“And when he had commanded the multitudes to sit down upon the grass, he took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitudes. And they did all eat, and were filled. And they took up what remained, twelve full baskets of fragments.
And the number of them that did eat, was five thousand men, besides women and children.”

I hardly know where to begin. I purposely waited 2 days to respond to your comment because I was so stunned by it. Let’s try this step by step:

I have married a blue collar worker. I know that not everyone will go to college, however we should strive for “par excellence” but if we strive for mediocrity we will fail.

I think you meant to strive “for excellence” – par excellence is used for comparison, but I was stunned that you don’t have any problem identifying those who don’t go to college as mediocre, including your husband. You implicitly say this by saying “if we strive for mediocrity” (i.e. not going to college). I think that such an attitude is, frankly, disgusting. Poor St. Therese of Lisieux, who didn’t strive for “excellence” by going to college. Poor St. Joseph of Cupertino, who didn’t strive for “excellence” by going to college. Christendom is REPLETE with examples of people who lived phenomenal lives without college, yet you, in the early 21st century, have discovered a new norm?

As for money, it is possible for the poor, dare I say even the poorest of the poor, can afford it especially in the U.S. Just because your father cannot afford it does not mean you can not go. Education pays for itself.

False. This is a silly, idealistic notion that is completely out of touch with reality. I just finished assisting 10 students in the last 8 weeks put the finishing touches on over 100 college applications. The average university education costs upwards of $18,000 a year, and the average student leaves college over $37,000 in debt. These statistics vary, but not too wildly. In short, how, madam, does an art history major pay back $37,000? There is a dearth of jobs in that field, and if they follow your advice down this yellow brick road of “education” what will they have at the end? As I think I mentioned to you in another response on the original college thread, someone who stays away from Borders because I can’t go in without spending money on some book when I have so much to read, certainly appreciates education and reading and all that. But as someone who has actually had to make it on their own in the REAL WORLD outside of academics, I find that very often, in our modern university system, graduates are ill-equipped to “cut it” in the modern world. Yes, that piece of paper might mean “achievement”, but so does a high school diploma. It’s all what you do with it…I know far too many successful Catholic and non-Catholic businessmen who do not possess your apparent “norm” of college and who make great husbands and fathers, and indeed, love to read, which is the heart of education, not sitting in lectures for 4 years and writing papers (though that is a great deal of fun for those of us who love it). I don’t think it is fair to impose that level of intellectual pursuit on everyone.

And while there is no way for me to say this without sounding elitist, I have to again reiterate that intellectual pursuits are not in everyone’s grasp or even, frankly, interest. By forcing these people along into college you will drag those of us down who thought we were finally free of those kids who “had to be there.” Please let people “do what they are” (to borrow from a popular book title).

As for those who choose to waitress I recommend it highly to pay for college whereas you recommend it for them to meet their lucky man to marry. I want them to meet that man in college. At least try it.

Finally, it comes out. Girls, go to college so you can get a man. I won’t comment on that.

I will again point out that no one recommended a career in waitressing. What I was trying to point out, unsuccessfully, it seems, is that if someone doesn’t want to go to college, and if they want to waitress or pump gas or whatever, because they trust in Providence instead of what you call “luck”, so be it. I’m not going to do what you tell them: Hey girl, go spend $4000-$8000 a year of yours or your parents’ money doing something you don’t want to do! Noblesse oblige! I just don’t buy it. Sorry.

Dr. White is responding off of what you say. If I were to talk to him I would get a different response as would only be normal.

Formulate a question for Dr. White, I’ll be happy to forward it to him, and then we will see if you still hold on to this fantasy.

For all who read what I have written above, please note that this is an ongoing discussion between myself and Mrs. Carter (on and off, over 6 months) in which she has pertinaciously held, both publically and in private emails, maintained this really indefensible stance of “college is a MUST for EVERYONE.” If I seem a bit hard, it is because I’m really trying to get through and discredit this notion as ridiculous.

I don’t think the results will be any different this time, unfortunately – yes, I know, honey, vinegar, flies, but you haven’t seen the didactic way I tried to walk through this in the beginning that she still didn’t get.

I have married a blue collar worker. I know that not everyone will go to college, however we should strive for “par excellence” but if we strive for mediocrity we will fail. As for money, it is possible for the poor, dare I say even the poorest of the poor, can afford it especially in the U.S. Just because your father cannot afford it does not mean you can not go. Education pays for itself. As for those who choose to waitress I recommend it highly to pay for college whereas you recommend it for them to meet their lucky man to marry. I want them to meet that man in college. At least try it.

Catholic action takes place in France which I believe is Socialist and yet they rise above and do not look at what they do not have but what they can achieve with what they have and we can too!

Dr. White is responding off of what you say. If I were to talk to him I would get a different response as would only be normal. I will never throw out his tapes I love them too much he makes me go higher.

Noblesse Oblige,

Erin

I’m not going to rehash the multiple point argument we had on that thread at Cornell’s expense.

The question you never answered was how everyone was going to pay for college. There’s no pat answer for that one.

Nor did you have a satisfactory answer for the fact that many people are not intellectually suited for college studies. We somehow made it as a society without EVERYONE going to college for millenia. You are the one proposing novelty, not I.

As much as I have had disagreements with writers in this thread, I think you will find threadbare (if any) support for your closing salvo of “College is a MUST for EVERYONE.” Your alleged “norm”, outrageous as it is, leaves no place in society for blue-collar workers, and it is precisely that sort of disgustingly snotty bourgeois attitude that has crippled us as a society that thinks itself so enlightened that it doesn’t know how to fix a broken pipe.

Surely you understand that people have different roads and roles in this life. You want to force them all to fit your fantasy that the only effective Catholic action is that from university-trained students.

Those poor, stupid Catholics in the Catholic worker movement! They should have stopped their Catholic Action because they were insufficiently trained! They should have left their horrible blue-collar jobs and gone back to school! What you kindly ignore, Mrs. Carter, is that our Catholic Action movements in the past had education, from priests, in seminars and lectures, similar to what one might have gotten in the university. We have nothing like that here in the United States, and those who try to start such movements are shouted down as Sillonists by certain people.

And I’ll tell you I know for sure what Dr. White’s answer is to your “norm” of EVERYONE going to college. No. Not all of Dr. White and I’s conversation showed up in the transcript. I guess that means you’ll have to throw out his tapes, huh?

As for your comment about waitresses, in the original thread you were looking to demean them, and I simply said that there is nothing wrong with having a job like that – you read that as “Stephen wants women to be waitresses.”

You should consider writing for the New York Times, Mrs. Carter.

PS What we never got to look at in that college thread, Mrs. Carter, is that waitressing and gas station jobs, jobs that don’t pay a living wage to support a family, are not the by-products of a lack of education, but rather of a globalist capitalism. A rather different argument entirely.

Retreat is not defeat. It is a military strategy. Sometimes regrouping is necessary in order to come back to retake the field.

If you’re the only one left in the field, there might be some hope if you’re Achilles. But we’re not all Achilles, and sometimes we judge the situation better to withdraw.

It is “Catholic” to use prudence and good judgment. Not to “keep fighting” at all costs.

Good luck finding me saying anywhere in print or in private conversations that women should work at gas stations or as waitresses.

And I can give you Dr. White’s telephone number or email address if you want to find out if we are mens nostra, or you are just wishfully thinking.

PS I had a woman with me when I was conducting the interview. Couldn’t find more demeaning work for her to do.

Some young on-line traditionalists–I suspect from their vocabulary and concerns (dungeons, dragons, unicorns, all things medieval) that they are either young or “young at heart”– seem to relish this kind of cowboy bravado given to sweeping renunciations of the world. They seem to egg it on. Some not young enough to use youth as an excuse do the same.

The thing is, it isn’t Catholic and it isn’t traditional, for Catholicism built the university system administratively, provided the theoretical platform for the development of the sciences, and supported the development of the sciences and technology materially; the Church has survived by full political participation in a fully political world, not by withdrawing from it.

What’s at stake is winning or losing.

That said, it’s still perfectly fair to criticize the man for making silly claims, and I believe Dr. White made several, which several of our commenters have rightly targeted. If Brother Bugnolo or others think they can reconstruct his true views on these subjects more faithfully than he himself has done, they are welcome to try; I for one would be genuinely interested. Likewise, if White’s supporters would like to recommend other works that they think are more meritorious, they may certainly do so. I can’t promise that I myself will read them; as a graduate student I get a lot of reading just through my work, and the list of other books I’d like to read on my own time is already quite long. Time is always limited, so you must choose carefully which literature looks most promising. Based on this interview, I am not brimming with eagerness to read more, though I’m prepared to believe that White is more authoritative/insightful in his own field.

In this interview, however, White is anything but erudite and nuanced. He has aimed instead to be provocative, blunt and hard-hitting. Such an approach often leads to shortcomings in the accuracy of one’s statements, and it’s perfectly fair for bloggers to point these out.

It’s seems to me that after this string unsubstantiated opinions on David White’s part, the poor scholar is apparent and it is not the Holy Father. Furthermore, White’s comments on the subject are political in the most degrading definition possible for the term, that is, having the eye out who is winning, not for what is right.

White also asserted that the Holy Father heretically stated that the Muslims worship the “one true God” but he did not quote the words, and I do not find those words in the Holy Father’s Muslim comments, and in fact find that the Holy Father was telling them to their face precisely that they do not believe in the one true God, because the one true God could not, never could, support any human action as erratic as jihad, the war upon the innocent. White would continue to object even to that interpretation, because it would make the Muslims mad–even if it is the truth. Which makes White a coward.

What the Holy Father specifically said at Regensburg — that an illogical God is impossible — is both true and helpful to the world, as the truth usually is in the long run, but especially now. Someone has to tell them that they do not in fact worship the one true God and that their enthusiastic worship so admired by White is misplaced.

This is how Wikipedia summarized it, and I will not apologize for using Wikipedia, since White used nothing at all:

“Pope Benedict used Manuel II’s argument in order to draw a distinction between the Christian view, as expressed by Manuel II, that “not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature”, and an Islamic view, as explained by Khoury, that God transcends concepts such as rationality, and his will, as Ibn Hazm stated, is not constrained by any principle, including rationality.”

The Irrational God — the justification for jihad. The only way to Muslims can respond to that statement honorably is to disprove it, and they cannot, for it is true. The best they can do is shake their fists and scream and make threats. No matter how much White thinks Muslims have “mo,” this is a weak position.

White reopened his assertion of the intellectual insufficiencies of the Holy Father but once again, as in an earlier 2005 interview, he declines to bring up specific errors, saying only that,

“For a bright mind, the modern university is not the place to go” and that the Holy Father’s participation in Vatican II proves that the errors of Vatican II permeate his thinking. This of course is followed by White’s amusing admission that in fact ” I [White himself] have spent my entire life in modern universities.” Well, I guess that explains everything — to a lazy mind.

But my remarks so far are only a prologue to my real beef with David White. David White is one of those traditionalists who make statements so ridiculous as to raise the suspicion that they are agent provocateurs. In this case I refer to his position on electricity.

Here’s what he said:
It occurred to me recently that we are now totally dependent upon power and electricity for every aspect of our lives. All that Satan needs to do is turn out the power, and then his false son can step forward to perform the great miracle of restoring the power to us if we fall down and worship him.” Electricity is bad of course, because it “has allowed us to turn night into day, winter into summer, and summer into winter, with air conditioning and heating.” My God, the horror.

So rather than continue the patient Catholic work over centuries of relentless education and the technological progress that inevitably goes with it and makes up what we know as European culture, we should blame, not sin, but electricity.

It is this kind of lazy nonsense that keeps more people from picking up their checkbooks and helping traditionalism. It is a shame, it really is, that we continue to give it shelf space.

It is not surprising that the interview’s capsulization of White’s book, published, no doubt to its shame by Angelus press, the Horn of the Unicorn, is a collection of “sound bites,” meaning that it does not bother to develop an argument and caters to the 10 minute attention span that White encounters in his midshipman students. After the revelations of this interview, that should not be surprising. White would cater to the Muslims as well, because they are, in his incorrect perception, currently “stronger” than Catholics. White is a caterer. He should stick to teaching Flannery O’Connor, whom he at least partially grasps.

Does David White in fact maintain that, “the Holy Father should not antagonize the Islamic world because they have great ‘momentum’”?

It is important to settle whether or not that is in fact his position. For, if it is, White might merit this criticism: “from every angle it appears to be sheer cowardice. Heretics should not be opposed or chastised by the Holy Father if they have many followers and much enthusiasm for their cause? Perhaps he should have offered this advice to the crusaders, or martyrs like St. Edmund Campion, or missionaries preaching to hostile territories.”

From the text of the interview, it does appear that David White holds this position. From the text of the interview, I don’t see how someone could accuse Clara of lacking in hermeneutical generosity. It seems to be a sound assessment.

1. Does Stephen or anyone else know whether we have access to more information relevant to the matter of White’s position? Has he changed his mind? If so, did he share his reasoning?

2. Does anyone want to take a guess as to when the Holy Father might oppose and chastise that other false faith that has so much “momentum”? My goodness, if one can just pick up the phone and get a Polish consulate official to cancel a talk by NYU Prof. Tony Judt, then you’ve sure got “Big Mo”.

3. And if the Holy Father would not oppose and chastise this other false religion, then what would we imagine being his “advice to the crusaders, or martyrs like St. Edmund Campion, or missionaries preaching to hostile territories”? Would it appear “from every angle to be sheer cowardice”? And, would the “sheer cowardice” be equally sheer vis-à-vis each false faith?

People get nervous over approaching certain cases of “Big Mo”. I completely understand. Nevertheless, this is a really bright group and I would love to read your recommendations for Dr. White and the Holy Father.

I thought it was the modernists and nervous disordinarians who argued that black can be made white through reading, study, and dialogue?

This interview is characterized by anything other than layered, scholarly analysis and depth; it’s frequently simplistic and shallow, and often Dr. White is plainly wrong.

He may be a brilliant scholar and write with lyrical grace, nuance, and depth elsewhere. But I am judging these words of his, and I find them wanting. That can’t be mended by appeal to the other things he says.

Perhaps you could point us to David Allen White’s more substantive work? I know he’s apparently written about the Archbishop and Castro de Mayer with great gusto, but I wasn’t aware he had spoken definitively on modern education before.

Such an interview as he has given, would lead an sound academic to read his more substantive works, so as to understand the context and import of his remarks, and only then proceed to a critique. That requires thoughtfulness and reading a few books. ;) !

But I do not believe I would be beyond the pale to presume that even Dr. White recgonizes that not everything he said he said with the same level of probity, and it takes some charity and intellectualy maturity to sort that out.

I encourage his critics therefore to do some reading.

“And the number is closer to 60. Yes, I’m sure Dr. White is interested in taking credit for those conversions away from the Church.”

Firstly, do you not see the satanic element of this statement? Conversions for what? Radical traditionalism that smacks of a protestant-like pride? Who leads souls away from the Catholic church but Satan?

Secondly, Bishop Fulton Sheen in his lifetime made hundreds of converts. While on his deathbed someone tried to give Sheen an exact number. Sheen’s response was to silence the gentleman for fear that the large number would tempt Sheen into believing this was his work and not God’s.

I agree. And on White’s recommendation, at some point, I want to take up Solzhenitsyn, of whom I’ve often heard, but never read.

Like Ambrosius, I did not care for his sweeping remarks about the Pontiff generally; actually, it seemed to me almost incredible that anyone who had read the Holy Father’s writings could be directing such remarks towards him. Confused and imprecise? Would he care to offer some examples? I find the Pope’s writings to be admirably clear and profoundly insightful. Perhaps Dr. White falls into that same error, unfortunately shared by many traditionalists, of assuming that anything nuanced is “confused” without considering whether the nuance might be called for by the complexity of the truth being explained. And White’s sneering at the belief that God loves everyone as merely “sentimental” seems to me to border on heresy. In the interpretation of the Apostle John and many of the Church Fathers, God IS love and so by his very nature must love everyone and everything that exists.

But I leave this aside for the present to focus on his point about the Holy Father having made a misake in insulting the Muslims in their “Big Mo.” I’m honestly attempting to find a charitable way of looking at this view, but from every angle it appears to be sheer cowardice. Heretics should not be opposed or chastized by the Holy Father if they have many followers and much enthusiasm for their cause? Perhaps he should have offered this advice to the crusaders, or martyrs like St. Edmund Campion, or missionaries preaching to hostile terrorities. “Going up against Big Mo! Better back down!”

Personally, I feel fortunate that Pope Benedict, and not Dr. White, is at the helm and making these sorts of decisions.