OK. But. There is still a very serious confusion in your post.

You seem to be laboring under the impression that building one’s life around the gratification of personal desires will make one’s actions honest, genuine and happy, while acting out of obedience to God or other properly instituted authorities will make one’s labors joyless and deadening. This is a very modernist idea: happiness comes from the unfettered exercise of autonomy. It isn’t so. As the lives of the saints show us over and over, obedience to God can bring more joy than anything else, both because it is rightly pleasurable for beings like us to honor the Almighty, and also because does in fact will for us the things that will make us happy.

Do you think the Mother of Christ spent her life grumbling, rendering services to her divine Son bitterly and resentfully, just because the whole arrangement wasn’t originally her idea? Or do you think she accepted the honor gladly and gratefully, rejoicing not in the pleasure of unfettered choice, but rather in the realization that she was an important part of God’s plan for mankind? And if she was able to rejoice in this realization, I see no reason why other mothers could not likewise be glad and grateful for the honor of being entrusted with the care of other souls. Privilege and duty are almost always bound together in the Christian life.

Understanding this, my meaning in the paragraph about children turning to sin and sorrow should become clear. I admit that I’m not writing here with the precision expected of me in my philosophical work. For example, I suggested that liberals have “no right” to have children, but in the strict philosophical sense I’m suspicious of rights-talk anyway. It’s just a provocative shorthand for what I wanted to say. Likewise, I don’t mean to suggest that parents (liberal or otherwise) are literally morally responsible for all of their offspring’s sins. Of course the children have free will and make their own choices, though the parents might still be partially responsible for misbehavior later in life, insofar as they were negligent in their duties to provide necessary moral formation for the child. But that’s not the point of my post. I was thinking about the emotional impact on a parent when a child makes bad choices.

My attention was arrested by this fact: the decision to become a parent affects others more than oneself, and particularly, affects the child more than the parent. Isn’t it fascinating that, for all the liberal obsession with maximizing autonomy, the very existence of one’s autonomy still depends entirely on the choices of others? A proper attitude towards parenthood should reflect an understanding of its ramifications. Just as it would be selfish and frivolous to want to be President of the United States just because it sounds like fun, so it would be culpably frivolous to become a parent merely because one wants to experience parenthood. In becoming a parent, one participates in the creation of a new soul, That soul will remain in existence for eternity, long after the baby fat has melted away and the cub scout meetings have ended. Kids are cute, but the immediate pleasure derived from their cuteness certainly is not enough to justify such a momentous action as bringing one into being.

To explain more carefully what I mean about guilt… suppose that my next door neighbor has a baby and lets me baby-sit sometimes. I think the child is cute, I have fun playing with it, and I get envious of my neighbor, both for having the child and also on account of the attention that she gets through her baby. So I decide to get pregnant and have one of my own. This kind of thing presumably happens quite often. Now fast-forward twenty years into the future, and suppose that my child gets himself into all kids of trouble (becomes a drug addict, gets arrested for some kind of crime, or what have you). I am likely to feel deeply guilty. I just wanted a cute little person to dress up in oshkosh b’gosh trousers. My motives were ephemeral and basically selfish. But of course, the ramifications of that choice went far beyond my short-term desire for a baby; insofar as they were more bad than good, and insofar as I attribute the child’s existence entirely to my whimsical action, it is neither strange nor entirely inappropriate for me to feel remorse for the frivolity of my actions.

When parenthood is undertaken both as an honor and as a duty, the thing can be put into perspective. Both parents and children are part of something larger than themselves. Thus, the parents can reasonably demand graces from God to help them discharge their duties faithfully, and when they have done their very best, they can turn trustingly to God and ask that He make it all work out for the best. Even when it seems not to, they don’t need to second-guess themselves as to whether they were wrong to bear children in the first place. Obedience to God is never an excessively frivolous reason for doing something.

Far from robbing things of their joy, God’s plans allow us to live life to its full, appreciating the deeper meaning in life. Without God and without obedience, we’re just a lot of broken human beings making a lot of stupid, selfish choices.

I’ll finish that response up now.

“Seeing one’s child turn to sorrow or sin must under any circumstances be deeply painful, but the liberal, unlike the Catholic, must bear the full weight of the responsibility himself.”

How untrue. The assumption that anyone else is ‘responsible’ for someone’s turning towards sorrow or sin is deeply flawed. People make *choices*. An adult child will make a CHOICE.

And how can you blame anyone for turning towards sorrow? If your child chooses to marry someone they love, and that person has terminal cancer, they are choosing sorrow - but their commitment to their beloved and their willingness to bear that cross is commendable.

As for their choosing sin/alienation from God, that’s about their relationship with God, and it’s THEIR choice. No one else’s.

If you ARE going to blame the parents, then be even-handed. There are plenty of Catholic children out there who go off the rails because their parents are breathing down their necks, stifling their childhood and shoving faith down their throats in a joyless, mechanistic manner - and either the children become incapable of making adult decisions or the angriest adolescents around, who won’t touch organised religion with a bargepole.

Yes, parents like that exist across the board, but this post needed balance, hence that example.

And how do you separate “I want to experience motherhood” from your “Every woman is called to be a mother”? Isn’t that desire part of the indication of the vocation to motherhood?

And frankly, I’d rather have a mother who wanted to experience motherhood than one who resented me as her 5th child and her ‘duty’ to the man she married not because she loved him, but because ‘well, he’s a good Catholic boy, and that’s what you do as a Catholic’. *shudder* Talk about the perversion of natural law and the sacrament of marriage.

At least the former would be putting her heart into it, even if you don’t agree with her methods.

3/12/2007 05:28:00 AM

I absolutely agree. This is something my wife and I have come to realize. We have a five-month-old and whenever we take him around our atheistic, contracepting blue-state friends the topic of having children inevitably comes up. Mind you, we never initiate this conversation, but our friends keep saying things like “We want to have children eventually but we just don’t have the money” (this coming from people who make twice as much as us, and in one case five times as much as us), “We’re just not ready yet”, etc. Really, like Clara said, what reason COULD you give for bringing a child into the world. When it comes to contributing to the origin of a new life there is no reason that we can give as individuals that can justify this. It is nonsense to even attempt it which is why the results are so feeble and egotistical: “it would be pleasing TO ME if we had a child”, “I want to have the experience of having a child”. Ugh.

Do you see what widespread contraception leads to? It causes us to ask certain questions that should not even be asked. These questions simply should not arise. The question is not, “should I have children?” or “why should I have children?”. Those questions were answered as soon as you got married. That’s (principally) what marriage is FOR! The question is “are there any grave reasons why we should refrain from having children at this time?”. This question can be answered in a way that does not usurp God’s role and make us lord and master of life.

I think a good way to look at things like this is to acknowledge error in raising children on the basis of the moral law but also recognize and trust that God will be able to save and reach out to such children regardless of their upbringing.