Passing On The Faith

A conversation with a co-worker the other day reminded me of this article which I ran into on Google some time back. Prof Lynn Okagaki did a study published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology on how successful parents are in passing on their beliefs to their children.

Her conclusions are common-sensical, but I'd certainly be interested to see more data on this. What she found is that while parents actions are important in forming their children's moral thinking, spoken witness essential to passing on beliefs. The design of the study was pretty interesting:

"We asked students to tell us what they believed and what they thought their parents believed," says Lynn Okagaki, an associate professor of child development and family studies. "We then asked the parents what their beliefs were and how strongly they felt they had tried to nurture their child in terms of religious beliefs and values. What we found was that the perception does not always match the reality."

Okagaki's study showed that the accuracy of a student's perception was affected by how much his or her parents talked about their beliefs and whether the mother and father shared the same beliefs.

"Many of the students we talked to told us that their parents shaped their environments by making church activities a regular part of their lives, and took on service projects as a family", Okagaki says. "But while 'walking the walk' was certainly important, it was regular, specific conversations about religious beliefs that gave students a more accurate perception of what their parents actually believe. In other words, it's not enough for parents to just model beliefs for their kids."

This seems to be what has driven so many parents in the post Vatican II church to put more time into overt religious education at home. In my grandparents generation, it seems to have been assumed that if you sent your kids to Catholic schools and took them to mass on Sundays that they'd pick up whatever they needed to know. Goodness knows with most parish schools and CCD programs these days you're in no way guaranteed to pick up the fundamentals of the faith by default.

After seeing the drop-out rate in the first couple generations after Vatican II, it seems that those still standing have learned that if you want your children to be active, faithfull Catholics you need to educate them rigorously. (Some of my more liberal/cynical friends tend to put it differently: "You think that if you shelter and indoctrinate your children that they'll all grow up just like you.") There are still, certainly, no guarantees in life or parenthood. Free will has a way of asserting itself. But one thing is clear: if you assume that your children will simply "pick up" your faith without putting in the work to teach it to them clearly, you're far less likely to be successful in passing on your beliefs than if you take the time to educate your children thoroughly in what you believe and why.

1945 Revisitted

The Weekly Standard runs an article looking at declassified information which helps shed some light on the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II.

Susan Torres gives birth

Susan Torres has given birth to a baby girl. The Northern Virginia woman has been brain-dead for months, but has been on life-support for the sake of her baby.

A cancer-ravaged woman robbed of consciousness by a stroke has given birth after being kept on life support for three months to give her fetus extra time to develop.

Susan Torres, whose plight has attracted support from around the world, gave birth to a daughter Tuesday by Caesarean section. The delivery went smoothly and the baby "is doing well," her brother-in-law, Justin Torres, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. Susan Anne Catherine Torres weighs 1 pound, 13 ounces and is 13 1/2 inches long, he said.

Pray for the baby and the family, especially since now Susan will probably be taken off life support and allowed to die.

Murdered in Iraq

Freelance Journalist Steven Vincent (one of whose interviews with ordinary Iraqis I linked to a couple months back) was murdered yesterday by an al-Sadrist death squad. A war supporter, Vincent put his money where his mouth was and spent the last several years wandering Iraq and interviewing ordinary Iraqis. Here's an interview he did a while back with FrontpageMagazine. Vincent's essays always brought home the plight of ordinary Iraqi men and women, striving for peace and freedom in the new Iraq.

His book, In the Red Zone, is available from Amazon.

God rest his soul.

UPDATE: NRO has an obit up with links to all of Vincent's NRO articles over the last year and a few more details about his death.

Straying from the Path

I was reading a little bit last night about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

I always feel myself at a bit of a disadvantage dealing with some of the more edgy proponents of Church social teaching, in that in many cases I think their political and economic (though not their spiritual) ideas are faulty. So while I think that the Catholic Worker movement has done a lot of good in promoting the kind of radical support for the poor that saints like Saint Francis also performed, I also think that their pacifism and many of their economic ideas are incorrect, and perhaps misguided.

What I came around to is that there are many activities which can lead to great holiness, which, if made the center of one's spirituality can lead one astray. The perfect example is the way in which (within a generation of St. Francis' death) his poverty-centered spirituality gave birth not only to the thriving Franciscan orders which have helped the Church down to this current day, but also the various heretical groups known as the Fraticelli. Francis himself, and countless followers, did great things for God through their vows of poverty. But for those followers who came to believe that total poverty was the only means of holiness, the same spirituality became the path to heresy.

Similarly, someone who is a sworn non-combatant (even in an eminently just war) can do great things for God. But it seems that many people easily move from their own self sacrifice in assuming a life of poverty, or non combatant status to asserting that property ownership or just war are in fact wrong, taking their own spirituality and making it an overarching norm for all Christian salvation.

The temptation exists on the 'traditionalist' side as well, where those who rightly love the Tridentine Rite set that good up as the only good and condemn all other forms of worship as corrupt.

The key, I suppose, is to remember at all times through careful reflection and submission to the Church the difference between ones own spirituality (however acceptable to the Church) and elements of the magisterium to which all the faithful much in good conscience hold. No easy task, but Christ did not only call us to do the easy things.

Testing Roberts

Ramesh Ponnuru remains on of the best reasons for reading National Review and The Corner on NRO.

I was going to criticize Cathy Young and E. J. Dionne for their columns on the subject, but Christopher Hitchens has made that pointless. Hitchens argues that Roberts's faith is fair game because the Catholic church is especially sinister. Anti-Catholicism isn't bigotry because it's justified.
Hitchens's piece is only seven paragraphs long, yet somehow feels padded. And padded with the most mindless dreck I've ever read from Hitchens, whose coverage of religious issues has been getting lazier by the month. The Ten Commandments, he informs us, do not condemn genocide. (I guess Hitchens is a very strict constructionist.) We're supposed to worry about a pope-obeying Catholic bloc on the Court including Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and prospectively Roberts. "Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas are strong in the faith." Has anybody told Hitchens that Kennedy disagrees with Scalia and Thomas about the constitutional status of abortion? Hitchens dismisses Justice Scalia's comment that "the principle of laws being ordained by God is . . . the foundation of our legal system" as "gibberish" that "is in flat contradiction to the Declaration of Independence." Has Hitchens ever read the Declaration?
Hitchens affects a smug superiority over Scalia, but the ground that Hitchens has chosen is unfavorable to him. All he has demonstrated is his own invincible ignorance about the law, Catholicism, and American politics.

Hitchens is an especially sad case. While supposedly trumpetting the importance of western culture, he is blinded by hate of what the core of western culture actually is.

Making Babies for France

The International Herald Tribune features this piece of commentary about the number of women in France having three or more children.

It began in the 1970s, in a typical French government technocratic concern for developing the service sector, for which women seemed a prime labor source. Therefore free, full-time municipal creches, or nurseries for the very young, were expanded. Free public pre kindergartens and canteens were vastly increased in number, as well as subsidized vacation camps during school holidays. Competition for places in these institutions remains high, and is increasingly subject to means tests, but this has simply pushed the development of cooperative creches organized by better-off families.
This had an important psychological as well as practical effect, legitimating the decision of young mothers to go back to work. There are also state financial incentives - family allowances, support for the volunteer creches formed by groups of mothers, and family tax benefits, many of which increase significantly with a third child.
The result is that more than in any other European country, French families now have three or more children. Germany and Switzerland also give generous family benefits, and in Sweden 77 percent of the children under 6 are in creches, but birth rates stay well under that in France.

There are to my mind a couple key pieces of information missing here. The big things I'd be curious to know are:

• What percentages of French women have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4+ childen?
• What percentage of women with three or more children work, vs. the overall percentage.
• What are the relative total fertility rates for Moslem vs. non-Moslem women?

If it's taken as a given that 80+% of women will be working full time, it makes sense that a massive effort to provide 'free' (compare French tax rates to US taxes) childcare would help keep fertility fplummetingting. However, the more children you have the more difficult the school/daycare model becomesmaintaintian, so it makes sense that the majority of women taking advantage of the creche system would have only 1-2 children, with a small percentage (I'd guess under 20%) having three or more.

Unfortunately, there are no good statistics on how the immigrant Moslem population ties in to all this, because French law bans the collection of religious or ethnic information by their census. For some best guess figures, see the following:

The overall French TFR is 1.85; however, the TFR of French Muslims is approximately 3 to 4 (the French government does not collect official statistics on religion) while the non-Muslim TFR is only 1.4. Thus, while Muslims make up only 7% of the French population, they constitute 25-30% of the population under 25. Clearly, unless major changes occur (if it is not already too late), France is facing major cultural changes in the next 50 years, especially because the mainstream French culture has generally left its Muslim immigrants underrepresented and unassimilated. (The above figures are drawn from the CIA 2003 World Fact Book and from this article originally printed in the New York Sun: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11909 )