made the Mass Make Sense

I was raised lightly-Catholic, and when I was in high school my family moved to a small town where we started going to church. Father got us all caught up on our sacraments, and when I graduated I was such a model Catholic that I won the Knights of Columbus “Catholic Student of the Year” award. Within a week of arriving at college, I’d essentially quit attending Mass.

There’s a recipe for how to get a kid to do that, topic for another day. Short version: I wasn’t really evangelized. Indeed, I’d been faux-evangelized, as happens in many parishes.

So I quit going to Mass, toyed around with this-n-that mortal sin, and by the time I’d finished school I was very staunchly Not A Christian. My husband and I weren’t married in the Church, because I thought it would be hypocritical to go in for the pretty church wedding when neither of us believed what that church taught. (Yet more topics for other days, and yes indeed, we got the wedding convalidated in due time, panic not on our behalf.)

Not being in a relationship with God is horrible. We’re made for that one thing, and when we push that one thing out of our life, no amount of alternate spirituality can fill the gap. So I started looking for God again.

My husband and I had several false starts before we began going to a local non-denominational Evangelical church together. I also started slipping off to Mass on Sunday evenings by myself. If you had asked me, I would have told you I was back to being a Christian. I hated the confrontational way Evangelicals were always keeping track of who was and wasn’t officially on the Believer’s List. But inside I was praying, “Jesus, if you are real, show that to me.”

God uses the willing. Every month at work I would sit down to a meeting with a Baptist deacon whose day job involved, among other things, reviewing pricing information with me once a month. We’d chat about religion stuff, but it was low key. Friendly. I enjoyed chatting about religion stuff.

On a Tuesday in February in 1999, I went over to his cube for the monthly meeting. I’d just been reading about the Protestant vs. Catholic views on salvation, and I was excited about it. I told him so — I’d been reading a book, I’d figured it out —

–and he cut me off.

Theology time over.

He reached up and grabbed his Bible, and led me to the company cafeteria, where we could talk without the whole cube farm hearing. He opened his Bible. Read this. Flip flip flip. Read this. Flip flip flip. Read this. It was the Roman Road, that famous tool of the Evangelical evangelist, and I was all over it. He told me afterwards that he just felt the Holy Spirit telling him to do this. He put the ultimate question to me, probably along the lines of, “Would you like to receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

Yes. Yes! This was weird. Massively weird. I’d been hoping for a nice quiet introvert-friendly conversion experience, maybe in a pretty Catholic chapel someplace. I did not care to be the “Seeker” in one of those “How to Evangelize People” videos they show you at non-denom church on Wednesday nights. But I was. There’s a reason for those videos.

The Holy Spirit was around us like wind. Not wind-wind, with papers blowing everywhere, but palpable. It owned the space. And I knew with absolute certainty that this was the answer to my prayer. I knew that I was free to say no, but that this was my one shot. Say yes now, or say yes never.

So I said yes.

We went out to the picnic benches by the parking lot, and I said the Sinner’s Prayer.

We walked back inside, and I was filled with a powerful, overwhelming urge to go to Mass as soon as I could.

I guess we probably did some amount of the pricing meeting we were being paid to have, but as soon as I got to my cube, I pulled out the phone book (that’s what people used back then) and looked up the next available Mass. It was the following morning at 8:00.

So I went to that Mass. I couldn’t wait.

And it was dripping with the Gospel.

Things I’d Never Heard Before

At daily Mass, all you get is the Mass. There are no songs. A short homily. Just the Mass.

I’d been to Mass many, many times. You don’t get Catholic Student of the Year if you don’t go to Mass. I’d been going most Sundays for the last six months or so. Even during my agnostic-pagan years, if there was a family thing or whatever, I’d go to Mass, and I’d like it.

I’d never heard the Gospel.

It was there.

It was absolutely, totally, utterly there.

I just couldn’t hear it.

Now, having been evangelized, the liturgy was saturated with meaning, and all of it opened up to me.

I could understand it. The words that I thought I used to know what they were and what they meant, now I really knew. It was everything for my soul, and my soul was everything for it.

What is Mass for the un-Evangelized?

I don’t make up Catholic stuff. It’s there and I say yes to it. I say yes to it because it keeps being true, time after time after time. When this topic of liturgy and evangelization came up this morning, all I could say was, “My goodness. Yes. This is correct. That happened to me.”

We live in a time, though, when the Church is run backward. The Mass is our public event, the one place the doors are open to anybody. And then if you come enough, you might be invited to be catechized. And then, if you’re lucky, you might get evangelized.

It’s like liquid being poured into the small end of a funnel. Don’t try to change your oil that way.

So it’s no surprise that our parishes are dripping gooey nasty puddles of post-Christianity everywhere we go.

Good liturgy matters, because if we haven’t got someplace to deliver the evangelized, they’ll hear the Gospel and be able to do nothing with it. When the bridegroom sent his servants out into the byways to gather up guests for the feast, it only worked because there was a feast waiting.

But without that evangelization, that proclamation and invitation, the feast ends up just being this room people might happen to walk by, or not, but they never realize there’s a wedding going on, and that they should be part of it.

Image Credits:

Intentional Disciples book cover, via Catherine of Siena Institute

Wedding Feast by Andrey Mironov (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Great Banquet, Brunswick Monogrammist (fl. between 1525 and 1545) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Why is Gay Marriage the Catholic No-Go?

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 1:03 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Andrew Sullivan writes here about the plight of a pair of gentleman who’ve been asked to step out of the communion line at their Catholic parish on account of their recent same-sex civil union. Sullivan’s observations are about typical for those who are mystified over the Church’s reaction on this topic. I’d like therefore to review some of the myths concerning Catholic teaching on same-sex attraction and Church participation, because the reality is both more extreme and not nearly as extreme as people guess, and that paradox is what bites.

1. Yes. Marriage is about sex.

Even when you’re not having sex, marriage is about sex. Even when you are incapable of conceiving, marriage is about sex. It’s about sex because sex is about children, and children need to be raised by their mother and father. Marriage is so fundamentally about sex that failure to have sex (ever) is grounds for annulment, and the inability to have sex is an impediment to marriage.

We could say, very loosely speaking and with some exceptions that affirm the rule: Without the sex part (ever), you aren’t married, you’re just very good friends.

By “sex” what we mean is the real thing, not the cheap imitations. It’s the intimate act between man and wife that is the means by which new human beings with eternal souls are brought into this world. Even when no baby results, the act retains its sacredness and its deeper meaning. Think of intercourse like a love letter to the universe.

2. The trouble with Catholics is that we don’t hate people who experience same-sex attraction.

To make it even worse, we charitably assume the best about others.

This is, as in the Montana case, a recipe for disaster. Here are two wonderful men, kind, loving, active in their parish. Barring some public announcement that they’re committing mortal sins in their free time, there was no reason prior to their civil union for anyone to assume they were anything other than the picture of chastity.

There’s no moral law against friendship. There’s no moral law against a pair of bachelors rooming together. Indeed there’s a longstanding and noble tradition of unmarried or widowed siblings and close friends providing support and companionship for one another in old age. This is good.

(Since we who are reading about this case from afar can’t know otherwise, we’ll assume that indeed these gentlemen were conducting themselves in a way that cast no doubt on their chastity.)

Attempting marriage with a person of the same sex, however, is a public proclamation of at least one thing: I reject the Church’s teaching on sex and marriage. We pass therefore from the realm of private doubt and struggle into the land of open rebellion.

It is for this reason that a pastor might legitimately bar from communion a person who enters into a same-sex civil union, until the situation is rectified. To receive communion is to publicly proclaim one’s fidelity to the Church’s teachings.

3. But there’s all those other sinners!

Confounding matters is a widespread failure of the Church to teach the fullness of the faith. I can recall some time ago a young catechist coming to me, troubled: Her two fellow catechists were openly discussing (among adults, not in class) their choices of contraception. These teachers of the Catholic faith felt no need whatsoever to conceal their utter disregard for the teaching of that faith.

I could multiply the examples. The reality is that dissent on the Church’s teachings — not just her moral teachings, but concerning virtually any topic at all — is widely considered to be perfectly acceptable within parish life. The reason the young catechist felt conflicted is because she knew it was inherently problematic for someone to be teaching a faith they made no pretense of practicing, but she also knew that she’d likely be pegged as the over-pious tattletale if she discussed the matter with her pastor. She had no reason to believe anyone at her parish cared whether the catechists believed and practiced the faith they taught.

Within in this context, men and women experiencing same-sex attraction understandably wonder, “Why am I being singled out for the special treatment?”

Why, indeed, can’t I go about openly disregarding the faith the way everyone else does?

4. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Thus we find ourselves, as Sullivan observes, at a splitting point. American culture has finally gone and done something that doesn’t sweep under the rug so well. Like the dysfunctional family that covers over the addict’s misdeeds, we in the Catholic Church have long been making excuses for our utter lack of discipleship. We want our faith and our unbelief, too. Pious on the outside, plain vanilla American on the inside, that’s our recipe and it’s “worked” for years.

Well, it hasn’t worked. We aren’t falling apart because the difficulties of a couple of gentlemen in a small town in Montana are too much for the Church to bear. We’re falling apart because we’ve long since ceased to be Catholic.

To answer the question Sullivan poses: The Catholic Church will endure. The million things people mistake for the Catholic Church?

Ephemeral.

File:1846-single-bachelor-solitude.jpg — I searched on “wedding” and found this image. Apparently Wikimedia is feeling the pang of loneliness, too.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia [Public Domain]

3 Things We Need From Our Priests Before We Can Evangelize

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 1:01 pm By Jennifer Fitz

10 Ways to Support Evangelization

I don’t go in for clergy-policing, to the point that I have to remind myself it’s okay to give a guy a compliment when he does a good job. Likewise, as my husband pointed out one day when I was whining about some trivial shortcoming on the part of Fr. Excellent, most pastors are trying to do the job of five men, and if they manage to do the job of three men well, they’re ahead of the game.

I write now with both those perspectives firmly in mind. Executive Summary: If you want your parishioners to evangelize, Fathers, there’s not a whole lot we need you to do. Many of you are doing it, and doing it well. Thank you. I repeat: Thank you.

For those who are wondering, “Is it me, or is it my parishioners?” here’s my answer:

You bring to your parish just three things, and the laity should be able to take care of the rest.

If you are doing these three things, the problem is not with you. It’s with us.

Evangelization Prerequisite #1: Decent Liturgy

We can build bridges in the community all we like, but there’s this pivotal moment in evangelization when one must say, “Would you like to come to Mass with me?”

If you, Father, can provide a decent Mass, we can extend that invitation.

I don’t mean an amazing Mass. You don’t have to have the town’s best musicians or a world-class homily. (If you do, we’re good with that.) But remember that we’re trying to get folks to:

A) Not run away.

B) Experience the answer to the deepest longing of their being.

Category A Troubleshooting:

Does the sound system hurt anyone’s ears? (Yes, I really had to leave a congregation once because I spent the whole service covering my infant’s ears to protect her hearing.)

If there’s music, is it performed with a minimum of competence? The odd dropped note is not a problem. Clergy get a free pass (and bonus points) for chanting to the best of their ability. But if your choir sounds like a scene from the Brementown Musicians, consider scaling back and channeling that enthusiasm towards a parish sing-along some other hour of the week.

These things aren’t complicated. It is tempting, though, to tolerate soul-deadening incompetence in the name of Franciscan-inspired poverty or some kind of misguided “kindness.” If any sane visitor will want to hide under the pews covering his ears (as my six-year-old did once when we visited a parish on a particularly bad sound-system day), that’s not kindness.

Category B Troubleshooting:

To advance your liturgy from don’t make them run away to make them want to stay, we have to ask: What is the purpose of evangelization? Why do we want people to stay?

People will quibble over music styles and homilies and you-name-it all afternoon, but ultimately what we seek in the liturgy isn’t a concert or a good speech. What the would-be convert is seeking is the one thing for which he was made: To worship God.

If your liturgy isn’t about the worship of God and only the worship of God, there’s no point in inviting anyone to Mass. Things other than God are more easily found elsewhere.

Evangelization Prerequisite #2: Orthodoxy

If I want to help someone discover the joy and beauty and wonder of the Catholic faith, I need a place where that person can be sure to find the Catholic faith.

You may know a priest, or be a priest, who does not believe the Catholic faith. This is an absolute obstacle to evangelization. Dead stop.

But suppose you do believe, and you wish to help others believe. Because you are a charitable soul, you might even assume your volunteers and staff are, in fact, adherents to the fullness of the Catholic faith.

If you are known for your orthodoxy, and you have any influence over what happens in the parish, those around you will quickly get good at concealing their dissent from you. They don’t, after all, wish to lose their position.

It is also likely that those who are disturbed by pockets of dissent within your parish have been trained through years of experience to put up and shut up. “How dare you question those holy volunteers / deacons / sisters / priests who have given their life to this parish out of love for the faith?” “Who died and made you Pope?” “Maybe you’d be happier at another parish.”

Achieving parish-Orthodoxy in the post-dissent era is no small feat.

Doing so requires not just unequivocally and explicitly declaring that the parish will teach and act consistently with the Catholic faith, but it requires providing a known avenue of recourse for addressing concerns as they arise, and charitably following through on every instance. Over time, and only over time, your reputation is proved.

Until then, evangelization remains a dicey prospect. A realistic assumption is that those in your pews most serious about their faith and most eager to evangelize assume you may not in fact hold to the Catholic faith, except in those matters where you have proven yourself. Literally every encounter with your parishioners is an experiment for them in finding out what kind of person you are. The faithful have a catalog of reasons to set their expectations in the gutter, even as they secretly hope those expectations will be disproved for the better.

Evangelization Prerequisite #3: Kindness

The laity don’t need you to be smart. We don’t need you to know how your computer works, how to fix the toilet, or how to plan a funeral meal. It would be nice if you were Father Everything, and indeed the more talented you are, the more you can accomplish; but in practice your parishioners can cover a multitude of deficiencies.

The one thing we can’t do is be the priest. That means that in all the priest-things that you do (everything you do is a priest-thing), you have to avoid undoing the work of evangelization.

To do that, you have to be kind to people. Here are some things you must not do:

Yell at people in the confessional, and then follow them into the nave for additional yelling on the topic of what they confessed, how they confessed, and why they deserve to be yelled at.
Publicly berate a family as they are praying after Mass for indulging in devotions that show a superabundance of piety in a manner not to your own taste.
Announce “Meeting over! Can’t help you! We’re done here!” and show a family to the door when they come to you seeking the sacraments, and you discover that they have some situation that will require rectifying before they can receive the desired sacrament.
Subsidize your gambling habit with the parish building fund.
Have an affair with the parish secretary.
Look a woman straight in the face and tell her she must continue to live with her physically abusive husband.

You have to not do these things.

You have to not do even the much milder, small-time versions of these things.

It doesn’t help evangelization if we have to say, “Hey, come check out my church. And if Father is mean to you, just, um, try not to think about it. We’ll dash to donuts fast as we can and maybe he won’t see you.”

Your would-be evangelizers might be doing their St. John of the Cross routine and putting up with you for now. But we cannot expect anyone who isn’t yet absolutely firm in their faith to stick around and endure even a low-grade case of Father Horrid.

Kindness doesn’t mean soft-pedaling the faith. It means practicing the faith in its entirety. For every Father Horrid I’ve heard about or encountered, I’ve met dozens of priests about whom I can say with confidence, “You know, for that problem, just give Father Decent who lives in your area a call. He’ll help you sort it out.”

Father Decent might or might not get the call. But being Father Decent means someone could call. It leaves the option on the table.

Only Three Things

When Catholic people use the word evangelization, sometimes what they mean is, “My conception of evangelization that involves doing things I’m comfortable with and that make me feel good.”

Sometimes, though, what they mean is, “An impossible thing I can never hope to do.”

This isn’t so.

None of us can control what others around us do. We might have some influence for the better, but ultimately even Father Perfect can’t override free will and cause the devoutly-lukewarm to do anything other than wallow in their tepid juices. Our mission isn’t to be the person other people are supposed to be; we just have to be the person God created us to be.

Every Catholic has a long list of things we’d like to see in Father Ideal. But evangelizing Catholics in fact need very little from our parish priests: A decent liturgy, orthodoxy, and kindness. That’s it. More might be better, but good enough is good enough.

Catholic Education: You Can’t Serve Two Masters

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 1:43 pm By Jennifer Fitz

One of the reigning errors of our insecure, perpetually-offended culture is the Approval One is the Rejection of All Others fallacy. So allow me to be perfectly clear: My love of homeschooling is in no way a rejection of our Catholic schools.

Not for a moment. Those who pay attention in real life know that I put quite a lot of effort into steering families towards their local Catholic schools whenever I can.*

Thus in the busyness of getting the new school year going, I was dismayed to have several different parents spontaneously volunteer to me — in flesh life, not just internet parents — that one of the reasons they were happy to have left their local Catholic school was because the kids weren’t being taught the Catholic faith there.

Not that bad isn’t very good.

There wasn’t any particular muckraking. Just, “Gosh, I was paying all this money for my kids to learn the faith, and it was not being taught.”

The telling moment: A mother waxing about the amazing world of religious education opened up to her no-longer-in-Catholic-school family, now that her kid was using the Faith and Life textbooks.

Now I happen to love F&L. It’s my go-to spine for a religious ed program. But this isn’t some obscure program imparting mysteries unfit for the great unwashed. This is just a normal religious education textbook, used in thousands of parishes around the country.

Being wowed by Faith and Life when you’ve just spent a year or more at a Catholic school would be like being wowed by Sadlier-Oxford’s vocabulary books when you’ve just done a year of SAT-verbal prep. Um, yeah, it teaches the topic. But that’s what it’s supposed to do.

So what’s going on at St. Blandings?

I’m well aware of the patches of dissent that plague many parishes and schools around the nation. But the parents I heard from weren’t talking to me about dissent. Their children weren’t being taught anything false; they were simply not being taught the depths of the truth.

I think what I was hearing this week was something milder and much more pernicious: Catholic schools viewing their primary mission as being financially-viable in a highly competitive education market.

Pick your master.

I’m an accountant by trade. I understand the financials. Parents want a good academic education for their children, and Catholic schools enter the game with the odds stacked against them. By definition, to pay private school tuition is to pay for your child’s education twice: Once in taxes to fund the public school your child doesn’t attend, and then a second time to pay for the school you’d actually choose.

It’s a hard sell. Catholic schools are under tremendous financial pressure to try to nab just enough of the I-Have-Money-to-Burn market that they can stay afloat. Barring a massive community of very wealthy faithful Catholics, the easiest catch is to push good academics on the broader not-so-Catholic set. The not-so-Catholics are maybe not so keen on dropping $15K for their kid to study Faith and Life.

A Catholic education is worth sacrificing for.

The irony is that faithfully-Catholic families are the target of parochial-school enrollment guilt: If you really cared about your child’s faith, and the good of the Church, you’d send them to us.

There’s truth behind the pitch. Families who are serious about forming their children in the faith will sacrifice — in time, in money, in labor — to ensure their children have the best possible formation in their faith that they can possibly get.

Likewise, all Catholics should be ready to put their money where their catechism is when it comes to supporting faithfully-Catholic schools, even if they have no children to enroll.

But when a family drops out of St. Merchant’s Parochial only to be wowed by Faith and Life, we’ve got a disconnect.

Sadly, every dropout causes the administrative spiral to pick up speed: If you can’t keep the Catholic families, you have to water the theology program just a bit more, in hopes of nabbing a few more non-Catholics to fill those empty desks.

Radical change means radical sacrifice.

For the St. Anodyne’s of this world, there’s a hard choice. To choose to teach the Catholic faith in depth and breadth is to choose to alienate good paying customers. There’s a market for Catholic education, but it’s full of large families with stay-at-home moms and piles of loans from Christendom. To choose to serve that market is to take the risk that you won’t find enough faithfully-Catholic sponsors to keep the school out of the red.

Catholicesque education, on the other hand, seems to pay the bills. It’s the safer choice. This side of the grave.

*This post isn’t about public schools, but yes, I am well aware of the many situations in which the local government-run school is truly the best available option. Likewise, though I’m leery of school-homing, I’ll even go so far as to say there’s a time and place for boarding schools.

–> It’s as if I think parents are responsible for choosing the best education for their children, and that no single solution could possibly be the one-and-only answer for every single in the child in the world. Look here to learn more about where I got that idea.

Life of Grace Cover image courtesy of Aquinas and More Catholic bookstore.

3 Ways Homeschoolers Socialize Differently than School Kids

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 1:49 pm By Jennifer Fitz

I’ve been in the depths of back-to-school preparation on multiple fronts, and I’m continually astonished that people still bring up the old “socialization” thing with respect to homeschooling. So let’s be blunt: Homeschoolers do not socialize the way school kids do.

It’s a spectrum, of course. There are many school families that don’t get sucked into the assembly-line socialization rut, and thus teach their kids to cultivate a mature social life long before graduation. There are likewise homeschooling parents who cling so happily to their middle school social skills that they pass them on to the second and third generation. But if you’re in for the full Not-Back-to-School Social Life Experience, here’s what you can expect:

1. Homeschool kids break their own ice.

I picked up my son from his Confirmation kick-off event, a true microcosm of suburban 9th grade living. We were delayed in departing, and I noticed he was chatting with a boy I’d never met before, who had “Chris” written on his name tag. We got in the car. “So I saw you were chatting with, um, Chris? Is it? Nice kid?”

Usually the boy has a few interesting stories to share about the people he meets. This time he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just started talking to him when you showed up. We were so busy doing ice breakers we didn’t get to actually meet anybody.”

Yeah, homeschool kids don’t get ice breakers. You show up at a new event with people you’ve never met, and your parents leave you to the wolves. “Go find some kids. Or make yourself useful somewhere.”

They always do. It can take as long as five or ten minutes, if it’s a large group event the kids are joining midstream. But my kids never sit in a corner neglected. They are in the habit of introducing themselves, striking up a conversation, and finding something, anything, in common with whomever is tossed their way.

2. Homeschool kids spend the bulk of their time with people different from themselves.

Sitting at a lunch table with the same five friends every day, exactly the same age, same academic track, same clubs, and same fashion tastes? Yeah, that never happens in homeschooling. Mixed-age, mixed-neighborhood, mixed-ability social circles are the norm among homeschoolers. Cliqueishness is a no-go, because 1) the parents lose patience with that nonsense fast and 2) on any given day, you might have to be friends with exactly that one person you would have happily excluded if only this were the lunchroom and you had the choice of your favorites.

From there, it only gets more different: Homeschool kids spend a lot of time with grown-ups. Not just their parents. Not just teachers. (As a kid writing fiction, I could only ever think up “teacher” for a profession for my adult characters, because that was the only profession I was ever exposed to enough to have an idea of what the job entailed.) Homeschool kids spend their formative years going wherever their parents go, doing all the adult chores that grown-ups do. The people who live and work in their community aren’t stage hands for a me-centered teenage drama; they are the community. Homeschool kids get used to having spur-of-the-moment adult conversation with grown-ups of every age, profession, and cultural background.

3. Homeschool kids form deep, lasting relationships with the people they treasure most.

A reality of homeschool life is that you might have certain very dear friends you only see a few times a year. Of all the many friendly-acquaintances you gather everywhere you go, a few really resonate. They’re ones who understand you. They’re the ones you could spend hours talking to, and when you pick back up again six months later, it’s like you just saw each other yesterday.

School friendships are a little bit like this, in that you socialize all year with whomever is at hand, but very few of those friendships carry forward once you’re no longer in the same class or club. It’s easy to imagine at school you’ve got a real friendship going, when really those friends will drop you as soon as they find something better.

The homeschooling difference is that there’s never any illusion that you’ve got five best friends sitting next to you at lunch each day. You have to be intentional about cultivating your friendships, and you’ve got the mental space to do it in. When you find that one good friend, you make an effort to stay in touch. You learn to use whatever resources you have at hand to arrange a way to get together more often. Sometimes you discover that the friendly acquaintance was only ever just that, or the friendship wanes as your values and interests diverge later in life. But it’s not uncommon for homeschoolers to have multiple deep, lasting relationships that endure for years despite distance and long separation.

It’s okay to have a mature social life at a young age.

Sometimes I hear parents lament, “My kid gets along better with the teachers than the kids in his class at school,” as if this were a bad thing. As if the desire to spend time in intelligent conversation with someone who wasn’t obsessed with the latest trends or popularity scores was somehow indicative of a deficiency. (Sometimes the kids are more grown-up than the adults, though.) We pay lip service to “be yourself” and then get upset at children who don’t “fit in”. You can’t have it both ways.

Meanwhile, when my kids show up for activities that involve a mix of kids from all educational backgrounds, one of the questions they get immediately after their homeschooling status is divulged is, “But how do you make friends?”

To which we must answer, “What is wrong with you that you can’t make friends unless you are forced to spend six hours a day with thirty other kids exactly your age?” Actually we don’t say that. We try not to even think it. And then, because we are well-socialized, we make friends with the kid who asked the question.

Image by H. Zell (Own work) [GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Useful Stuff: All the Mass Readings for 2015 in One Book – Updated

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 2:24 pm By Jennifer Fitz

Yesterday the 2015 Abide in My Word showed up in the mail. Nice thick glossy-cover paperback that looks like this:

Wow. What a neat book. It’s nothing complicated, just the daily Mass readings for every single day of 2015. (Note: It starts on January 1, not with Advent.) Big print, and big, bold-faced date headings for each day. Very cool, and not very expensive. I was particularly excited about it because a friend of mine is trying to improve her English by going to more English-language Masses, and she was drooling over this guy, my most favorite book of all time:

But that’s a long term investment. (Or, be lucky and someone will get you one for Epiphany. It happened to me!)

The annual paperback doesn’t pack in any extra features, and at the end of the year you’ve got to buy a new book. But for low initial outlay, ease of use, and no fear of something very bad happening to it, it wins.

Other resources to know about:

If You’re Digital . . .

Then you want the iBreviary. It’s free.

UPDATED for Kindle fans, Julie Davis writes:

… I’ve been using Reading God’s Word for several years for the daily readings. It also comes in paperback.

Been longing for a missal but am not as lucky as you are. 🙂

–> Hey, publishers! Someone send Julie a review copy of your favorite daily missal.

If You’re Planning a Retreat . . .

Then you want an Ordo. Get the one for your region, because it will have lots of local info in it. (Serious cool factor: Dates of death for all the clergy in your diocese, ever. Historian’s dream.) You can read more about what’s in an Ordo here. It does not contain the actual texts. But it tells you what the readings are, what day of the Liturgy of the Hours 4-week cycle you’re on, and all kinds of odds and ends like the liturgical color for the day, saint of the day, etc., in a very small package. It’s like a liturgical version of one of those sponge-animal-in-a-capsule things.

Funny story: I call mine the Magic Green Book, because my 2014 regional edition was green. It turns out sometimes it’s a magic magenta book. I bet there are other colors, too. But because Google works the way it does, when I search for “Magic Green Book”, my favorite Ordo links pop up, something that does not happen when I search on the term “Ordo”.

Cover art courtesy of:

Christ the King Books and Gifts

Midwest Theological Forum

iBreviary

Catholic Supply of St. Louis