On the kids, I get that. I have a 10 year who would spend all day in front of the TV watching the Simpsons if I let him. I try to slip in such education as I can. I've been able to get him to understand Plato to a certain extent, though if I push it directly in any way he tunes out.
On the Church... yeah, I don't even know. Yesterday we were driving down an old country rode to a farm to pick strawberries, and out of nowhere this absolutely hideous building appeared, radiating that kind of Modern-Brutalist ugliness in every direction. I said to my wife "That's either a school or a prison." Turns out it was a Catholic Church, with attached school. I took a look inside the church via Google Images. Picture a high school auditorium with a Buddy Christ above the podium flanked by two garish Modernist paintings; no sacred images, no saints, no candles-- no magic.
And in contemporary Catholicism, your options are that kind of disenchanted ugliness, or else a Traditionalist movement that preserves the beauty of the old forms but keeps it locked inside the sort of abusive cult mentality that Steve Skojec talked about in the article that prompted this post.
So what do you do? I don't know. I baptized my daughter at the National Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes a last Christmas. I said to my wife yesterday that if we decide to introduce the kids to the sacraments, I'll just get ordained in an ISM parish and we'll do it ourselves.
Re: Catholicism
On the Church... yeah, I don't even know. Yesterday we were driving down an old country rode to a farm to pick strawberries, and out of nowhere this absolutely hideous building appeared, radiating that kind of Modern-Brutalist ugliness in every direction. I said to my wife "That's either a school or a prison." Turns out it was a Catholic Church, with attached school. I took a look inside the church via Google Images. Picture a high school auditorium with a Buddy Christ above the podium flanked by two garish Modernist paintings; no sacred images, no saints, no candles-- no magic.
And in contemporary Catholicism, your options are that kind of disenchanted ugliness, or else a Traditionalist movement that preserves the beauty of the old forms but keeps it locked inside the sort of abusive cult mentality that Steve Skojec talked about in the article that prompted this post.
So what do you do? I don't know. I baptized my daughter at the National Shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes a last Christmas. I said to my wife yesterday that if we decide to introduce the kids to the sacraments, I'll just get ordained in an ISM parish and we'll do it ourselves.