IN reply to H. McConaghy and Fr K. Ryan (CL 22/6/03, Educating young about AIDS), Shiloh’s letter leaves much to be desired in so much as it lacks information as to exactly what this education is.
Education, marvellous as it is, does not make us morally good. If this was so, heaven would be full of the educated and hell the uneducated.
Thomas Aquinas and Bernadette Soubirous are both saints in heaven. St Thomas Aquinas was brilliant intellectually. St Bernadette Soubirous was intellectually backward ‘ I hasten to add not mentally retarded. She suffered from asthma and missed much schooling because of this and also because she had to take care of the younger children while her mother worked.
We have been told for more than a generation now that sex education in schools is going to solve the problem of promiscuity in our society, but this is not so. Promiscuity has gone from bad to much, much worse.
Let a shop sell bad food and a person become ill with food poisoning from it, the heath department moves with all haste to solve the problem and severe penalties follow the offence. We are living in a toxic society. I don’t mean environmentally, but this is also an issue today.
A North American Indian saying goes: ‘Only after the last river has been poisoned, only after the last tree has been cut down, only after the last fish has been caught, only then will people realise that money cannot be eaten.’
We are living in a toxic society spiritually as far as our souls are concerned.
There are deep roots for this, our economic system and Freudism which swept the world, particularly in America, in the last century.
(‘Freud gave the father the place which in reality is that of the mother, and degrades the mother into the object of sexual lust’ ‘ Eric Fromm, The Sane Society.)
The message coming from the Magisterium of the Church, Rome, is that chastity is the answer to the scourge of AIDS. The Church is an unequal society. This point is most important to realise, particularly in the present day, when the concepts of liberalism and excessive democracy are worshipped as a cult. Christ, her founder, did not establish the Church as a democracy. Without this central controlling body, warts and all, this universal Christian Church could cease to exist.
Pope John Paul II in his apostolic letter on the dignity of woman, Mulleris Dignitatem on Mary writes: ‘God entrusts the human being to her in a special way’.
He never tires of reminding us that today more than ever we need to restore motherhood to its true value. Motherhood and fatherhood are spiritual categories.
Our dear, long suffering Pope John Paul II who is attracting the admiration of atheists (I heard this with my own ears) because of his stamina and great courage in carrying out his mission in his infirmity and great age, tired, weak, suffering, may have the secret of wisdom in advising us, pray the Rosary.
Never before in the history of the Westernised world has there been such a highly educated populous.
Education is not going to reform the world. True Christian living is, coming from the power of Jesus Christ.
ELAINE DRISCOLL
Greenbank, Qld
