by Phoebe Wise
The Passion of the Children
“Passion of the children… Say what?
Like what does that mean, dude? I don’t wanna to be, like, judgmental,
but it sounds kinda kinky.”
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| Author Phoebe Wise |
Pope Francis talked about it
last week.
“Oh, you mean like those pedophile priests,
right? That sucks, man. Those guys should just die in a fire.”
Well, yeah, that’s part of
it, but he was really talking about all the
terrible things that adults do to children.
At his regular Wednesday
audience, April 8, 2015, Pope Francis coined a phrase, “the passion of the children.” Don’t think
“passion” as in romance. Think
“passion” as in suffering -- as in
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
“Every child who is
marginalized, abandoned,
who lives on the street begging with every kind of
trick, without schooling, without medical care, is a cry that rises up to God
and denounces the system that we adults have set in place,”
the pope told members of his audience. |
| Pope Francis and the children he loves |
The phrase, “Passion of the children,” deserves to rank with some of the better-known coinings
of Francis’ predecessors. I’m thinking of Pope Saint John Paul II’s “the
culture of death” and Pope Benedict’s “the dictatorship of relativism.”
There is enough suffering to
go around for everyone in today’s world, but Pope Francis has a particular
heart for the suffering endured by children.
He chose to devote his Easter
week address, when presumably more people will be paying attention to what he
has to say, to raise a great cri de coeur
for their
“passion.” When he looks at children today, he sees Christ scorned and
abandoned, Christ tortured and crucified.
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| Is this the face of the world's children? |
The “passion of the children” is not just metaphor.
Children have been literally crucified by members of ISIS; bombed and
torn limb from limb by warring adults. Who
can forget Martin Richard, the 7-year-old victim of the Boston Marathon
bombing?
Francis went on to speak of
all the ways that adults mistreat children, condemning those who neglect and
abandon them, and the criminals who “exploit them for
shameful trafficking or commerce, or train them for war and violence.”
But in no
way should their suffering justify their murder: “There
are those who dare to say ... that it was a mistake to bring these children
into the world. This is shameful! Let’s not unload our faults onto the
children! Children are never a “mistake.” Their hunger is not a mistake, nor is
their poverty, their vulnerability, their abandonment — so many children
abandoned on the streets — and neither is their ignorance or their
helplessness.”
Few people, we hope, would
argue with his condemnation of those things.
But he goes on to talk about the suffering of children in so-called rich
countries, who are living in the ruins of a culture degraded by the sexual
revolution.
Here is what he said: “Children also pay
the price for immature unions and irresponsible separations: they are the first victims; they suffer the
outcome of a culture of exaggerated individual rights, and then the children
become more precocious.”
This translation is from the
official Vatican website vatican.va. I think a better
translation of the Italian would be, “and then the children
become prematurely precocious.” What Francis is saying is
that because of irresponsible adults, the children grow up too quickly and are
robbed of their childhood.
He goes on: “They often absorb the
violence they are not able to ‘ward off’ and before the very eyes of adults are
forced to grow accustomed to degradation.”
Now “degradation” is a strong word, but it is probably not strong enough for what
children are forced to endure in the “culture of
exaggerated individual rights.” This phrase of Pope Francis
also deserves to be noted and quoted, but have you seen it repeated in any news
source?
No, what gets quoted is his “who am I to judge?” quoted out-of-context and held up as an endorsement of
homosexuality. I guess no one wants to
talk about how the “culture of exaggerated
individual rights” has
brought about the “passion of the children.”
Pope Francis has spoken out
against abortion, the tyranny of gender theory, homosexual marriage, selfish
people who prefer pets to children, and the use of the “products of abortion” in the cosmetics industry.
But what do we see in the
popular press?
Look at a recent article
about Francis in The Wall Street Journal, April 4, entitled “The New Rome.” Its subheading claims, “From poverty and
sexual ethics to church governance, he has set a course to modernize Catholic
tradition and teachings.” The author, Francis X. Rocca, says that, “The pope’s
relative silence on certain widely contested moral teachings [abortion, gay
marriage, contraception] has left some worried that these questions are now of
secondary importance.”
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| Francis X Rocca, writer for the Wall Street Journal, is not listening. |
Relative silence? The Pope is
speaking. Who is not listening? Francis X
Rocca for one. In addition to the Wall
Street Journal, Rocca writes for the Catholic News Service, The National
Catholic Reporter, and America—all outlets with a “progressive” or liberal
outlook on things Catholic.
Liberal writers are masters
of spin and half-truths. They know how
to exaggerate and quote out-of-context.
But with Francis, what they know how to do best is to ignore. If he says something that does not agree with
the progressive image that they are trying to build up for him in the minds of
their public, they simply ignore it.
Don’t repeat it. Don’t write about
it.
That’s why the only way to
know what Francis is really saying is to go to the official vatican.va
website. You can still find his words faithfully
documented there. For now. Until they get hacked.
But if you have read this,
you know about the passion of the children.
Let us all carve that phrase on the palms of our hands.
Phoebe Wise has a master's degree in Medieval Languages from Harvard University. She has also written Raspberry Crazy Ants and The Synod on The Family.
