Category: Catholic Topics

Modesty & Sexism

In the combox at Ashely McGuire’s “Case for a Catholic Dress Code”, a reader argues that such dress codes are sexist — what with all the talk being about short skirts and cleavage.

So let’s clear something up: Men should not wear tight, skimpy clothing to Mass.  Here’s a picture tutorial to assist.

1. Skirt meet knees, knees meet skirt:

Yes.
No.

 

2. Cover the shoulders.

Yes.
No.

3. No cleavage.

Yes.
No.

4. Tailored yes, tight no:

Yes.
No.

 

 

Artwork:

Irish men in kilts: By Informatique (Flickr) (http://flickr.com/photos/infomatique/179122558/) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Islanders in grass skirts:  Taken in 1914 by Augustin Erdland and uploaded by Rémih ([1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Apostle Peter: 13 century Greek icon painter (The Dumbarton Oaks Museum, Washington D.C., USA) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Toga Party: Lithiumoxide at English Wikipedia [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
BeeGees: By Atco Records. (eBay itemphoto frontphoto back) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Eric Claption: CC 3.0 via Wikimedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clapton.jpg

Moliere: By Eustache Lorsay [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Medieval Men in Tights: By Meister des Jouvenel des Ursins [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

3 Quick Takes: Rosary, College, Good things to read.

I could never be coordinated enough produce seven on a Friday.  But here’s three:

1) If you ever wondered how someone like me ended up in the Legion of Mary, yeah, it’s about how you’d think.  Don’t be fooled by that lovely little picture Sarah R. stuck up, I pray nothing but plastic these days.  Unblessed at that, which horrifies the gallant rosary-maker I thanked the other week, but I tell you right now there is a rosary permanently stuck in the track of the seat of my truck.  Yes.  With the cheerios crumbs and the hardened mass you secretly hope is just gum, but maybe it isn’t.  It’s all I can do to pray the thing; keeping it from falling out of my pocket and into the netherworld where no blessed objects belong is beyond my  ability.

2) I don’t care what the nice guy at the Newman Society says, $20,000 a year for college tuition is not “affordable”.  Put me firmly in the camp with Msgr. Pope, on the question of “Are We Unjust to Require College Degrees As Often As We Do?” Yes.  We are unjust.  It is a mockery to post “degree required” positions for jobs that don’t pay enough to cover the cost of student loans.

3) I am having massive fun today hitting the “share” button in Google reader.  I made a little sidebar here on the blog that shows my favorite google-read posts.  If you are like me and never, ever, actually visit your favorite blogs (because you read everything in RSS), but weirdly you want to know what things other people wrote that I think are worth reading, I think the link to my Google Reader Shared Posts page is here. Which in theory you could subscribe to.  I have to test and see if that works.  (Update: Yes!  It works!)

Vocation and Education

Glad I clicked on this article by Elizabeth Scalia at First Things.  (I almost never click on anything that doesn’t arrive whole and entire in my feed reader.  This one was worth it.)  She writes:

A sense of calling is an idea to which our children often lack an introduction. We tell students they can plot their futures based on test scores measuring information regurgitation; we have no means of measuring their imaginations or their dreams, yet is from these that their deepest and truest longings—and thus their vocations, the things they were born to do—are discovered.

Last year I tried discussing vocations with the fifth graders.  I began by asking, “What are you good at?  What do you love to do?”

My own children have a clear sense of these things by late-elementary school.  They know what they like — military history for that one, emergency medicine for the other.  Even younger, they know what they are like.  This one reads massive quanitities of everything, writes satire, and loves hard manual labor; that one has a talent for teaching and connecting with small children; this one wants to know how it works and then make her own; that one feels everything very, very deeply.

Those were the types of answers I expected from my 5th graders.  Instead, they produced a list of academic subjects and school sports.  They were a room full of people who like math and play soccer.  Very few had a hobby other than an organized sport or club; even fewer had an interest in a field of study beyond whatever passes for “social studies” or “language arts”. The idea that you might, say, love poetry and have developed a taste for this or that type of poem? Nope.

Their worlds, it seemed, were so narrow. No room in the schedule for finding out who they were and what they loved.

Sometimes I feel like the music instructor pushing the talented kid to attend a thousand workshops and camps, when I take parents aside and tell them that this son or daughter has a talent for theology, and needs to be given more instruction, above and beyond the regular parish offerings.

I tell my DRE that if we don’t offer a serious high school religious ed program, we are like a school praying for more pre-med students, but never offering high school biology.  Do we really want more priests and religious?  We have to give our students a chance to discover the depth and riches of an adult faith.  And then, if they are called, to fall in love.

 

Theology of the Body For Teens: Middle School Edition

The Catholic Company very kindly sent me a review set of the Theology of the Body for Teens: Middle School Edition bundle. Okay, so I begged for it.  They sent an e-mail out to all the reviewers (they are still accepting new reviewers) asking who wanted it, and I gave it my best me-me-me-meeeeee! and made the cut!  Yay!  And then I told my DRE, who explained how she was busy trying to finagle a copy on loan from another parish.  Because yes, it is that good.

What’s in the packet:

  • A student book.  Eight chapters of substantial, readable lessons.  Upbeat format.  Rock solid teaching.  You will need one of these for each student.
  • A teacher’s guide.  It’s the student book page-by-page, with helpful teaching notes.  Includes some lesson-planning ideas, answer keys of course, additional information about the Theology of the Body, and supplemental material on difficult topics.  If you are teaching this as a class, you need this book.
  • The parent’s guide.  This is a small book (75 pages, pocket-size) that explains what students are learning.  It is more elevated, adult-level content, focused on how to parent middle-schoolers — it is not a re-hash of the student guide at all.
  • The DVD collection.  There is a set of videos for each chapter of lesson, plus additional material on difficult topics, and a show-this-to-the-parents chapter that explains what the course is about.  The videos are fun, held the interest of my small test-audience of adults (me) and kids (mine), and add significantly to the content of the course.  You would want these if you were teaching this as a class.

What does the course cover?

Well, the focus is John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, but it comes down to: How do I live?  What will make me happy?  And what do I do with this body I’m growing into?

Most of this is not about sex.  It’s mostly about virtue, identity, and love.  How do I love and respect myself and others?  How do I build good relationships?  How do I know what God wants me to do?  It’s a serious, useful, substantial set of lessons that really teach how to be the kind of person God wants you to be.

–>I read the student workbook first.  I found it helpful for me, personally.  To the point that in my opinion, parishes would do well to offer the course to both teens and their parents.  As in: I myself, a grown-up, NFP-using, CCD-teaching, cave-dwelling bona fide catholic dweeb lady, found this to be a course that pushed me to grow in my Christian life.

What Age Student?

The books are targeted towards middle-schoolers — grades 6th to 8th.  I may be under-estimating his maturity, but I felt that my own 6th grade boy, who lives a fairly sheltered catholic-homeschool life, and is not one bit interested in girls, he was not ready to fully benefit from the program.  I held onto a copy of the student book for us to use at home, and when my parish offers it next year (please God), I will send him then.  But for girls (who mature earlier), and for boys and girls who are more fully immersed in our sex-saturated culture, this is about on target for as young as 6th grade.

Sex-related topics are taught in a wider context.  First students learn how we use our bodies to communicate, how we must make an effort to grow in virtue and purity, and how we should not use others for our own gratification, within the wider context of regular life.  It is only after these essentials are thoroughly explored, many weeks into the course, that students are shown how they apply specifically to sex.

Sexual topics are dealt with directly but modestly.  If you don’t know what porn is, all you’ll find out is that it is “the display of images for the purpose of arousing lust”.  (Lust is “a vice that causes people to view others as objects for sexual use”).   So this is a step more mature than earlier-grades catechesis, where the details of “impurity” are left entirely to the reader’s imagination.  If your student is not yet ready to learn about the existence of pornography, sexting, and fornication, hold off on this course for now.

Difficult topics are not presented directly to teens.  There are some video segments the instructor can choose to present depending on the maturity of the group, as well as supplemental teaching material in the teacher’s manual.  One teaching technique I found very helpful was a script where a teacher reads a scenario (young people gathering in the alley behind a movie theater), but the actual misbehavior is not specified.  The teacher then asks: What do you think was happening there?  It’s an opening for students to share the kinds of things they know are going on in their community, which the instructor can then address as appropriate.

I’m cheap.  Or poor.  Do I need to buy the whole nine yards?

The materials are made to be used together.  For a knowledgeable parent wanting to teach at home for the minimal investment, purchasing just the student book would provide a substantial lesson for the least cash outlay.  Note however: The other items do add to the overall content of the course. This isn’t a case of the videos just repeating what the book says, or the parent book being a miniature version of the student book.  Each element contributes new and useful material.  If I were teaching this in the classroom, I would want the whole collection, no question about it.  As a parent, I would want my children to view the videos.

Is it Protestant-friendly?

It’s a very Catholic program.  (Don’t let the “Pope John Paul II” thing fool you.)  You’ll hear references to saints, to the sacraments, the Catholic faith.  BUT, keep in mind, this is all just normal healthy human life.  Love, virtue, modesty, chastity — these are for the whole human race.  The message is right on target with what any Christian youth program would want to teach.  So if you are comfortable with Catholic-trappings,  you could work with the whole course as-is, and just explain to your audience that it was made by Catholics.  If not, you may want to get the materials for yourself, and use them to train yourself how to teach these topics to your teens.

Summary:  I give it a ‘buy’ recommend, if you are responsible for teaching a young person how to act like a human being.  Thanks again to our sponsor The Catholic Company, who in no way requires that I like the review items they send, but would like me to remind you that they are a fine source for a Catechism of the Catholic Church or a Catholic Bible.

Health Insurance Regulations – Go Comment

The Impractical Catholic has a very practical link to how to submit your comments on the new health insurance regulations.  Click on his link, it is very easy from there.   You can scroll through the regulations to make sure you know what you are talking about, and then submit the comment of your choice.

Naturally I forgot to copy mine for posterity before it submitted, by my talking points were this:

  • I quoted the bit about how the goal of the religious exemption was to protect houses of worship.
  • I observed this was too narrow a view of “religious institution”, that did not represent the reality of religious institutions such as hospitals, schools, and other benevolent works.
  • I proposed a compromise, in which employees of such institutions could choose either to accept the employer-provided plan, or use a cash allowance of the same value to purchase the plan of their choice from another source.
  • In that way, the religious employer is not required to directly fund a health care plan that includes treatments contrary to its religious tenets, but employees remain free to choose some other plan as they see fit.

I didn’t say it, but it’s a bit like the difference between saying, “every employee shall be given a per-diem allowance to pay for travel expenses at a hotel or brothel”, versus specifying a per diem amount per day, and leaving it to the employee to decide where he wishes to lodge.

So that’s what I wrote.  Go write something yourself.  It is so easy and fast.  Really, it is.

 

Okay, here’s the link directly to regulations.gov that I followed from Impractical Catholic’s post.  Go.  Now.  Seriously.

 

***

Also: Reconsider giving your nine-year-old a blog on the same blogging program you yourself use.  I almost posted this on a hot-pink ProudKittyCat blog.  That woulda made the grandparents raise an eyebrow.

“But I am not that attractive . . .”

I was in a private conversation with a young woman a few years ago, and the topic was modesty.  No, she told me, she didn’t think outfit she had shown me was a problem.  Her reasoning?

I’m not that attractive.

She meant it.

Let me tell you, she was and is BEAUTIFUL.   I don’t just mean “all young women have a special inner beauty of their own if they just let it shine blah blah blah.”  I mean like, Wow!  Gorgeous!

–> One thing Jon and I discovered when we quit watching TV many years ago, is that our sense of beauty readjusted.   Our brains no longer held up some kind of fake, air-brushed perfect standard as the model to which all humans must be compared.   It is a kind of freedom.

Girls today are not growing up in my little cave of normalcy.  They are surrounded by images everywhere of Perfect People.  Those people are pretend.  They are fake.  They are like the hamburger in the picture on the menu at the fast food restaurant.

But here’s the thing about modesty:  Men are perfectly happy with regular hamburgers.  They don’t need it all fluffed and shellacked and with lettuce and onions hanging out just right to show off what’s inside.  Maybe you have to photograph a hamburger just right to sell it to a girl.  But all you have to do is say, “Hey, hamburgers!” and the guys will line up.

Really.

Girls, even if you aren’t super gorgeous, guys are THAT interested in you, just because you are a girl.  You!  Yes, you!  You don’t need to “sell” yourself.  You don’t need to put your every asset on display.  Be a kind, friendly person who cares about others.  That’s what real men are looking for in a wife.

PS: Betty Beguiles comes well-recommended, if you are looking for fashion ideas that show off the best you, without showing off more of you than needs to be public.  Thank you to the Dorian/Bearing blogging powerhouse for their regular reminders that I really need to subscribe.

[And if you make a point of not showing off your body, you’ll eliminate from the field all the jerky dogs who are only interested in that, and who will drop you in ten years if you don’t stay perfect enough.  You don’t need that.  Do you have ten years to waste, and no desire to find a guy who loves you for YOU?  No.  Use the power of clothing to cull the field of the losers.]

Fr. Z Poll Bleg

As requested.  Go vote.  The topic is “Does an all-male sanctuary foster vocations to the priesthood?”

The results (given that this is Fr. Z’s blog) are unsurprising.  But vote anyway.

[I voted yes.   FYI I have a daughter who loves serving at the altar,  and as long as my pastor is good with it, I’m good with it.   My parish has about half and half boys & girls serving.  Last time the secretary counted, she said it was more boys than girls.  But my intuition is that a mixed server-corps encourages vocations to the sacrament of matrimony.  I could be wrong.  H/T to Sr. Meris the New Nun, who used to be an altar server.]

Be Modest at Church in Four Easy Steps

This topic has been in my head for a while, and I was waiting for fall so no one would be embarrassed.  But this article here got my attention, courtesy of I think maybe Fr. Z or the Pulp.it or maybe both — primarily thanks to my being wound up late at night and goofing off.

What I see at Mass — and of course out in the wider world — is that a lot of really good Catholics don’t have a clue about modesty.  These are super wonderful people. Kind, pious, regular mass-goers who are living out the Christian life day after day.  And honestly?  They are trying to be modest.

–> My experience is that the people who struggle most in the two-few-clothes department are the more pure among us. It doesn’t occur to them just how weak their fellows can be.  It’s like putting out giant trays of brownies because it just never occurs to you that some people will be tempted to eat too many.  (But some of us?  Yes we will be.)

***

But our culture’s at the point where vendors of athletic clothing think nothing of mailing out catalogs with ladies in their bras on the cover.  And not a sports bra.  I mean, underwear-underwear, done pin-up style.

[Hint to businesses:  If my son has to carry in a picture of a seductively-posed almost-naked lady from the mailbox, I am never buying your products again.  Did I say that clearly enough?]

And that was the event today that made me decide it was time to share the Four Easy Steps.  Because when you live in a world where everybody everywhere is forgetting to put their clothes on, it’s really hard to know what’s modest and what’s not.  And all the great essays about “Put on your clothes! But it’s really about internal holiness and don’t be judgmental!” don’t really help, if no one will tell you which clothes you are missing.

So here you go, Four Easy Steps for Dressing Modestly at Mass:

  1. Cover your shoulders.
  2. Cover your knees.
  3. Don’t show any cleavage.
  4. Tailored is good, tight is bad.

And that’s it.  Follow those rules, and you will have to really goof it up to not be wearing enough clothes.

Now for some clarifications.  Consider this the advanced course:

1.  Actually I don’t think bare shoulders are always and everywhere a near occasion to sin.  Witness what I wore to my dad’s wedding, and what my own daughters wore last May for the crowning of the Blessed Mother.  This can be done modestly, or modestly-enough.  Lots of not-immodest sleeveless outfits at my church.  But it is so, so easy to go wrong.  And it’s just not worth agonizing over.  Put on a little sweater and you know you’re good.  Buy something with sleeves, you’re good.  Why argue about strap thickness when it so, so easy to just be sure?

UPDATED to point you to a quote in the combox.  A reader asked about sleeve length.  I gave it my guess, and then asked the guys for an opinion.  Christian LeBlanc came to the rescue with his usual no-nonsense analysis:

Short or long sleeves, either is ok.

No sleeves starts to distract. Thin straps/ bare shoulders/ bare backs distract more.

It has to do with the amount of skin, I think, even though the skin exposed is basically mundane.

–> So there you go.  Not just me makin’ things up to repress the masses.  Guys notice this stuff.  Be kind to them.  They are trying to pray.

(And anway, you know you are freezing at church. They set the A/C so that poor man saying Mass in all those vestments on a 105 degree day doesn’t fall over.)

2.  Ditto for knees.  I did a quick look-around the last couple weeks, and sure enough, there are tons of ladies at my parish wearing just-above-the-knee skirts that were perfectly modest.  The trouble is this:  It’s really hard for the modern-media-saturated brain to distinguish between the skirt that is long enough, and the one that is not.  Who runs around with a ruler in hand, figuring out the perfect modesty formula?  Knees, on the other hand . . . almost everyone has knees.  They are easy to identify, so you can tell right away whether they are visible or not.

–> Once again, this is a rule I don’t always follow.  (See “Dad’s wedding” above.  Plus of course in regular outside-of-Mass life, I wear shorts.  It’s summer.  Shorts.  Summer. Shorts.  They go together.)  But you know, I’d be willing to sacrifice an outfit or two, in my fictional world where parishes made dress codes, if it meant my son doesn’t have to look at swimsuit models at church.   Cover the knees at Mass and it’s hard to go wrong.

3.  Cleavage.  Cover. The. Cleavage.  Do you know what that part of your body is for?  It is for feeding your baby.  Do you know that when you walk into Mass with those girls on display, it makes nursing babies and toddlers hungry?  And it attracts other attention as well.  Do you honestly want people salivating at the sight of you? As in, actual drool?  Are you ready to feed the masses to whom you are advertising?  No.  Save it for your own baby.

This is a rule for 100% of the time, everywhere you go.  Fabric is your friend.  Cover the cleavage.

[Perfectly fine to be actually feeding a person during Mass.  If that person if your offspring, not yet to the age of reason.  Good, holy, necessary thing to do.  With the cleavage covered.]

4.  Tailored yes, tight, no.  This is another pretty firm rule.  Okay, so my daughters were telling me today that my t-shirt was tight, and I promise it was not, but, you know there’s a few decades there where the ol’ body stockpiles emergency calories just in case, and so yeah, there is a certain subgroup for whom staying ahead of the fitted-versus-tight curve is kind of a challenge.  I suppose we need to fast more.  But even with that allowance made, yes there should be some measurable amount of air between your body and your outer garments.

These aren’t rules for all time.  These are rules that work for 2011 in most parishes in the United States.  They err on the conservative side, not because I think you need to be extra-conservative, but just to make things really silly easy.

If you are currently wearing not that many clothes to Mass, give them a try.  You can say some lady on the internet dared you do it.

You’ll be more comfortable indoors when the A/C is set too high, but you won’t be too hot standing outside on the patio after Mass, chatting with your friends.  You’ll attract the attention of the kinds of men and boys you actually want to meet.  The ones who care about you, and see you as a real live person, not just as a pin-up model or an underwear catalog.  Mothers of teenage sons will thank you.

Try it.  What can it hurt?

Pagans & Tax Collectors

In Matthew 18:15-17, Jesus gives instructions on how to handle sin in the Church. There’s a method, and it’s pretty simple: You give the guy multiple chances to understand that he has gone astray, starting with the most discreet options, but eventually bringing in the teaching authority of the Church herself if necessary.

And what if he refuses to listen even to the Church? Jesus says this:

“Treat him as you would a Pagan, or a tax collector”.

And that’s the process.

The first steps are pretty straightforward, though maybe not real popular. Since it involves you personally, refraining from gossip and instead pulling on the grown-up suit and figuring out how you are going to convince someone else what is right and wrong. With the actual goal of persuading the person to repent and reform, instead of the much more self-gratifying goal of venting your anger and maybe getting in a few good digs while you’re at it.

[Remember: If the guy doesn’t listen to you, then you’re supposed to go get other members of the church to come help persuade. And you know those other members are going to ask about how the first conversation went. So you better not have said something really mean and stupid.  Yeah, I know. No one really likes this passage. I’m so much better at “mean and stupid” than “charitable and helpful”.]

But let’s skip ahead to the unrepentant sinner – which includes a subset, the unrepentant dissenter. This is the part hand-rubbing pundits love, because you get to pull out the big guns. You maintained composure through all those edifying discussions, and now, now!, finally!, you get to give the guy what he deserves and Treat Him Like A Pagan. Or a tax collector. Your choice.

When I see editorial on this passage, what I often see is the Freaked Out Jesus Method* of biblical interpretation. We, the readers, see words like “sinner” “Pagan” and “tax collector”, and we insert BAD, BAD, and BAD. And if Bad then Mad, right? So we picture Jesus: Impatient with sinners, ready to toss transgressor outta the church, and here’s how to get rid of ‘em, make sure you do the job thoroughly. Don’t be Mr. Nice Guy, apostles and disciples, or Jesus will be Mad at YOU too.

Except that Jesus doesn’t actually treat Pagans and tax collectors this way. What does Jesus do for Pagans and tax collectors? He invites them to dinner. He heals their sick. He praises what faith they have. He invites them take of the Living Water.

In summary: Jesus evangelizes.

That’s the method. If one of your brothers sins against you, and he won’t listen to the Church, try to win him back.

***

There is a sting, though, in this instruction. And here is where I think the courage of the Church fails most.

See, everybody wants to stay “catholic”.

It’s pretty funny, really. None of my Pagan or tax-collector friends are upset about not being Catholic. They don’t sit around stewing and accusing the Church of cruelty on account of how Pagans aren’t Catholic and Catholics aren’t Pagans. Everyone fully grasps the notion that there are things you have to be willing to believe and do if you want to be Catholic, and well, if you wanted to do and think such things, you wouldn’t be Pagan.

But unrepentant and dissenting Christians often are resentful of the notion that they have left the bounds of the fold of the Church.

Regular Pagans recognize the authority of the Church over its members, and choose not to be part of that Church. Dissenters want to be counted as part of the Church, but without recognizing that the Church has an authoritative teaching office that Christians need obey.

—-> For all the noise about ‘closed communion’, I’ve never once had a non-catholic friend be upset about it, after I explained why we did things how we do. No sane person wants to be publicly labeled as “believes in the Real Presence” and “accepts the teachings of the Church”, if they don’t actually believe such things. Catholic doctrine is, you know, a little crazy, huh? Would you want to have walked around New York in 1750 with a big stamp on your head that said “Thinks Humans Can Fly”??. Until you knew for sure that hot-air balloons worked, you wouldn’t want the crazy-label. Once you knew, you’d be proud of it. But until then, no.

In contrast, dissenting Catholics cling to their ‘rights’ with bitter furor. Try to tell a formerly-Catholic hospital** or college that they need to quit claiming Catholicism now that they’ve quit teaching and practicing Catholicism . . . and the drama . . . oh my goodness the drama.

The scandal isn’t that this or that person or institution is non-Catholic.

My local county hospital isn’t Catholic, my State U alma mater isn’t Catholic, and most of friends are not Catholic. Pagans and tax collectors all of them. For the longest time, I was even married to one of these people. (He seems to have come out of it.  Yay!) No drama necessary.

Jesus isn’t freaking out. He wants every one back into the Church, and He’ll do any good thing to make that happen. Have you to dinner, heal your servant, die on the cross for you – there is no limit to His mercy.

But the Gospels do tell us this: Don’t be crazy.

Sane people know what they do and don’t believe.

If someone has ceased to believe and practice the Catholic faith, put your head on straight and acknowledge the fact. Non-Catholics and former-Catholics are no scandal. Open wide your arms and give whatever you legitimately can to help and befriend.

Bad Catholics? No surprise there, we announce our sinfulness at every Mass. Forgive us seventy-times-seven times, and remind us in no uncertain terms what the Church really teaches. Accept our repentance, over and over and over again.

But fake Catholics? That is scandal and madness.

Turn on your brain, and respectfully acknowledge the former Catholic has stepped outside the fold. You can’t welcome someone back into the house, if you are busy pretending they’ve never gone out.

 

 

 

 * See two posts below for an explanation of the FOJM.  WordPress refuses to let me make links today.

**Ack, I hate link failure.  Here’s a great piece on the current round of Catholic hospital scandals:  http://defend-us-in-battle.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-providence-hospital-situation-isnt.html