Raising Catholic Kids: New Study Suggests What Successful Parents Have in Common

Raising Catholic Kids: New Study Suggests What Successful Parents Have in Common by Jonah McKeown at The Arlington Catholic Herald. Data cited by the researchers show that the number of people who remain practicing Catholics after being raised Catholic in the United States has been steadily declining for decades. In the 1970s, an average of 36 percent of those who were raised Catholic remained Catholic as adults and attended Mass weekly, peaking at 40 percent in 1977. By the 2010s, that figure was just 15 percent…Among those raised Catholic who leave the faith, about half become religiously unaffiliated and the other half adopts a new religious affiliation. The median age at which these former Catholics said they made the decision to leave the faith was 13, the researchers said. Read

Return to Beauty: A New Renaissance in Catholic Art by Lori Hadacek Chaplin at Good Catholic. There is a budding new Renaissance in sacred art. After a period of dioceses uglifying Catholic churches and making them look dull, we are seeing a gradual return to beauty with more masterful artwork… “Underneath [a culture of destruction], there’s a lot of movement and activity—almost like the life under the soil in a forest—with a huge desire to respond with beauty and sacredness,” says Selvaggi, whose work comprises beautifying church spaces with a team of artists, sculptors, artisans, and architects. He believes sacred artists are “rebuilding something that was dormant.”  Read

‘Art’ificial Intelligence: AI Can Create Religious Images in Seconds. But Is It Really Sacred Art? by Joseph Pronechen/National Catholic Register. Think you can recognize AI-generated art? The man-vs.-machine contest is rampant today, even in the art world, as machines contend against flesh-and-blood human artists whose artistic ancestry harks back to Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Raphael, Jan van Eyck, Paolo Veronese, Johann Friedrich Overbeck and many others… Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs told the Register, “Sacred art is not a composite of popular images on the subject. Sacred art is the work of a trained artist cooperating with the grace of inspiration to create a visual description of a supernatural reality. Machines are purely material and therefore cannot respond to the challenge of communicating a supernatural reality with visual metaphor.” Read

Higher Education Reform, Civic Thought, and Liberal Education by Peter Berkowitz at The Epoch Times. Our colleges and universities have been policing speech. They have been curtailing due process…And they have been packing course offerings, particularly in the humanities, with classes aimed at indoctrinating students in leftist articles of faith: The one and only prism for viewing moral and political life is the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, chief among oppressors on the global scene is the United States, and chief among oppressors within the United States are white people. Read

University of Dallas President: Mission of Higher Ed is Open Debate in Pursuit of Truth by Tyler Arnold at Catholic News Agency. In a Feb. 8 speech titled “Universities, Patriotism, and Citizenship: A Catholic Liberal Arts Approach to the Election Year,” Sanford said there are only “very rare moments” when taking a political stance is appropriate for institutions of higher education. He said universities should instead foster open debate so that “the pursuit of truth can proceed in an unfettered way.” …Sanford cited the example of several university presidents who made statements after the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that implied that “there’s something wicked to holding the pro-life position.” Such statements, he said, “silence those who like to argue about that position” and can create an “alienation of Christians on campus.” Read

Major Expansions Coming to Belmont Abbey College After Fundraising Feat by Joe Bukuras/Catholic News Agency at National Catholic Register. Some of that $100 million has already been put to use with a new dining hall, lab space and strengthening of its endowment. Now, the Belmont, North Carolina, school is aiming to raise $50 million more by 2026… The “Made True” campaign, launched in February of last year, has aims of allotting $15 million toward building a new monastery for the 14 monks on campus, raising a new performing arts center, and launching career and family initiatives supporting religious freedom, according to a press release announcing the initiative last year. Read

American College of Pediatricians: ‘No Long-Term Evidence’ that ‘Affirming’ Youth as ‘Trans’ Improves Mental Health by Susan Berry, Ph.D. at CatholicVote. As the proportion of adolescents who identify as heterosexual decreases, the incidence of mental health issues increases,” including depression and suicidal ideation… The YRBBSS found 11% of adolescents described themselves as gay, bisexual, or not sure of their sexuality in 2015. By 2021, that percentage had more than doubled to nearly 25%...Additionally, students identifying as sexual minorities “remained >3 times likely to attempt suicide relative to heterosexual students in 2017.” Read

Virginia’s Largest School District Put A ‘Kink-Affirming’ Bondage Specialist In Charge Of Reviewing Parent Complaints About Books by Luke Rosiak at The Daily Wire. The appointment of Laila Cooper, the sex therapist, is a provocative gesture intended to signal that although the school system technically has a process for registering complaints about obscene materials, such complaints are likely to be essentially thrown in the trash, parents told The Daily Wire. In a professional bio of Cooper, she states, “I work from an affirming and social justice approach with the LGBTQIA community and people of color, and I am kink- and non-monogamy informed and affirming… My work is focused on sex and gender issues (including transgender issues), sexual orientation, kink/BDSM, and interpersonal relationships (including couples, polyamory, family dyads).” Read

Indiana Launches Website for Parents to Report Gender, Racial Indoctrination in Schools by Calvin Freiburger at LifeSiteNews. “Eyes on Education is a platform for students, parents, and educators to submit and view real examples from classrooms across the state. The Office of the Attorney General will follow up on materials submitted to the portal that may violate Indiana law using our investigative tools, including public records requests, and publish findings on the portal as well.” …“Submissions to the portal will be reviewed and published regularly,” the website promises. Read 

Throwback Thursday

Catholic Culture: Living with the Saints by Institute for Catholic Liberal Education Staff on July, 25 2018. The primary instrument of education and formation in a school is a culture. No one student or educator can sort through the diverse visions of the good, true and beautiful that assault us everywhere in the “marketplace of ideas”. This is where culture comes into the picture. A developed, lasting, impressive culture is one which has, in its various spokesmen, encountered the whole, diversified experience of human activities, and taken related positions on them. Culture provides a unified wisdom. The role of culture is so critical to education that recent Magisterial documents identify “cultural pluralism”, the idea that all cultures are of equal value, as the greatest challenge facing education today. Read