Introduction: Setting the Scene and Topic
So today is August 17, 2025 and this is William Michael of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. As you can probably hear from my background, I’m out for a walk today. So today’s talk will be presented in the form of a walk talk. And I just ask you to bear with the circumstances of a walk talk, which means I’m usually not providing any kind of prepared talk, and there may be distractions in the background.
What I’d like to talk about is an important topic, one that I was reminded of by this morning’s mass readings and today’s the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, if you’d like to look up those readings. The topic I’d like to talk about is the increasing rate at which young Catholics are reportedly leaving the Catholic Church, kids who are raised in the Catholic Church, reaching adulthood and then deciding that they don’t want to continue attending Mass or participating in the sacramental life. These numbers are reportedly increasing.
Critique of Media Reports and Assumptions
The problem with reports about these sorts of things in modern society is that they’re usually not presented for the sake of sharing information. They’re usually presented as part of a plan to publicly criticize the church, publicly criticize the Pope and bishops, criticize the Second Vatican Council and so on, and suggest that because there are some undesirable statistics in the church, that this is a proof that the church hierarchy is the cause.
The statistics reveal nothing of the cause; they may present us with circumstances that, as I said, we don’t desire. But there are many possible causes, and it’s our duty to prove the cause, rather than assume the cause. Recognizing the problem is an important first step. Studying to diagnose the cause of the problem is the second step, and then proving the diagnosis to be true would be the third step, and then providing a remedy would be the fourth step.
What we see writers doing today and people on YouTube and all these other Catholic media outlets looking to criticize the church, which, of course, they have no authority to do, we’ll see them say: step one, we recognize there’s a problem in the church. Step two, assume the cause. Step three, provide no proof for the cause. They just skip step three and jump to step four, which is, propose the remedy, which is, of course, to disagree with the Pope and bishops, reject the Second Vatican Council and so on.
Personal Perspective and Experience
I’d like to talk about what’s going on in the church from the perspective of one who has worked in education with those kids ages, you know, high school age kids for the past 20 years, and also as a father who’s raised 10 children, six of whom are now adults, because I’ve seen all of these issues firsthand, and I think I can explain what’s going on pretty clearly and provide some evidence to support the conclusions that I propose.
Illustration: Ignoring External Causes
Now I’d like to ask you to think about a ridiculous illustration, and I said it’s ridiculous. Imagine if there was an organized terrorist attack on Catholic churches in America, and somebody pulled out statistics that showed that in the 1950s there were no terrorist attacks on or there were no deaths. Uh, at Mass in Catholic churches, but in 2025 there were 75 deaths at Catholic masses, and they said, Look at this. This is a very upsetting statistic, but that’s the modern church. It’s a mess. And the only way to fix these modern problems is to go back to what was done in the past when there were no deaths at Mass.
Imagine if someone were to propose something like that and completely ignore the reality that there had been organized terrorist attacks on Catholic churches in 2025—we’d all know that those suggestions were ridiculous, and yet this is the same thing that men are doing today in the church. They’re looking at statistics about what’s going on inside the church, ignoring everything that’s going on outside the church, and then assuming the cause, of course, the cause is assumed to be internal, and then proposing a solution that really has nothing to do with the cause of the trouble.
That’s the problem we have. Yes, we can demonstrate and it’s not like I should say there was an article written by a couple of Catholic college professors on this topic recently where they presented this data as if there are some great researchers who collected this data. This data has already been collected. They presented these statistics as if they’re sounding the alarm like they’re Paul Revere and after presenting these statistics and showing that cradle Catholics are leaving the Catholic Church, they leap to the conclusion that this is caused by internal problems, and then they propose some really lazy solutions. I mean, the solutions are ridiculous. It’s like, you need to take your kids to more vibrant churches. You need more religious activities. Just just like vague, useless nonsense.
The assumption, as I said, is that a problem in the church has an internal cause, that the cause must also be in the church. And that is an inconclusive argument, not an argument at all, really.
Alternative Perspective: External Influences
So let me present a different perspective on this whole issue, one that I think you’ll actually see to be more realistic and accurate, and one that we can actually respond to with some intelligence and responsibility, some maturity.
The Second Vatican Council was called by the pope in the early 1960s and the council was prophetic in a number of ways, most importantly, because the problems that were discerned by the Pope and many of the bishops, the problems were just beginning to hatch. It was very early in the process, and the church was already reading the signs of the times, seeing where things were headed, and they acted early on in a responsive, preventive way.
Now for those living at the time, they might not have thought they were acting early. They may have been hurrying because they felt that they were acting too late, but they had no idea of how much further the problems that they were recognizing in that, you know, early seminal form, how much they were going to multiply over the next half a century.
Think about it, the concerns of the Second Vatican Council were the changes in the world that followed the great world wars, and war was still going on at the time of the council obviously greatly diminished, but still the world was in an unsettled state, and it was like all of the restraints of medieval life, medieval culture had been busted off, and society was set free like a wild animal.
There were all kinds of problems. Family values were upside down. Sexual behavior was upside down, all kinds of political crises, all kinds of social protests and turmoil, chaos really all over the place, and the church responded and said, what we’re doing, basically maintaining an established religion needs to be changed. We need to go back and re-evangelize this world, because everything has been turned back upside down.
It’s, it’s, it’s funny to think that in the first century, when Saint Paul was spreading the gospel and planting churches all through the Roman Empire, he was accused of turning the world upside down. And at this time in the mid-1900s it was as if everything was being turned back on its head. And the church responded with the Second Vatican Council and proposed reforms that it believed would help to address the needs of 20th century society, not to continue doing what served the needs of 16th century or 17th century or 18th century society.
Tradition and Authority in the Church
So when we talk about tradition, we talk about keeping tradition and Pope Francis’s document, Traditionis Custodes addresses that exact topic when he makes sure everyone understands who it is that’s responsible for the keeping or for the care of the tradition, and that is the Pope and bishops in union with him. They are the keepers of the tradition. They are the interpreters of the tradition. They are the keepers of tradition, not laymen, not college professors, not anyone with a YouTube account and so on.
So the church reacted at the Second Vatican Council, proposed reforms that we all know were pretty radical, and remember the word radical just means getting to the root of the issues. And we see all the documents that came out of the Second Vatican Council, which addressed the active participation of the laity in the worship of God, the study of Sacred Scripture, the return to the sources and so on. It was sort of a reset of Catholic Christianity, sending Catholics back to apostolic times to rebuild the Catholic faith by returning to the sources, getting back to the basics and working together to establish a living, vibrant, growing, developing, spreading, modern Catholic Church.
Refuting Claims of Historical Disruption
When we look back to the time of the Second Vatican Council, contrary to what’s suggested. And this is the same lie that Protestants tell when Protestants talk about the Catholic Church. They say that somewhere in the past, the Catholics took a left turn and abandoned apostolic tradition and invented their own religion, and obviously, millions of people accept that, as if that’s reasonable.
But the question is, if we look back at the historical record, where do you show us that that takeover took place? Where is this disruption? Where is this abandonment of apostolic Christianity? Where in history does that take place? And the answer, of course, for those who study is, there’s no such disruption anywhere. This is why we get this popular saying that to go deep in the study of history is to no longer remain Protestant. There is no break in church history.
The only time there’s a break in church history is when some schismatic group separates from the Bishop of Rome and bishops in union with him, as we saw in the Great Schism, as we saw in the Protestant schism, those are the only breaks in the church. It’s when someone breaks away from the church. But there’s no apostasy or separation from apostolic Christianity in history, it’s just a lie.
And when modern critics of the Pope and bishops who belong to this Trad Catholic crowd, when they criticize the present and living Magisterium, they make this false accusation that at some point there was a radical abandonment of the religion that had existed from the time of the apostles and the establishment of some new religion that no one ever knew of before it was imposed or installed upon the Catholic people.
And this suggestion gets everyone all excited, just as that suggestion gets all the Protestants excited, because they imagine themselves to be the remnant of true Christianity, or the saviors of the Church, which is just all, it’s all ridiculous craziness. They just, they never present these arguments in a context where they can be realistically examined and challenged, and where they usually, or if they ever do, they’re usually humiliated because it’s ridiculous.
But when we go back and I ask the question, so, where is this great disruption? Where is this great takeover? You know, this hostile takeover, where hundreds of millions of tradition-loving, Latin Mass-loving Catholics suddenly have the religion, the only religion that has ever existed in church history, ripped away from them and replaced by something no one had ever seen before, something entirely novel.
You know, if we take up the conspiracy theory, something imposed upon them by a bunch of crazies who infiltrated the church somehow and changed everything. Where are the protests? Where is the widespread act of opposition to this inexplicable and blasphemous change. There’s no such thing. We can find a small number of people who rose up against the Pope and bishops who did so, you know, not with any interest to preserve any kind of unity or orthodoxy, but who ended up in schism and excommunicated.
So just like the Protestants, they ended up outside the church. For all their talk of being concerned with apostasy, they themselves apostatized. But apart from that, apart from a schismatic group here or there, we’re talking about a population that I would assume. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I would assume it would be hundreds of millions. I don’t know if there were a billion. I think the Catholic population recently was calculated at 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, which I know Trad Catholics will just deny that. They’ll say that’s not true.
For example, when a recent controversy, quote unquote, developed on the internet among Trad Catholics in the diocese of Charlotte, I told them that they’re imagining that this is some kind of widespread controversy that everyone’s talking about. And the truth is, it’s a very tiny number of Catholics in the diocese who are concerned about the Latin Mass, and there are like 500,000 Catholics in the diocese, and it’s basically like less than 1% of the Catholic population is talking about this. They just denied the church’s statistics. They just denied the diocese number of Catholics in the diocese, as if the diocese either doesn’t know or is lying. And that’s, it’s easy when you’re just free to dismiss official numbers from people who would actually know.
So anyway, if we assume that the population of the Catholic Church was, let’s say, hundreds of millions, and then we ask how many people expressed opposition, how many people in the Catholic Church said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The Pope and bishops just totally changed our whole religion. They just got rid of the mass and replaced it with something totally different. How many, how many reports do we find after the Second Vatican Council of such concern, such shock and awe as they’re, you know, hit with an atomic bomb from the Vatican that changes the whole history of church worship, that there’s no such thing, there’s no such response, because almost all of the Catholic population always follows the Pope and bishops.
That’s what the Catholic Church is. We believe in the Catholic Church. We trust in the authority of the Catholic Church. We trust that Christ is, in fact, the head of the church, and that the magisterium of the church is always under his direction, under his control, and will never lead us into error. There was no rebellion against the Second Vatican Council.
In fact, if there was to be a problem that we might point to, and the church herself has recognized this problem. It’s that in some places locally, where the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were received and implemented, they were implemented with too loose of an interpretation, and that led to some abuses of the reforms, which, over the past 50 years have been identified and corrected.
So once you get off the internet, it’s pretty easy to see that there’s no great division among Catholics about these things. There’s 1.4 billion Catholics, almost all of them celebrate all over the world, the ordinary form of the mass that was established at the Second Vatican Council. There’s no controversy, and where there is, it’s usually people who are misguided or have some bad information or some short-sighted and pretty arrogant assumptions about their preferences being requirements, and they often end up in trouble. We’ve seen a number get into trouble on the goofy internet in recent years.
Challenging the Assumption of Internal Causes
So the fundamental problem that I’m concerned with is this attempt to assume that, because there is a problem within the church, that the cause of that problem must necessarily be in the church itself. And this is never proven by anyone. It’s just assumed. And I push back on that and say, you know, humbug, there’s no proof that the cause of this separation of young adults from the church is actually in the church, that it’s actually because the priests or the bishops or the pope are doing things wrong.
I don’t believe that we need a couple of college professors who have no actual office in the church to tell us how to fix the church. I think the Pope and bishops are the ones who will fix the church, and who have fixed the church and continue to fix the church.
I would argue more reasonably, as I’ll explain, that the problems that the church is facing are caused by influences that exist outside the church, and that’s why, before I use the example of attacks made on the church that caused people to die at mass. And this is all hypothetical, just for the sake of illustration, but if there were attacks on the Catholic Church which led to deaths at mass, and someone tried to argue that because there are more deaths at Mass today than there were in 1950 that the Second Vatican Council was the cause of deaths at Mass.
Anyone who has taken a sixth grade level logic course would know that’s a fallacy, just because something follows an event that doesn’t make that first event to be the cause of the second event, that’s baby logic too difficult for some modern Catholics. But you know, logic is not taught in schools, unfortunately, because we’re raising engineers and doctors who might never meet, by the way, when working with lawyers or engineers and doctors, but we don’t have kids learning logic, and so we can’t assume that baby logic is known.
External Problems and Societal Changes
The reality is that the problems that were seen and recognized by the Pope and bishops at the time of the Second Vatican Council have multiplied exponentially outside of the church. The trouble inside the church is being caused by life outside the church, and to say that the church is failing because at a certain point in time, some college professors or some random Catholics on the internet decide to take a snapshot and use that as the final story is just an artificial internet problem. It’s irrational. It’s not true.
These people would be the kind of people who would go back into the time of the world wars and check the attendance records and complain that attendance was down while the Germans were bombing Catholic cities and say that back in the old days, people went to Mass every Sunday, but here in the 1940s people are unfaithful, probably because the priests are not godly priests, and just ignore the war going on outside the churches.
The problems that were identified by the Second Vatican Council have multiplied exponentially. The church makes no excuses. The church accepts the challenge. The church proposes changes. The Church has implemented changes in a prophetic way, because they started these reforms when they were barely beginning to sprout, and now they’re in full flower, and the church is positioned to handle these problems. Thanks be to God.
But what are these problems? What are the real problems in our society that the church faces that’s causing this abandonment of the church when Catholics reach adulthood? They’re pretty obvious. We all know them because we all complain about them every day. The world that we’re living in is very different from the world that Catholics were living in in 1570 when the Council of Trent established the Tridentine Latin Mass. The world we live in is very different.
First of all, we live in a democratic society in America and democracy, if it’s not, if it can’t assume a Christian majority, or I shouldn’t even say Christian, if it can’t assume that the majority of voting citizens will be virtuous people, then it’s evil. And our democracy has become, or is in the process of becoming, a real evil, because the majority is getting worse and worse, and so the voting body is getting worse and worse, and the results of the voting is getting worse and worse.
And so we’ve got a real problem in America with democracy, where the voting population is not evangelized, are not believing, are not under the influence of God’s grace, but are running out of control, like wild animals. And the democratic government is getting worse and worse. Of course, corruption in democratic government leads politicians to make deals with the population and say, if you vote for me, I will make your marijuana legal. If you vote for me, I will make your desire to marry your gay partner legal. If you vote for me, I will make public nudity and drug use legal. If you vote for me, I will make abortion legal. If you vote for me, I will. And it goes on. It goes on this bribery of the immoral by immoral politicians in a democratic society.
And this is what we see politicians doing more and more. If you watch the Democrat Party, they’re constantly seeking another subgroup of sinners to recruit as their voters, making promises to them that in exchange for their votes, they will do what they can to benefit that group, and this is a real source of evil, because instead of telling people you need to live rightly, you need to obey the laws, you need to practice virtue, you need to respect your parents, you need to love your wife, you need to respect and obey your husband, you need to care for your children. You need to educate your children.
Instead of that message coming down from the government, instead of righteous laws being made and enforced by the government, we have the opposite message being given to the population. They’re being told they don’t need to obey anything. They’re being told that we can change any laws you want. If we get enough of our party members into Congress, we can change that law and allow you to have your abortions again. We can make your drugs legal. We can let you do your drugs right out on the street, and we’ll even supply you with fresh needles so that you can drug yourself to death, if you’ll vote for us.
And so when members of a population no longer have the government pushing them towards virtue, but actually inviting them into vice, paving the way for them to pursue vice, equipping them to pursue vice, that natural restraint that’s supposed to be present is taken away, and we end up with a situation that past generations, medieval or even modern European countries could never imagine.
And our children growing up, no matter how well they’re catechized, no matter how frequently they’re brought to participate in the sacraments, no matter how they participate at Mass and so on, outside of their parents, outside of the church ministers that they may be in contact with, the message that they’re receiving is the opposite of the message of their parents and church leaders.
They’re being told that their Catholic parents are just crazy fanatics, medievalists, their priests are child-abusing hypocrites. And they’re being told by presidents, governors, mayors, congressmen and so on, that they don’t have to listen to nobody. They don’t have to get married if they don’t want, they don’t have to go to church if they don’t want to. We have freedom of religion in America. No Americans need to listen to their parents and practice their parents’ religion, you’re free to do whatever you want. Once you turn 18, you are legally free and can practice your life the way you want to.
That’s the message that our kids are receiving from the entire society around them, and that’s not a message that kids were receiving in 16th century Italy or 16th century Spain, maybe in parts of 16th century Germany, that was the message, but not in most Catholic places. In most Catholic places, Catholic monarchies enforced Christian laws and morals. So not only did you have mom and dad telling you what to do. Not only did you have the priest and your bishop and the Pope telling you what to do, but you had the local and national government also enforcing those laws.
And our children don’t have that, and it’s gone to such a crazy extent that our government is no longer punishing drug users, criminals. We see looting, just widespread criminal activity. The police respond to it as they please. Judges just dismiss criminals back to the streets. Our country is not enforcing any kind of moral code, and if you think that’s not going to have an influence on kids, you’re just really nuts. It does. It has a very powerful effect on kids, because the Christian faith that we’re teaching our children is contrary to their inclinations as fallen human beings.
They are under the influence of concupiscence, which is a natural lingering inclination to sin, and that inclination, which is already in them, is being fanned like a flame by our secular society, and there’s nothing we can do about that. And so we have kids being told, just wait until you’re 18 years old, and then you can do whatever you want. And it’s true. That message is true.
I tell my kids that all the time. I tell my kids when they’re young, if I have a rule in the house, or I tell them to do something, and they fuss at me or don’t like it. I say, Look, when you’re 18 years old, you’re legally an adult, and you can do whatever you want. You can make all your own rules. You can do everything your own way when you’re 18 years old, and when they turn 18, they’re ready to give it a try, and I encourage them to do so.
Learning the Hard Way: The Prodigal Son Analogy
But, and this is the second cause of the problem, I expect that they’re going to have the same experience as the prodigal son. I expect that when they turn away from the church, when they turn away from religion, when they turn away from Christian morals, when they turn away from reason, they’re going to quickly learn that is that there’s no other option. They’re going to learn that the Catholic faith is true. It’s as true as photosynthesis. It’s as true as we could say gravity, if you believe in gravity, and so if you go out into the world and turn against Catholicism, turn against Christian morals, nature is going to push back.
I teach my kids that nature is like a glacier and it just destroys and crushes anything that opposes it. And we learn this in nature. We learn this on the farm and in the gardens. We learn that what you do on your farm or what you do in your garden is really not up to you. There’s a limited range of things that are possible in your area, in your climate, in your soil and so on. And if you try to do something outside of these things that nature is going to support, nature is just going to burn them to the ground and destroy them.
And so you learn quickly that if you want to grow watermelons in North Carolina, not only will they grow well, but they’ll thrive. But if you want to have an apple tree, or if you want to grow grapes, you can’t plant and grow the kinds of apples and grapes that they grow in Washington State. There is just a limited number of varieties that will grow well in North Carolina, and those are the varieties that you’re going to have to be content with, because nature is the boss.
And when we go into adult life, we can have all kinds of ideas and desires for what we want to do and how we’re going to live. I’m going to be gay, I’m going to be single, I’m going to use drugs, I’m going to drink alcohol, I’m going to have sex before I’m married. I’m going to be promiscuous, I’m going to do this or that, or I’m not going to go to college. I’m just going to get a job instead, or you can. Hey, anything you think you’d like to try. I say, go try it. But here’s my warning, you’re going to learn that it doesn’t work. You might as well go try it. If you’re not going to believe me, you might as well go try it, because you’re going to see that it won’t work. And fortunately, you’ll understand very clearly why it won’t work.
And this is why when we read ancient philosophers or even the apostles, we see them refer to sinful behavior as unnatural or contrary to nature. It’s like wanting to be a flame who lives under water. You may grow up as a flame, living among flames, and tell yourself, when I grow up, I’m not going to live here, I’m going to live down in the sea. You can tell yourself that, and when you’re a young adult flame, you can tell your parents, I hate living here. I hate living like a flame. I’m going to live out in the sea. And your parents can say, go ahead, go try it. Tell us how it goes, because it’s not going to work.
And our kids need to learn that lesson if they won’t listen, they need to learn the hard way, and we need to be willing to let them learn the hard way.
The Role of Politics in Sustaining Rebellion
Now the second source of trouble comes again from these politicians, because these politicians know that an anti-Christian way of life cannot work. They know it’s not sustainable. They know it doesn’t work, and so what they try to do is pass legislation that redistributes wealth from the just to the unjust. They try to make anti-Christian ways sustainable. They try to allow people to walk away from God’s way and not immediately crash and burn.
They build a little submarine that the flame can drive under the sea, and so he can drive down in his little submarine under the sea and live in the water and snub his nose at his parents and say, ha, I told you I could do it because my politicians approved this new plan that provides flames with free submarines if they’d like to live underwater. And I’m sorry these illustrations are so stupid, but this is how stupid it all is.
But of course, the submarine works for the flame to allow him to live underwater for a few hours, maybe a few days, and then all of a sudden he starts to realize this thing is running out of gas, or this thing is running out of power, or the thing is just breaking down because the submarine can only last so long, and they have to buy a new submarine, or they have to work to get another politician elected to get more submarines for the flames.
And eventually it just runs out of possibility, and the flame has to eventually realize that he can’t live under the water and he needs to go back to flameville, where he came from. But you see how politics, especially democratic politics, can create all kinds of artificial programs and systems where wealth is forcibly taken from those who don’t support this lifestyle and given to those who do, to cause them to believe that it can actually work, and that’s why politics is so hot. No pun intended.
The reason why politics is so central to this rebellion is because the only way that the rebels can live is if they are artificially supported with other people’s resources that just have to pay for the way of the unjust, and that can only be done by means of taxation, unjust taxation, which is really just a form of robbery. But democracy allows that, allows for the most ridiculous tax programs, because all they need are votes, and all the votes need are enough crazy, foolish people to put crazy politicians into office who are willing to vote for these ridiculous programs.
We can look at modern society and see whole communities, ghetto welfare communities, where the people living there just do whatever they want. They don’t work, they don’t marry, they have kids random. They have abortions on demand. They use drugs all over the place. Don’t do any maintenance. There’s no infrastructure attended to in these places, and they’re perfectly content to live in their own filth, perfectly content because what they want are their sins and this community, this artificial tax-funded community, allows them to have their sins, and they’ll accept any conditions.
And so when morally upright people look at this, they say, What? How can you possibly live in a place where your children just run loose in the streets all night long, and none of these buildings have been maintained in 50 years, and you inherited a beautiful neighborhood, and you’ve turned it into something that looks like Haiti or Jamaica, and what we find is that it’s the same culture. The culture has been given a place where its voters are allowed to do what they please, so long as they vote for the guy who moves out to DC.
And so we see all these Democrat politicians living in Washington, DC or in the area around Washington, millionaires raking in millions of dollars, living in total luxury while their districts they represent just break down into third world ghettos, public nakedness, filth all over the streets, trash, crime, prostitutes, I mean, just you name the most disgusting, degrading behaviors. And not only are they allowed, they’re visible right on the main streets.
Extending the Prodigal Son Story Through Government Support
So the second problem, as I said, is that not only is this democratic culture telling the kids they can do whatever they want, but these politicians are working to create artificial programs to actually reinforce these deceptions and make them appear to be possible. It’s as if, you know, imagine the story of the prodigal son. Imagine the prodigal son goes out, blows all of his father’s wealth on, you know, his immoral living, finds himself in the gutter, you know, at the end of his rope, he starts to think to himself, man, my father was right. This life doesn’t work. I satisfied these short-term desires, and they took everything from me, and now my long-term conditions are horrible. The only thing that I can do is repent and go back to my father. That’s the thinking of the prodigal when he reaches rock bottom.
But imagine at that moment a politician shows up and says, Hey, what’s the matter, buddy? And the prodigal son tells him his miserable story. And the politician says, Don’t worry about it. We’ve got this new program. We’ve got this new welfare program. It’s for, you know, drug-using, immoral, anti-Christian people, and it provides you with, you know, here it’s a debit card. You can go, swipe it at the grocery store, get food you want and stuff like that. You know whatever you want, cheese puffs, cigarettes, soda, you know whatever you want. Just go swipe your card, get your stuff. Things ain’t so bad, buddy. All I need you to do here is fill out this voter registration card and next week, come down to the library and vote for me and all the other guys with Democrat next to their name, we’ll take care of you.
The prodigal son would sign that thing, and he’d have another couple of years to live in his rebellion. And I would argue that that is what we’re seeing in our society. It’s like the story of the prodigal son being extended by government programs.
And so here’s what, you know, the effect that this has on the church. First of all, the kids in the church everywhere around them, they’re being told that the church is old-fashioned, the church is obsolete. The church is outdated. The church is hypocritical. Your parents are just crazy people. You don’t need to listen to anything they say. When you’re 18 years old, this is America. You can do anything you want. You just have to wait until you’re 18, and then you never need to visit church again.
And any kid who is not thrilled about going to church every Sunday, or who doesn’t skip and, you know, click his heels when it’s time to go to confession, he knows that when he turns 18, he doesn’t have to do that anymore. And off they go. They’re told they don’t need—this is America. There’s freedom of religion. You don’t need to do that.
And the parents say, I’m telling you, son, you better not mess around, because you’re going to learn that what Psalm one says is true, that the way of the righteous is blessed. Everything that the righteous does prospers. He’s like a tree planted beside rivers of living water, but the wicked is like chaff that the dust that the wind drives away. Don’t follow the chaff. Don’t fall for the deceptions. Don’t give in to temptation.
And the kid says, temptation, cementation, I don’t care about anything you say. This is America. I can do what I want. And all the government programs are there waiting for this new voter to arrive on the scene. He can go to college. He doesn’t need $1—he can go to college. He can move out of his home without a job. He can get quote-unquote financial aid, which means loans from the government that will provide for him to live for four years on campus. He can charge all of his food, all of his books, computer costs, anything he needs for school. Can charge it to his financial aid, and he can spend four years—age 18 through 22, the first four voting years of his life. He can spend living on government money, totally artificial life, doing whatever he wants. He can be gay, dye his hair blue, put an earring right through his eyeballs. He can do anything that he wants. All he’s got to do is fill out this FAFSA, and he’s good to go.
And that’s what we—that’s what we have to deal with as Catholic parents. This was never possible in world history, and this is the reality of what we need to deal with, and this is the reality of what we see our kids dealing with. Our kids are being subject to extremely evil temptations, extremely persuasive temptations. And there’s really—because the children have free will, and because it’s true that this is America, and they’re free to do whatever they want. There is freedom of religion. There’s really nothing that we can physically do to stop them. There’s nothing the church can do to stop them. There’s nothing that parents can do to stop them.
What’s going to happen is that these kids are going to go and they’re going to test this system out, and we’re going to watch them do so. We’re going to watch not only their short run as a prodigal where their own resources are limited and would have in the past led them to realization quickly that they can’t live a certain way, but they’re going to have that extended for years. The Prodigal Son is given a credit card, he’s given an EBT card, he’s given a line of credit. And so the story of the prodigal son goes on for another chapter, two chapters, three, five chapters, until he’s 30 years old and has lost everything, 10 times as in $200,000 of debt. Has five sexually transmitted diseases, three kids born out of marriage, child support he can’t pay, and his situation is much, much worse than that of the prodigal son in the old world story.
Hope and the Church’s Role
And so what we see is outside of the church, a whole support system for the prodigal son being created that enables his life and allows him to defy the odds and make it another week, another month, another year, living in rebellion. And as parents, as Catholic parents, we need to understand the reality of this situation, we need to have a realistic awareness of what’s going on.
Now the good news, the good news is that the gates of hell will never prevail against Christ and his Church and God’s grace is more powerful than all of these sources of temptation, and yet we know from the Garden of Eden that God is not afraid of letting men suffer temptation and the consequences of yielding to temptation. God is not afraid of letting us make free choices and suffering the consequences. He sits there in omnipotent power as that little two-year-old sticks the car key into the electric socket and gets zapped. God is present. He is not afraid of allowing us to learn the hard way, because prudence is a natural virtue, and God intends for us to learn prudence. God does not override prudence. He allows us to learn by our mistakes, and yet everything is under his control.
We’re taught in the New Testament that God never allows us to be tempted beyond our ability, and so we always have to trust that even when our kids make bad decisions, when they go down bad paths, when they turn away from the church, when they stop going to Mass, when they fill in the blank, God is still in control. They are not outside of God’s reach. Many of our children go into this adult life as baptized, confirmed Catholic kids, and they’re going to have to go through temptations in a greater degree than we had to go through. That’s just a fact, because our society is going to, in most cases, get worse and worse with time.
Advice for Parents: Practical Steps
And what we need to do, I would argue that there are a couple important things that we need to do. First of all, we need to really study to understand these circumstances we live in so we have realistic awareness of what’s going on. We can’t allow ourselves to be influenced by party politics. We can’t listen to goofy online media sources. We have to really learn and understand what’s going on, and the best source for understanding what’s going on is to listen to the church. Listen to the church. The church is present everywhere in the world. The Church has contacts with leaders in every country on Earth. The Church has people everywhere, and the church knows what’s going on better than any news agency, media outlet, any YouTube prophecy expert, church critic, the church knows relatively, infinitely more than anyone about what’s going on. The church knows what’s going on, down to the confessions of people all over the world.
Trust the church when the Church tells you what’s going on, when the church explains what to do, trust in the Church’s teaching. Do not lean upon your own understanding. Don’t listen to other sources that contradict the church. Trust the church, that the church knows what’s going on and that the church is acting responsibly in light of what’s going on. If the Church tells you to do this, do it. If the Church tells you not to do this, don’t think you’re smarter than the church. Listen to the judgment of the church. That’s the first thing. Know what’s going on, and get your information from the church.
Second, model the Christian life. Model the way of the just. If you’re living a Christian life, your life should be blessed. Your children when they go into adulthood, they may never understand your adult life when they’re kids. They may say marriage is stupid. I would never want to be subject to some dopey husband. I would never want to be married to some nagging wife. I would never want to have to have a bunch of kids and pay all their bills and deal with all this nonsense. I never want to do this. I hate church. I would never want to go and have—they can have all kinds of opinions when they’re ignorant dependents living at home.
But when they become independent, when they move out and start their own adult life, they’re immediately struck by reality. They start to learn how much milk and eggs cost. They start to learn how much gas costs. They learn about car insurance. They learn on and on and on. And finally, they say, man, it costs so much just to survive. And they start to think back and say, Mom and Dad provided for a whole family for 20 years, and they’re still providing for a whole family. They start to see when they become adults, the life of their Christian parents is looked at from a different perspective, and they start to understand more and more of what their parents said and what their parents did and what their parents do.
And so it’s important to not lose hope, but to keep practicing the Catholic faith so your children can continue to see you do those things that they’re going to increasingly appreciate as they become adults. You’ve got to keep living the Christian life. You’ve got to live a life that’s filled with all of the fruits and rewards of upright, moral living. Your life should be blessed if you’re living a virtuous life. Your children, when they become adults and they wander from the—they need to be able to look back at your life and see what happiness looks like. Remember, that’s what the prodigal son did. He said, Oh, if I was at my father’s house, his servants have it better than I have it. He was able to think back to his father’s house, and that was part of the influence that led him to conversion.
We’ve got to keep living faithfully, even when things go badly, and it can be traumatic, because parents will be tempted when they start to see their kids make bad decisions and they realize, like Job says, What I feared has happened to me. I thought we were going to avoid this by living a faithful Catholic life. I thought other families had these problems and that we were going to escape them, and yet, here they are. Many times that becomes overwhelmingly discouraging, even depressing, to Catholic parents, and they start to give up. They start to loosen up. They start to quit.
And at a time in life where their kids need to see them persevering, where their adult kids need to see them doubling down on their Christian life, they start to give it up. And so it’s important to make sure that you keep persevering in the Christian life, because your kids need your example more than ever when they’re getting into adult life. They need to be able to compare their life and the troubles they’re having with your life and what should be the solutions to their problems.
Third, you need to maintain loving, positive, supportive relationships with your children, understanding that what they’re going through is a real temptation. It’s a real temptation. It’s not their free choice, it’s not just their will. It’s a temptation that they’re facing. And I’ll tell you a quick personal story: my eldest daughter, she decided that she was going to identify as gay. That’s how I looked at it. When she entered adulthood, she had a friend who was a blah blah blah. They end up deciding that they’re gay. I’m frustrated by this, obviously annoyed by this.
I contacted Father James Martin, the popular Jesuit priest who works with the homosexual community. I told him the story because I wanted to get advice from as many sources as I could, and his response to me was, Do you really think that anyone wants to be gay? Do you really think anyone chooses to be gay? Do you really think anyone wants to be gay? And I thought about that, and I understood what he was saying. He was saying that they’re going through a time of temptation that I may not face, and I need to look at it and understand it as a temptation, as a trial, as something they need to struggle with, even if it was true that they have some sort of homosexual inclination, which I have no idea. So I’m not going to assume that, but his advice to me was, just continue to love your daughter, continue to maintain good relationships, be positive, pray and do good.
The third thing is we have to maintain good relations with our kids, because I can tell you that that story with my daughter turned out well, and the advice that I received from the church, which I admit I struggled with and was kind of annoyed by, turned out to be the right advice and true counsel. And thank God I had the grace to know, to listen to the church and not to myself. But the third thing is, you need to deal with your children when they go through these times with a hopeful spirit, expecting a good outcome, looking forward to the prodigal son’s return and maintain a relationship with them that shows that you’re hopeful. They need you to do that. They need you to help them through the temptation, even when it gets dark and ugly and bad, you just need to continue manifesting the virtue of hope by continuing to maintain a loving, positive relationship with them.
That doesn’t mean that you start saying nonsense like, Oh, that’s great. I’m so excited to meet your new—No, it’s not stupid. You love your child, not their sin or their situation, but your child. Maintain a loving, intimate, positive, hopeful relationship with your children when they go through whatever their troubles may be.
Fourth, you need to reset your family timeline. You need to recalibrate your expectations, because this idea that you’re going to work your tail off to raise your kids until they’re 18, and then you’re going to be free, that’s a fantasy. You’re going to be—you should, I should say—you should expect, you should plan to continue to teach and parent and help and support your children into their late 20s, because, as I said, the prodigal son’s experience—the hard lessons that the prodigal son had to learn—they’re being extended by artificial government programs.
You’re going to have to expect you’re going to have an 18-19-20-year-old who wastes three years and has to recover and get his life back in order when he comes to his senses. You may need to have kids come back home and reorganize their lives. You may have to lend money at times to get kids out of trouble, to help them out of a rough situation. You’re going to have to continue to parent and teach and help your children for years and years after they become legal adults. You need to prepare for that.
And lastly, I mean, I could list 100 different things, but I think those are pretty good. But lastly, you just need to make this the focus of your own Christian life. You need to pray and sacrifice and offer everything that you can for your children. I’ve offered every rosary, every mass that I’ve attended for my children, and I pray a very simple prayer from the book of Hebrews. I pray that the Lord would furnish them with all good things that they may do His will. And I trust and I continue to maintain good relationships with them, and I continue to pray for them. I offer them every support and help I can.
And like I said, the stories have turned out good, because the kids have gone through these trials. They’ve gone through these temptations, very powerful, very deceptive, very, very difficult, and as they’ve experienced the consequences, they’ve looked back to home. They’ve looked to other people’s lives. They’ve remembered and thought about things they learned in the past, and as the negative experiences and the negative consequences just continue to increase, the benefit that our children have, the advantage that our children have, that others unfortunately don’t have, is they know that they can go home. They have a safety net, and that’s another reason why it’s hard for them, because they have this sense of invincibility, because they know we love them, but they know what to do when they reach the gutter. They know that all they have to do is make a call, and they can change their life, and it really is that simple, and they learn that.
Like I said, we’ve been through difficult times, sought the church’s council, did what we were told, and we’ve seen the end of the stories turn out well.
Conclusion: The True Cause and Remedy
So is it true that children are leaving the church? Yes. Does that prove that the church is doing something wrong? No. Does that prove that the problem is internal? No, the problem is external and it’s real. The church doesn’t need to change what it’s doing. I can testify that what the church is doing is actually the remedy to this problem. The church is so loving, so generous, so patient, to the extent that it’s accused of being irresponsibly kind and generous and forgiving, but that’s really what’s needed in this situation.
I can testify that this modern church, this modern church in the modern world, is equipped and ready for this challenge, and it will overcome this challenge. And if you think about the message that’s constantly preached by the modern church. What is that message in the modern church? The message that is emphasized constantly, ad nauseum at times, is, know this, that God loves you. Every time I go to confession, every time when I’m finished confessing my sins, the first thing that my priest says to me is, know that the Lord loves you, and we can take that for granted when things are going well, I know I take that for granted, but when someone reaches rock bottom, knowing that the Lord loves you, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and you’re just one of those sinners, and that God’s grace is greater than all your sin, and knowing that the church is so wimpy, weak, wishy-washy, effeminate, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff it’s criticized for, knowing that the Church will receive you with the same generosity that the father in the Gospel received the prodigal son, that’s what allows these young adults to come home.
And if you get in the way of that, these Catholics who criticize the church and speak all kinds of harsh messages to those Catholics—they’re actually opposing the church on this issue, and I would argue that they are contrary to their own thoughts. They’re actually helping the devil and the world to destroy those Christian kids, telling those kids that the modern church is all screwed up and evil and effeminate and stupid and doesn’t preach the true message. And the real message is that you actually have no chance and you’re going to burn in hell unless you live like Dominic Savio, that message of despair and judgment, that message is actually strategic for the source of the temptations, because that’s what will keep the kids there in the gutter when they’re told you can’t go to church dressed like that, you can’t go like that. You can’t look like that and go back to your father’s house looking like that with your background, with your record. Oh my goodness. You know what people are going to say? You know what people are going to think?
That’s all a bunch of nonsense. You know what people are actually going to think? You know what the true Christians are going to think? You know what the priests and the bishops are actually going to think? They’re going to think exactly what the father did in the story of the prodigal son.
So that’s my argument for why children are leaving the church as young adults. I suggest that the cause is not inside the church, but outside the church, and I argue that the remedy is the modern church and not some goofy return to medieval Catholicism or some lazy suggestions that we just do more religious stuff. It’s a real war, and our kids bear the brunt of it, and we have to support them, both spiritually and materially, emotionally, relationally in every way possible, because they’re going to need us to stand by them as they go through this time of trial. And we have hope in the Gospel that if we persevere, it’ll turn out well, and I can testify in my own experience that it does.
I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
