Back in the day,
Europe was Catholic. The people who lived there could let their
children
run and play, safe in knowing that those who lived around them shared
their basic views of what is True, Good, and Beautiful. During the day,
while their men worked, women were surrounded by extended family and by
other women who believed as they did about the basics in life. They'd
drop by each
others' homes for a kaffeeklatsch, talking together over coffee and
cake. Their children would play together while the women socialized and
shared their problems with each other, and if any of those children
acted the fool, any of the mothers could step in and correct them
without fear of being accused of something nefarious. In the
very olden days, women would share labor, doing things like meeting at
the river to wash their families' laundry, or getting together to bake
up things in advance of feast day celebrations. Women had their
world, men had
theirs, and the two weren't in competition, but supported each another.
Immigrants from Europe to the United States created little oases made
of those co-ethnic, likeminded people who still shared their core
values and ways of life. "Little Italys," and Polish, Irish, and German
neighbhorhoods were built around parishes and populated by large
families who grew up together, went to church together, and went to
school together. My city, for example, never had enough Italian
immigrants to have an official "Little Italy," but the people who came
here from the Old Country lived in the same area. My paternal
grandparents attended an Italian personal parish and lived among
Catholic Italian Americans, with the Catholic Irish Americans close by.
Two of their seven children moved a few houses down from them when they
got married, a grand-daughter -- a girl from a family with eleven
children -- moved into the house next door to her parents when she
married, etc., so that the people of my family lived all up and down
the same street. Aunts Teresa, Catherine, Frances, and Mary had each
other and Nonna; their many children had them and each other. Children
back in the day could go outside and play with other children whose
parents had the same basic ideas of what are True, Good, and Beautiful.
So what happened?
These beautiful, close neighborhoods were intentionally destroyed in
order to destroy Catholic solidarity, something E. Michael Jones writes
about this in his book "The Slaughter of Cities,"1 which he discusses in mp3
format here. Paul Likoudis, of "The Wanderer," writes that Jones's
book explains:
how the elites
used World Wars I and II to 'Americanize' Catholic ethnics, used the
crisis of war production to transport millions of poor blacks North for
factory work and housed them in Catholic neighborhoods, branded
Catholics as racists for resisting this influx, invented and employed
sophisticated propaganda tools 2 in the major media to
persuade Catholics the suburban life with a car and garage was superior
to a close-knit neighborhood, and that public school was superior to
the parochial school, and so much more.
But the destruction of those neighborhoods and the great exodus to the
suburbs did more than just destroy Catholic solidarity; they put a
burden on the Catholic family that's played a big role in the
destruction of family altogether. Where women once had their own
culture, and a sorority made of literal sisters, aunts, mothers,
grandmothers, and neighbors -- women to talk to and share work with --
they now had no one but their husbands. Isolated in the suburbs, with
no family and relatively few Catholics around them, they were
desperately alone. Desperately alone, they became unhappy. Unhappy,
they became feminists -- prey to the writings of such people as Betty
Friedan, Erica Jong, and Gloria Steinem. And becoming feminist, they
came to blame men, instead of the destruction of their communities,
for all of their problems.
The Rolling Stones have a song, "Mother's Little Helper," with rather
mocking lyrics that describe the very real turmoil women came to find
themselves in:
"Kids are
different today, " I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
"Things are different today, " I hear every mother say
Cooking fresh food for her husband's just a drag
So she buys an instant cake, and she burns a frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And two help her on her way, get her through her busy day
Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old
"Men just aren't the same today, " I hear every mother say
They just don't appreciate that you get tired
They're so hard to satisfy, you can tranquilize your mind
So go running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And four help you through the night, help to minimize your
plight
Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old
"Life's just much too hard today, " I hear every mother say
The pursuit of happiness just seems a bore
And if you take more of those, you will get an overdose
No more running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
They just helped you on your way, through your busy dying day
-- Hey!
The relative ease of making an instant cake or preparing a frozen steak
does nothing to ease loneliness and feelings of being uprooted, so
women turned to drugs like Valium, prescribed by the billions by
doctors in the 1960s and 1970s. Women were in pain. And women in pain
want to talk about it. But when a woman's alone with no one but a
husband
who's been working hard all day and, very understandably, doesn't want
to come home to misery but to a place of peace and nurturing, fights
break out, and marriages break down. Men tend to personalize their
wives' unhappiness, wondering why their women are so discontented when
they work so hard to give them everything. They tend not to understand
what it's like being alone with little children all day long, every
day, and understimate how very difficult it is, especially when those
children have no one else to play with, and grown women are expected to
act as their entertainment centers. Men being men, they're also
typically not highly emotional creatures who want to talk about
feelings all night. But women are women, social creatures needing
emotional validation, needing to kvetch when things aren't right with
them. With no females around for support, all of those emotional needs
get poured
out on the poor husband,
and both husband and wife end up exasperated for good reason.
Bottom line: women need other women. And men need other men. And
children need other children to play with. We need to restore Catholic
communites.
Moving Forward
When traditional Catholics think of surviving modern life, it seems
that most get the idea of moving to a rural area and living off the
land. That's fine and good, of course, but not all Catholics are meant
to grow crops or engage in animal husbandry, and moving to the country
doesn't help with the problem of women and children's isolation. The
old-school neighborhoods written about above weren't typically situated
on farmlands, but in cities, and it's cities I want to focus on here.
I envision Catholics banding together in groups of at least three
families (though the more the merrier), choosing a parish or chapel
that offers the traditional Latin Mass and all of the traditional
sacramental rites, and moving together to houses close to that parish
or chapel, and very close to each other -- next door to or across the
street from each other, if possible. Another option is for a wealthier
Catholic to buy a few duplex homes, condominium complex, or small
apartment building and
rent them out to Catholic families. Such a building with an enclosed
courtyard would be a tremendous boon in terms of children's ability to
gather and play together safely.
Or imagine a cul-de-sac with eight houses, each of them populated by a
traditionally Catholic family. Imagine how the
women could befriend and help
each other during the day. Imagine the
celebrations of feast days that could be had when eight families are
involved and working together. Imagine families getting together to
pray the Rosary,
engage in Lectio Divina, or just have fun with things like game nights
and cocktail parties. Imagine
how the children of those families could grow up with friends to play
with, yards to play in, and an entire street to ride their bikes and
play street hockey on. Imagine how much happier those families
could be without having to worry so much about their children playing
outdoors. Imagine three our four houses in a row with their backyards
collectively fenced in so that children have some breathing room to
play in.
Imagine forming such a small community, other strong Catholic families
seeing what you've built, and then their moving in to the area as well.
Imagine their further inspiring other families to do the same. Then
imagine what things could look like after a decade.
Rebuilding Catholic communities either starts with something like this,
or it doesn't start at all. Jewish people manage to have their Jewish
neighborhoods,3 so why can't we manage to have ours?
Dangers
Intentionally formed communities don't come without hazards. They could
easily devolve into cultish type affairs, for ex. And if "toxic traddism" creeps in, with its
busy-bodying and rigidity -- well, you're doomed. The three families
who
initiate such a plan should know each other well enough, get along
well,
be laid-back about each others' foibles and quirks, be aware of and
determined to
avoid such things as purity spirals,4 not be prone to
paranoia about or overreaction to "the world," and be nothing at all
like a "toxic trad." There should be no
"leader" aside from the leading and organizing needed to get three
families together and willing to make such a move. And there should
definitely be no "spiritual leader" other than the parish or chapel
priest and
the relevant Bishop.
There should be no communal anything that involves finances aside from
such things as the collective purchase of a plot of land to turn into a
play area or park, or for other communal use, or doing things such as
collectively fencing
in back yards, a
situation over
which which
each family would exert absolute control in terms of their own property
and section of the fencing. Family integrity is, of course, key.
Though legally murky to me as a non-attorney, voluntary neighborhood
covenants, conditions, or restrictions ("CC&Rs") or forming
a Homeowners Association may be tools to investigate and consider using
in
setting up such a community and maintaining certain basic standards.
Covenants are illegal to use to discriminate in terms of religion (or
race, color, or national origin), but they can be used to outline
agreed upon expectations for certain behaviors that aren't particular
to any given religion -- i.e., behaviors that are considered "facially
neutral." As an example, an atheist group of homeowners might band
together and form a covenant or Homeowner Association that forbids
putting up light-up decorations, but they couldn't ban "Christmas
lights."
Any expectations, though, whether by covenant or in terms of social
pressure, should be based not on the
religious life, but on secular life -- the world of everyday Catholics.
Look again at the photograph at the top of this page: those people
lived in the same neighborhood and trusted each other with the safety
of their children, but they weren't up in each others' business, nosing
into each others' affairs. The goal is the restoration of such
old-school, traditionally Catholic communities, not establishing a
religious order, a commune, or achieving Utopia (which means
"Nowhere"). There
should be no expectations of sharing the same aesthetics, such as
liking
or disliking the same TV shows, books, movies, or fashions. One family
may
listen to Led Zeppelin, another might prefer Bach; one might eat meat,
and another might be vegetarian; one might watch
movies another finds spiritually dangerous. And all could be well. What
matter are the
desire and will to live in a place where the True, Good, and Beautiful
are seen and treated as Real, where acceptance of the Catholic
creeds is a given, where old-school common sense (especially about
what is
safe and good for children) is evident, and where the overall goal is
to get to Heaven.
Now those three traditional Catholic families have to find each other
and begin...
Ideas
Obviously, locating a place to build a traditional community is the
first order of business, and necessary to the project are a traditional
parish or chapel, jobs, and housing.
Then comes getting the word out. I envision the use of parish bulletins
in this regard: someone decides to take on the task, and then scouts
for properties and housing, using his church's parish bulletin to
announce them, thereby allowing people who make hours-long drives to
get to Mass to see them. Websites could be set up, with the relevant
URLs posted in the bulletin. Social media could be used to make such
announcements and meet other interested
families. Or a single website could be
set
up that would host information -- organized by State -- about
traditional community building going on all over the country.
Read about the power of small things and
get busy!
Footnotes:
1 As of this writing, Mr. Jones's books
are banned from Amazon, but you can buy them through his website:
http://www.culturewars.com
2 The otherwise wonderful movie "Marty"
(1955) demonstrates attitudes that go against extended family (for
example, Clara's attitude toward what Mrs. Pilletti tells her about her
sister's fate), that equate living in such a place with immaturity, and
that
buttress the idea that the new-fangled suburbs are superior to the old
Catholic neighborhoods.
Example 1: Marty tells his mother, "You know, Ma, I think we oughta
sell this place. The whole joint's going to pieces. The plumbing is
rusty. Everything. I'm gonna have to replaster the whole ceiling now.
You know what we oughta do? We oughta get one of those new apartments
they're building down on Southern Boulevard. A nicer parta town, you
know?"
Example 2: When, out of concern for her father, Clara expresses
hesitance about moving away so she can become department head for the
company she works for, Marty says, "I think you're kidding yourself,
Clara. I used to think about moving out, you know? And that's what I
used to say. 'My mother needs me.' But when you really get down to it,
that ain't it at all. Actually, you need your father. You know what I
mean? You're living at home, and you got your father and mother there,
and you can go on like that -- being a little girl all your life."
I haven't done a survey, but I'm willing to bet that you'd see much of
this sort of thing in movies made in the late 1940s and 1950s. And
after 1963 or so -- fuggetaboutit.
3 See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_communities_in_North_America
Orthodox Jewish communities even have eruvim surrounding their
neighborhoods -- enclosures made for the purpose of allowing
activities normally disallowed on their Sabbath. They literally have
fences, and wires strung from publically owned structures, like utility
poles, and from phone poles, etc., to mark out an area as their
"private domain" so they can do things like carry objects into a street
on their Sabbath.
4 A
"purity spiral," as defined by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason
Manning, is a situation in which members of a group formed around
an ideology or goal become ever more intolerant and increasingly
zealous, resulting in members turning on each other, more and more
virtue-signalling, shunning, "cancel culture," and the like.
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