Epiphany Thoughts on Judas's Complaint

Paul Adams

On this feast of the Epiphany, as the celebration of Christmas draws to a close, I want to consider again the gifts with which the Magi, the three wise men, greeted the newborn King in the stable.  The gold and frankincense, foreshadowed by the prophet Isaiah in today’s reading (Is. 60:1-6), are gifts fit for a king.  Myrrh was a very expensive spice (gum resin) used for embalming the bodies of kings and nobility.

Since the Reformation there has been a desacralization and secularization of life in the West.  The divorce of the spiritual from the material that this entails is deadly to the sacramental and incarnational essence of Christianity.  Expressing devotion to God in Christ through offering the best we can - materially and artistically as well as spiritually - has been decried.  The altars were stripped, statues and shrines destroyed.  In Scotland, I read, where the established church is Presbyterian, Christmas, which colorfully and joyfully celebrates the union of divine and human in the infant Jesus, was outlawed even as late as 1958).  Churches became plain, unadorned, colorless, and even dour.  

Modern day secularists inherited this Protestant spirit.  One recently expressed her revulsion upon visiting the Vatican “which is so wealthy and covered in gold, and you can imagine the pope sitting in robes being fed food by nuns whilst outside we saw so many hungry families begging.”  The idea that the Vatican’s wealth should be sold off and the proceeds given to the poor is expressed in the very 1960s novel and film, “Shoes of a Fisherman.”  In fact, popes, most recently Benedict XV at the end of World War I,  have twice emptied the Vatican’s treasury and given the assets to the poor.

There are several aspects of a full answer to the Protestant (and now atheist) sensibility expressed in this visceral response that I have never heard even the poorest Catholic utter.  But first we should note its antiquity, recorded first in John’s Gospel account of Judas Iscariot’s complaint about Mary, sister of Lazarus, who anointed Jesus, days before his death and burial, with an ointment of nard worth a year’s wages.  Judas objected that the jar of ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor.  Jesus answers, “Let her keep it for the day of my burial.”  Like the myrrh brought by the learned men of the East, it is something fit for the burial of a King.  In both cases - the myrrh and the nard - the generous giving is an act of faith in face of the divine.

Judas’s response reflects not his concern for the poor but his own loss of faith in the divinity of Jesus and his decision to give him up for money, which, according to John’s account, he was already stealing from the disciples’ money box (Jn 12:1-8).  We are reminded here, not that secularists are dishonest in this way, but that, as all the research shows, they consistently and by all measures show less concern for the poor through giving of their own time, treasure, and talent than the observantly religious (Brooks, 2007).  

We should note here that no other organization on earth does more for the poor than the Catholic Church with its worldwide network of charitable activities. 

Consider, in our own day, the men and women of Christian religious communities who serve the people of Southern Sudan (Solidarity with Southern Sudan, 2010; Kristof, 2010a, 2010b).  Much charitable activity is organized through dioceses and parishes—AIDS ministries, prison ministries, food pantries, and the like, as well as in the form of contributions to larger efforts like Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, and other charitable activities of all kinds of Christian communions across the globe.  

From its earliest days, the Church understood charity as one of its essential organized activities, along with administering the sacraments and proclaiming the Word (Benedict XVI, 2006).  Charity was the responsibility of each individual member and of the entire ecclesial community at every level.  From the original group of seven deacons, the diakonia, the well-ordered love of neighbor has been understood as involving both concrete and spiritual service, corporal and spiritual works of mercy (Benedict XVI, 2006).  Through its institutions and individuals, both saints and sinners, the Church has been engaged in helping the poor and downtrodden.  It is a record that extends through the work of deacons, monasteries, dioceses, parishes, to the social service organizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the development of modern social work. 

But let’s look at the Vatican and the image of the pope being brought food by nuns.  Since the nuns have voluntarily taken a vow of poverty and the pope is a man in his mid-eighties, we may doubt that even if he made time to cook his own food, the savings would feed even a handful of poor people.  Popes are paid three coins a year and these are buried with them.  When Pope John Paul II died, he left behind no personal possessions but a hairbrush, toothbrush, and pen.  Even the Vatican bureaucracy, numbering some two thousand, is extremely modest for an organization with some 1.2 billion members.  The U.S. federal bureaucracy, by contrast, numbers some four and a half million.

The Vatican also houses some the world’s great works of art, created over centuries and maintained for the glory of God as the patrimony of the whole Church.  The great cathedrals and churches of the world, Chartres and Notre Dame and Cologne, as well as of Rome, Florence, and Venice, are themselves expressions of human energy, creativity, aspiration, and devotion to God.  These magnificent works of art and architecture not only reflect the faith of Catholic Christians, of poor craftsmen and laborers over generations and centuries; they also belong to the poor, who are the treasure of the Church as St. Lawrence told those who sought to expropriate the Church’s riches in an earlier period.  Poor people as well as noble patrons contributed their time, treasure, and talent to build this patrimony.  The great works of art, architecture, and music to which Catholic Christianity gave rise are a priceless and unparalleled cultural treasure.  They are not merely museum pieces but also just and appropriate ways for humans to glorify God.

Could there be a greater insult to the poor of today and of earlier times than to propose that this great inheritance should be cashed out and turned into welfare benefits?

Benedict XVI (2006). Deus caritas est. Encyclical letter of Pope Benedict XVI. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html

Brooks, A.C. (2006). Who really cares: The surprising truth about compassionate conservatism: America’s charity divide—Who gives, who doesn’t, and why it matters. New York: Basic Books.

Kristof, N.D. (2010a, April 18). A Church Mary can love. New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opinion/18kristof.html?hp ).

Kristof, N.D. (2010b, May 1). Who can mock this Church?  New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02kristof.html

Solidarity with Southern Sudan (2010). http://www.solidarityssudan.org/whoweare.html.  

Hugh Hefner's Theology of the Body - and John Paul II's

Paul Adams

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is once again scheduled to be married to his fiancee Crystal Harris, this time on New Year's Eve, 2012.  Prompting some thoughts about puritanism and sexual expressionism...and John Paul II's answer to both.

I recently had the privilege of sitting in on a seminar taught by Professor Michael Waldstein, the distinguished theologian who not only translated John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body but also provided the book with a brilliant 128-page introduction.  One of the most memorable sessions involved an unscheduled discussion about Hefner's theology in relation to JP II's.  The occasion was the interview with Hef conducted in 2004 by religion reporter Cathleen Falsani.  According to Waldstein, Falsani is a very bright graduate of Wheaton, the Evangelical college).  The interview - under the improbable title “Hugh Hefner: Man of God?” - appeared in the SoMA Review.  I would link to it except that the site carries a computer safety warning.  Still, her account of the meeting is included in a collection of Falsani’s interviews with famous public figures about their spiritual lives.

The conversation with Hef is revealing and seemed to surprise both participants.  It seems Hef had a Puritan upbringing.  He's descended from the original Mayflower Puritans but was raised sorta Methodist as he explains (loose in dogma, strict in morality).  

To set the stage for looking at Hef and his spiritual evolution, first a word about concupiscence and adultery in the heart - the topic for the day from TOB.  Bear with me here and I think you'll find it interesting from a cultural perspective, if nothing else.  I think it brings out how very differently a Catholic thinks about things than a Protestant or secularist. The two - Protestantism and secularism - are closely linked, I think, historically and spiritually - some say Protestantism is a stepping stone to atheism.  Even some Protestant theologians like Alister McGrath, whose book, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, I reviewed here, thinks there is truth in the observation.  (See also Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.)  Of course, in countries like the U.S. where Protestant/secularist culture predominates, even Catholics start to think like Protestants, a great loss to the larger culture as well as themselves.

In the Catholic view as explained by John Paul II, concupiscence is defective love, in as well as outside marriage, which it corrupts, so that even a marriage between Christians falls short of a Christian marriage when the spousal love is corrupted by it.  Thus adultery in the heart can happen even within a marriage while adultery in the flesh cannot.  But adultery in the flesh (i.e., involving someone outside the marriage) doesn't happen unless adultery in the heart has already happened.  A full and integral love (of flesh, blood, spirit) derives from the mystery of Creation (God who is love creates us out of love for love, so man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self [cf. Lk 17:33]).  

Our main difficulty with sexuality is that we don't see it in its full value, its real beauty, which is tied up with the spousal meaning of the body.  We are created male and female for a one-flesh union that is a full communion of persons, the archetype of which (without the sex) is the Trinity, a communion of Persons in the complete giving and receiving of love.  Jesus warns, not against normal sexual desires when he says the man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart (Mt. 5:27-28), but against the dehumanizing reduction of another person to an object for one’s own use, like a bar of chocolate.  His strictures, more harshly stated than the OT Law in some areas, can be a danger for persons of a scrupulous disposition.  But Jesus' point is not puritanical or sex-negative.  It is to reduce everything to the commandment of love, which Augustine summed up perfectly in the very non-Puritan injunction to "Love and do what you will."

So the answer to our tendency to objectify the person we are attracted to, to see her in a utilitarian way, in terms of her usefulness for our pleasure, is not to turn away in revulsion at our drives, our bodies, and sex, to take a cold shower (the Protestant-Kantian approach) but to love more.  Not to look away but to look more closely, to see the woman as a full person on her own journey through life and toward God, with her own goods (love is willing the good of the other as other, a matter of will and not just feeling or drives).  This corresponds more or less to the way Aristotle talks about friendship.  It's about living for someone and sharing life with them (the gift of self).  For the utilitarian alternative, think of the way I go to the store and buy a bar of fine dark chocolate.  I don't ask it if it wants to be bought and used by me for my pleasure.  I just pay for it, unwrap it, and eat it, an object of use for my pleasure, and then throw away the wrapper.  Treating a person that way is a real problem, combining slavery and rape.  Prostitution, even where it does not involve trafficking and coercion, is like that except it involves two people using each other in a commercial exchange in which each gets what they want, sex or money.  But there is no pretense of loving or even seeing the other as a full person with his or her own life journey, any more than there is in my relation with the cashier when I pay her for a bar of chocolate.

So what is the character of sexual desire in a right relationship?  It's part of an exchange of gifts--joy through giving and receiving joy.

From this perspective, utilitarianism is the other side of the coin of Puritanism.  Puritans, as did Luther, worried about selfishness.  You have to avoid pleasure in sex, or at most give it without receiving it.  This is manifestly absurd.  I kiss my wife to give her pleasure, but I make it clear that I am doing it for her, I get no pleasure from it myself as that would be selfish.  She'd slap my face.  Reminds me of the advice to English wives who were supposed to do their marital duty but not to enjoy it - just "lie back and think of England" - England being presumably so unerotic a thing to think about as to fill you with a sense of duty but without any pleasure attached.  Kant is like this, isn't he? - One should act out of duty only, not pleasure.

So in puritanism and porn (or hooking up), you have two sides of the same coin.  In both, sexuality is separated from the person, in one case to be repelled, in the other embraced as 'recreation.'  The actual teaching of Jesus is beautiful and liberating.  The real challenge is to love wholeheartedly, not defectively.

Hefner was consumed by the sense that an injustice was done to sex.  He was not hugged, he was left with a longing for love, which his mother could not express because hugging your kids is too pleasurable and like a good Lutheran she wanted to avoid pleasure.  So poor (though rich) Hef never broke out of his puritanism.  He just switched sides.  From born again to porn again. He is right to say (para. 4 of the interview) that organized religion (to the extent it embraced this puritan revulsion from sex) played havoc with people's lives and was very unChristian.  But he's wrong to tell his mother that because of what she was unable to give as love, "it set me on a course that changed my life and the world."  No it didn't.  He just changed sides, but remained as far away as ever from a full integration of sexuality with love and the full human integrity of the person.  He, no more than his mother, was able to love fully and integrally.  Both meant well, but neither was able to break out of their puritan chains.

Of course, Catholicism has been deeply influenced, more in some countries than others, by this puritan strain.  Nostra culpa.  But the challenge is to recover - in the midst of a deep dehumanization as well as desacralization of sex, the body, love, and marriage - a fully human and so fully Christian understanding, which seems more and more to be the task of countercultural 'creative minorities' rather than a socially available option on a large scale.

But young people who encounter JP II's TOB find it life-changing.  I wish more Catholics understood it and were capable of teaching it.  It's JP II's greatest gift to humanity, which is saying a lot given his many and profound contributions - to ending Soviet-style Communism/totalitarianism, stopping the rot in the Church, and his connection to millions of spiritually deprived young people.  (I like that poster of JP II, in the style of motivational management posters about teamwork.  It says, Generation JP II: Raising Our Parents Catholic.) 

Source: Uploaded by user via Being Catholic on Pinterest

Fr. Robert Barron has some excellent discussion of these themes in his essay, Sex, Love, and God: The Catholic Answer to Puritanism and Nietzcheanism.  See also such video clips of his as this:

and this, discussing Hanna Rosin and her defense of the hook-up culture as good for women -

Fr. Barron comments on the Tragedy at Newtown

Thomas Tallis, O Sacrum Convivium

St. Thomas Aquinas, scholar and Doctor of the Church, writes an ode to the Eucharist in which he says:

O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
Alleluia.

Why "Merry Christmas" beats "Season's Greetings"

I like this article by Michael Cook from a year ago so much that I am posting it again, this time before Christmas!

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 20 December 2011

7 reasons why “Merry Christmas” will always beat “Season’s Greetings”

DON’T LET GRINCHES STEAL YOUR CHRISTMAS BY SUBSTITUTING MEANINGLESS SLOGANS.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Christmas had never happened and that the Roman Emperor Aurelian had succeeded in establishing the feast of Sol Invictus on December 25 back in the year 274 AD.

Instead of Christmas, we would have had the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. At this time of year, just after the winter solstice, the lantern beaming light and heat hangs low in the sky; the days are dark and cold. But day by day it climbs back, infallibly reaching its fiery zenith at the summer solstice six months later. Yay! Way to go! This god has won more rounds than Manny Pacquiao! 

Had this happened, the colourless salutation “Season’s Greetings” might have conveyed something vaguely meaningful, especially if you’re shivering in the northern hemisphere. Something like: gor blimey, I can’t handle this brass monkey weather, but let’s hang in there and may the gods grant us a good harvest.”

It’s a hopeful sentiment, but not an inspiring one, a bit like the experience of eating tofu and celery sticks for Christmas dinner instead of tucking into mince pies and roast turkey. The sun rises and the sun sets; seasons come and seasons go. Whatever good or evil men do, the sun shines on them all alike with a divine indifference. For devotees of Sol Invictus, “Season’s Greetings” would have been a token of our inevitable submission to fate. This was the popular wisdom of the ancient world – from which Christmas has rescued us.

Whether or not you accept the Christian theological beliefs which underpin the celebration of Christmas, they have transformed Western society and they are in the process of transforming nations far from Bethlehem. Christmas, that is, the celebration of the moment in which the all-powerful creator of the Universe took on human flesh and entered human history, sends powerful, if unspoken, messages. Here are seven which are implicitly conveyed when we wish friends a “Merry Christmas”.

God cares. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport.” This comes from King Lear, but it is the wisdom of paganism. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. What the Incarnation, as the theologians call the act of God becoming man, shows for all time is that the Creator cares about his creatures. As the carol says, “and he feeleth for our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness.” Jupiter, on the other hand, when presented with complaints about our sadness would probably say something like, “Yeah, whatever. Get over it. Stuff happens, you know.”

History matters. The ancients believed in the myth of the eternal recurrence, that history was not linear, but cyclic. Their cosmic fate was to live imprisoned in cycles which end in fire and then return in a new cycle, playing the same role over and over again. Its symbol is the dragon devouring its tail. But the implication of the Incarnation is that history is moving towards a climax which begins at Bethlehem. Our own participation in history makes a difference.

All men are fundamentally equal. We can get used to Christmas paintings of the manger, in which shepherds are rubbing shoulders with the Magi as they peer over Joseph’s shoulder. But the implications of this setting are immense. “With the poor, the scorned, the lowly, lived on earth our Saviour holy”: before the infant in the lowly cattle shed, distinctions of talent, rank and education are insignificant. All men are brothers.

Families are the cornerstone of society. Bethlehem suggested the ideal to which Christian families should aspire: a father and mother doting on their child, willing to make any sacrifice for his welfare. But the homely tenderness of this scene was virtually unknown in the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans were not strangers to domestic affection, but this was not the paradigm of their families. Without Christmas we would never have had the bubbly, loving warmth of the Cratchit family made famous in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Women have dignity. No women appear in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. There are famous women in ancient history, but most of them are queens and empresses like Cleopatra and Zenobia. In Bethlehem, a simple village girl, Mary, is the central figure. Kings bow in homage to her and her child. In the Christian tradition, capacity for motherhood gives women an incomparable dignity. As Cristina Rossetti’s marvellous poem (and carol) says,

Angels and archangels
  May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
  Thronged the air,
But only His mother
  In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
  With a kiss.

Children are special. The ancient world defined children by their powerlessness; they were just underdeveloped adults. But Bethlehem suggests that we should treasure their innocence and dependence. “Once in Royal David’s City” is a Victorian carol, but it expresses it nicely:

For he is our childhood's pattern,
day by day like us he grew;
he was little, weak and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew.

The fact that a defenceless child is the centre of the Christmas story also means that men and women are not to be valued by how productive they are, but simply because they are with us and share in a common nature. In the Gospel account this is underscored by the sequel to the Nativity, the Massacre of the Innocents by the vicious tyrant Herod.

We should send more Christmas cards. Western art was born on Christmas Day. We take for granted the human drama depicted on Christmas cards. But in other cultures, art was meant to be a faint reflection of unchanging, inalterable divinity. That’s why statues of Buddha depict him in a few stylised postures. Even Greek and Roman art presented idealised figures and seldom depicted ordinary life.

But art of the Christian era is based upon an altogether different philosophy: that all of human life has dignity because the Child of Bethlehem is both God and Man. Since then, everything in human life carries within it a spark of divinity and becomes a worthy subject for an artist. What sort of greeting cards would we have if the cult of Sol Invictus had survived? Probably much like we have now: images of snow-bound homes or decorative calligraphy. But nothing human, affectionate and tender.

So there you have seven reasons to say “Merry Christmas” with greater gusto in 2011. Let’s defy miserabilist Grinches who want to banish it from public life.

In any case, all this has happened before. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas in England. In the 1640s the Long Parliament decreed that no holy days other than Sundays were to be celebrated. December 25 was to be observed with fasting and humiliation for the sins of countrymen who had turned the day into a feast, sinfully “giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”. Shops and market were to be kept open for trading. Parliament was to meet for business on December 25. Christmas, said the Puritans, was a pestilent popish festival with no Biblical justification.

However, Cromwell failed to convert Merrie England to miserabilism. As soon as Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the Christmas bans were swept away. Mirth, mistletoe and plum pudding returned and the Christmas fast vanished. The reason for the season was no longer treason. Merry Christmas and "God bless us every one!"

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 

This article is published by Michael Cook and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines.

O Sapientia - Advent Antiphon December 17

See also this chart of the O antiphons for the week before Christmas.

Marriage Needs Help, Pt.2

"Catholics Awake!" cries Anthony Esolen, "Marriage Doesn't Just Happen!" Two exclamation marks in one title, not Esolen's style so a particular indicator of the urgency with which he views the situation.

He notices that in the generally Catholic college where he teaches - and as I confirm from teaching at a non-Catholic public and private universities - boys and girls don't hold hands.

Let that serve as shorthand for the absence of all those rites of attraction and conversation, flirting and courting, that used to be passed along from one youthful generation to the next, just as childhood games were once passed along, but are so no longer.  The boys and girls don’t hold hands. 

I am aware of the many attempts by responsible Catholic priests and laymen to win the souls of young people, to keep them in the Church, and indeed to make some of them into attractive ambassadors for the Church.  I approve of them heartily.  Yes, we need those frank discussions about contraception.  We need theological lectures to counter the regnant nihilism of the schools and the mass media.  But we need something else too, something more human and more fundamental.  We need desperately to reintroduce young men and young women to the delightfulness of the opposite sex.  Just as boys after fifteen years of being hustled from institutional pillar to institutional post no longer know how to make up their own games outdoors, just as girls after fifteen years of the same no longer know how to organize a dance or a social, so now our young people not only refrain from dating and courting—they do not know how to do it.  It isn’t happening.  Look at the hands. 

In our swamp of miserable statistics, let me introduce another that is often overlooked.  In 1960—back when Wally Cleaver was wearing a jacket and tie to join other boys and girls at a party, for playing records and eating ice cream and dancing—in that already souring time, almost three out of four Americans aged 24 were married (72%).  Now that number is less than one in ten (9%)!  That is not a good thing.  First, it is evidence of deep and widespread loneliness.  We are not talking about people who are dating during all those years; they aren’t.  Some of them are bed-hopping; some are shacking up; some are simply alone.  That pretty much accounts for them all.  Three options, all bad. 

Second, it delays, perhaps derails for good, the time when young people will set down roots and integrate themselves into the great passage of the generations.  In a culture where marriage is really treasured, that time is the supreme aim of most people’s lives.  It is when the couple will plant orchards whose fruit they themselves will not enjoy—while tasting the fruit that has been made available to them by their parents and grandparents.  The married couple, open to bearing and raising children, assume wholly new relations to the world around them.  They need not rely upon the ministrations of a secular and soul-withering state.  They themselves make a society within the larger society. 

Third, it implies a divorce of love from the crazy vigor and cheerfulness of youth.  And this is what I specifically want to stress.  Young people should be oriented toward love; that is natural.  Grace perfects nature; but that means there has to be a nature to perfect.  But where, now, is the natural expression of this search for love?  There aren’t any boys climbing the mountains to pick edelweiss for their sweethearts.  There aren’t any sweethearts.  There aren’t any boys singing “Annie Laurie,” nor any Annies for them to sing to.  A whole mode of being has been lost, a mode of being that in every culture but our own produces a wealth of beauty, and sweeps young people along with its strong tide, into marriage and a world of families.

Esolen, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, relates the problem to the damage we as irresponsible parents who over-schedule our children and leave them to the soul-destroying world of television, video games, and endless distractions, does not mince words:

What do we do about it?  Well, what would we do if we found a land of pallid, feeble, depressed children, kept withindoors all their lives, and so burdened with drudgery and the inanity of electronic gadgetry that they couldn’t climb a tree or fish in a pond or climb a mountain?  We wouldn’t give them lectures on the wonder of the simple joys.  We wouldn’t have them read articles proving the superiority of a way of life they cannot imagine.  We wouldn’t focus on the intellect at all!  For the problem is bigger than that, or more fundamental.  We would get them outdoors, right away.  It isn’t enough that no one prevent them from going outdoors, just as it isn’t enough right now that no one prevents our young people from holding hands, delighting in the company of the opposite sex, courting, and marrying.  They’re lost.  They hardly know where to begin.

It's as well he does not resort to satire, sarcasm, or irony as he does in the book.  When he tried that on Fox and Friends recently, the interviewers missed the irony entirely and, clearly flummoxed, cut short the interview after two and a half minutes. That itself is a sad commentary on our dying culture.  Satire depends on shared values.



Look what happens when adults, even in Catholic schools, colleges, and parishes, neglect their responsibility, hitherto a key task of all cultures, to steer their young toward marriage!

And, let’s be honest, among all sane people, one generation assumes some responsibility to ready the next generation for marriage.  They sponsor dances.  Where are the dances, the concerts, in our parishes?  Dancing, I know, is another one of those games that used to be passed along by the young to the young, but that’s long ceased to be the case.  Now all we’re left with are the epileptic jerks of disconnected “partners” on a strobe-lit stage, all conversation made impossible by noise from hell, or the embarrassing slow-dancing, which you can hardly engage in with somebody you are only beginning to get to know.

Esolen's point is that it is irresponsible to "let our youth muddle and meander; to suppose that marriage will eventually 'happen.'" (Esolen is a witty and articulate traditionalist in literary matters, especially scriptural and liturgical translation.  Here he properly uses the dying semi-colon.)

 For my whole life, the ecclesially minded have asked, “What can we do to keep our youth in the Church?”  And their attempts haven’t worked, because they have viewed young people as consumers of a churchly product, rather than as boys and girls, young men and young women, with obvious natures and needs.

We handled these things better and more naturally in the past, as Mormons, I understand, still do.  The answers Esolen proposes are "sweet and simple and ordinary things."