From the Dinosaur Game to Dinoniche

“Pop, I thought of something else to add to my Christmas list.”

“What’s that?” I replied in the predawn stillness in which the rest of the family lay yet abed.

“An office.”

“An office!”

I turned from where I stood at the kitchen table to fix my eyes upon the second-grader at the far end of the extended family room. He sat upon the old draftsman’s chair in the light of a desk lamp on his old desk, which consisted of a countertop laid across the top of two three-drawer file cabinets with a space in between to accommodate the chair. His head was turned toward me, though his body was still bent over his elbows and forearms resting on the desk and his left hand still holding his pencil. Before he had broken the morning silence, that hand and pencil had been industriously marking onto three-by-five index cards pictures and words that would illustrate dinosaurs and facts about them for the multitude who must certainly desire to know as much as he desired to know everything about the prehistoric-animal wonders that had populated the land and sea of the very planet he and his now inhabited.

“Joseph,” I said, “you’re not going to get an office for Christmas. I was in my twenties before I ever had an office. You have your own desk, and your brother has his little table. Your mother and I had to make due with what room we could get at the family table to do our homework or projects, and we had several brothers and sisters who might need to work at the table at the same time. You’re not going to get an office. You have plenty of room with your desk to do your work.”

But he persisted and was perfectly adamant that he needed an office. He explained to me that his desk was just not adequate for all the essential work he had before him to make his dinosaur cards, given that he had to do his homework and all his other projects there too. And yet I remained unmoved.

The cards became part of an elaborate game, indecipherable to adults who attempted to play it.

Eventually he solved the problem by creating an office just for the dinosaur cards in what he called his under-bed. He would obediently wait until 4:30 a.m., then roll out of bed to under his bed, lie flat on his belly propped up on his elbows and forearms, and go to work on his cards. (The 4:30 start time was a compromise to mollify his mother who would not hear of him getting up at 4:00 or earlier.) I raised up his bed on wood blocks, which gave him more room, and his mother got him some LED lights to attach to the slats that held up his mattress, and he had all he needed to continue his crucial work. In all, he created some 600 dinosaur cards.

The cards became part of an elaborate game, indecipherable to adults who attempted to play it. In the game, cards would be laid out all over a table, and then long, thin, irregular strips of paper, that had been cut with a scissors, would be laid out among the cards, and play would commence. On one occasion, on a visit to my parents, they, my brother and his wife, my wife and I, our two sons, and my niece all sat down to play. Though parents and grandparents never had a clue about what was going on, the two boys and, remarkably, their cousin newly introduced to the game, went about play as if it were as obvious as the sun.

Fast forward fifteen years. Joseph was now in what was supposed to be his last semester of college. (It was not, but we can come back to that.) He still retained his fascination for and encyclopedic knowledge of prehistoric creatures. In fact, in one class the professor held up a fossil of a nautiloid and began asking questions about it. Joseph held back on answering, as usual, until no one else answered, and then he volunteered the answer. Finally, after he had reluctantly answered all the questions, the professor asked if anyone knew the name of the creature preserved in the fossil. Joseph held out as long as he could, with the professor’s eye fixed on him, before he said, “Gomphoceras.” The professor blurted, “How did you know that?” Joseph shrugged his shoulders. Still incredulous, the professor asked if he had looked at the label on the box. He assured him that he had not. Joseph betrayed a hint of mirth when he summed up the experience, “He was surprised I knew it to the genus level.”

Another of Joseph’s professors, a very kind paleontologist, marveled to his mother and me about his knowledge of information related to the ancient past. Finally, the professor bluntly said that he wondered if Joseph ever had any fun. I explained to him that, to Joseph, continually learning, especially about the fauna of the earth across geologic time, was fun. But then I added that he also ran on the track team, played piano, got together with his many and varied friends. Yes, he had plenty of fun.

Anyway, well into the spring semester of his senior year, I received a phone call from him that shortly made me glad that he had called me and not his mother.

“Pop, remember that dinosaur game I made when I was a kid?”

“Yeah, I remember it.”

“Well, I was thinking about it, and I thought I could make it into a tabletop miniatures game. So, the other night I wrote up forty pages of directions for it, and I’ve been designing models for it on Blender, and I ordered a 3D printer to print them, and I can playtest the game with the guys here and just keep improving it.”

Just what a parent wants to hear with graduation all but in his grasp.

“Well,” I said, as my imagination projected my wife’s reaction to such news, “that’s great, but you want to keep in mind that graduation is only a few months away, and you just want to make sure you keep up your grades right to the end. You’re almost done here, and you’ve put in a lot of time and work, and you’ve got a strong average, and you don’t want to throw that away at the end.”

And he did inform us, perhaps a little too close to graduation, that he planned not to graduate, even though he had all the credits he needed to do so.

He assured me that that would not be a problem, and then launched excitedly back into his plans for the game. Eventually, he would be running two 3D printers in the cross-ventilated empty room in his suite, printing various dinosaur models that he was designing on Blender. He would playtest the game with teammates from the track team, who would help him identify areas that needed improvement. And he would keep making improvements.

Apparently, the idea to turn the dinosaur game into a tabletop-miniatures game was born in Michigan’s incomparable Upper Peninsula. We were first made aware of his pending adventure there when Joseph called to let us know that a professor from his college biology department had offered him the chance to work at two different bio-stations that summer. In response to my wife’s reservations, I pointed out that it would be a great opportunity for him to be out on his own, take on several layers of responsibility, spend a good deal of time in unspoiled nature, and do real hands-on work in the field of biology that he loved, all while working for a respectable professor in a dependable environment.

Thus did he split his time that summer between biological stations at Rockwell Lake and in the exclusive and unspoiled wilderness of the Huron Mountain Club. At Rockwell Lake he conducted his thesis project involving spiders; fished for and ate bass; spent a good deal of his income on quality food to cook, bake, and eat; and kept up his training, which included running into town on Sundays for church. At the Huron Mountain Club, he and a colleague drove a pickup truck to the farthest extent of the roughest road he had ever been on, then canoed another two-and-a-half miles, then bushwacked their way into the spot where they set up their professor’s experiment, which was eventually destroyed by a bear to render it all fruitless in the end anyway. They also admirably battled the notorious Great Lake’s region mosquito, of which I had warned him. Resolutely eschewing insect repellent, he returned from one outing with over two hundred bites on his back. He and his colleague drove into Marquette and returned with various means to combat the dreaded foe, including a hand-held device that we would hear zap over and over again during the short conversations we could manage with him before the calls would drop. And he was zapping the pesky creatures while inside his place of residence, a historic house hanging out over the lake.

He also created boxes of exquisitely mounted insect collections and put them on consignment in a shop in Marquette. That was the latest in a series of saleable products he had made over the years that illustrated things that interested him, like a poster depicting molecular geometry and packs of cards of favorite prehistoric creatures. It was on an excursion to Marquette that he discovered and purchased a Star Wars Legion game in a game store. After playing this game with friends, he realized he could turn the dinosaur game from his childhood into a tabletop miniatures game. Thereafter came the designing, 3D printing, play testing, and improving described above.

And he did inform us, perhaps a little too close to graduation, that he planned not to graduate, even though he had all the credits he needed to do so. It seems that he still had a year of eligibility to run track due to the Covid plandemic, and he intended to return for the spring semester of the following year to do so. We were that close. . . . That close.

But, as Joseph is wont to do, he spent his time well and constructively. And we, his parents, readjusted, each in our own way. And, to his credit, the youth had made a wise decision. Track was the part of college he valued the most, and he had the best season of his career that spring. And, among all his various endeavors, he kept improving and playtesting the game and developing a business around it. And, in the end, he did graduate, with a degree in biology with a chemistry minor, magna cum laude. And we breathed a sigh of relief.

Finally, he has launched his game, Dinoniche. That dinosaur game for which the second-grader required an office has come to fruition. And, it is a wonder to behold, and to play. May you or someone you know find it so.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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I wrote the following for the occasion of my father’s retirement in 1994. An edition of it was published in Catholic Digest, in January 1995, under the title “‘Be the Best Bum You Can Be’.” It appears here with some minor editing in the month that my father would have turned ninety-five years old. Please see its introduction, the preceding post: “The Man Who Stays:.”

1994

My father retired recently from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, where for twenty-eight years he worked as a landscape architect. I was asked by the planning committee for the retirement dinner if I would give a little talk about my dad at the dinner. I welcomed this opportunity, because I think the world needs to hear a little more about people like my parents. I share here what I had to say about James Ritzer at the celebration of his retirement.

Dad is one of those steadfast kind of people we tend to take for granted. Well, tonight is Dad’s night, and I am going to share a couple of stories that I think illustrate some elements of his character, and then I would like to offer some reflections on the secret and nature of his success.

Stranger on a Street Corner

One Sunday morning in our small town in Wisconsin, when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I pulled up to Main Street on my bicycle, after finishing my paper route. The 6:00 church bells rang through the pregnant air of late spring or early summer, as I pulled out onto Main Street and started home. Now, Main Street in our town was not a rollicking place at 6:00 A.M. on Sunday, if indeed it was at any time. Thus, the sound of far-off yelling immediately caught my attention, and I turned around to see a stick-figure man, several blocks down on a corner of the deserted street, shouting and waving his arms over his head in an obvious attempt to gain my attention. His urgency had its effect on me, and I turned around and rode back toward him.

“If you ever get to Eagle Pass, Texas, you look him up.”

As I approached the man I could see that he was of middle age or older, small to medium build, and dark-complexion. He was neatly groomed and modestly dressed and had a kind face, that betrayed a propensity to smiling and laughter, despite the concern it was at that moment communicating. Even before I reached him, he was gesticulating and talking excitedly to me in broken English mixed with some other language unfamiliar to me. This was not an every-day occurrence in our less-than-cosmopolitan municipality. From his rapid explanation I managed to pick out something about a bus that did not come, the police station, the police saying the bus would not come, and Waterloo.

Finally, with my own firm gesture of holding my hands palm-side-out toward him, I said to the man, “Just stay here; I’ll be right back.” (As if he were going somewhere.) And I climbed back onto my bike and sped home.

When I reached home, I ran into the house and up to my parents’ room, where my dad was uncharacteristically still in bed at 6:00 A.M.

I told Dad about the man on the corner, and he said, “He’s probably a migrant worker who needs to get to the nursery in Waterloo.”

As he said this he was already getting out of bed and pulling clothes on over his pajamas. “You go down and wait in the car, and I’ll be right out.”

We started up the Blue Bomb station wagon, and drove down to Main Street, where Dad told the man that we would drive him to Waterloo (about 14 miles away). The man was inexpressibly grateful, though he did his best to express his gratitude with multiple handshakes and repeated vocal thanks.

Eventually we were on the way to Waterloo, my Dad driving and trying as best he could to balance his attention between the road and the dangling curtains of family photos which unfolded from the man’s wallet in front of Dad’s eyes.

Dad responded sincerely to the photos with, “Yeah, yuh, uh huh, very nice, uh huh; why don’t you let Pete have a look at them.”

The man quickly turned back to me and proudly displayed pictures of his beautiful family, and for a while, between the two of us, Dad and I gave the road, the photos, and the man the attention due to each. Eventually the man re-packed the photos and turned his excited talk back to Dad, who continued to listen and offer positive response to a mixture of English and Spanish that neither of us understood very well.

When we reached Waterloo, the man opened his wallet again and tried to give Dad some money. I believe it was a twenty-dollar bill. Of course, Dad would not take it. The man insisted, until finally my dad told him that, instead, why didn’t he give us his address in Eagle Pass, Texas, and if we ever got down that way we would look him up. The man loved the idea and ran into the house to get a pen and paper and wrote out his address and left it with us.

As we drove away, Dad slipped the piece of paper to me and said, “If you ever get to Eagle Pass, Texas, you look him up.” I still have that slip of paper.

Thus, did my Sunday school begin long before we left for Mass that day.

At first Dad did not answer, as if some part of him refused to accept that we were there asking the question, but our repeated question eventually drew from him an admission that he was indeed going fishing.

No Fishing

On another occasion, my brother Mark and I caught my Dad trying to sneak away to go fishing. Now, Dad really loved to go fishing, but very rarely could get away to go. Besides the numerous home remodeling projects that were simultaneously underway and the constant maintenance demands of everything from the water heater to the car, my six siblings and I did a pretty fair job of keeping Dad busy with our various enterprises and concerns. All of this left little time for fishing.

Nevertheless, this day Dad was going to give it a try. I think Mark and I were about eight and nine years old, respectively, at the time. From the back yard, we saw Dad slipping out of the house with his fishing pole. We looked at each other stunned at the possibility that Dad might have planned something without us knowing about it, and we raised the question between us, “Is Dad going fishing?”

Without an answer between us, we ran up to Dad yelling, “Dad, are you going fishing?”

At first Dad did not answer, as if some part of him refused to accept that we were there asking the question, but our repeated question eventually drew from him an admission that he was indeed going fishing. Our following question drew from him permission to go along, as long as we put on warmer clothes. We were each wearing a pair of cutoff shorts only, no shoes, no shirt.

Now, Mark and I knew that we were pretty tough guys, that the day was only getting started, and that the early sun promised a warm day ahead; and we said so. Nevertheless, Dad insisted that we each put on at least a pair of shoes and a shirt, warning that it was always cooler out on the water. So, we grudgingly entered the house and returned, each wearing a pair of sneakers and a tank top. Dad warned us that he did not think we would be warm enough, but to our assurances that we would, he said nothing, and we climbed into the car and left for the lake.

When we arrived at the lake, Dad rented a boat and rowed us out to an acceptable place on the water. And it was COLD! The sun had disappeared behind some high clouds and a cool spring breeze had come up. As Dad sat comfortably in his long pants and jacket, Mark and I fought chattering teeth and goose bumps. And I was not going to say one word about it.

I believe that we were on the water long enough to untangle and set up some gear, bait our books and get them into the water. But not very long after that, a dull, hollow complaint rose up from Mark’s small frame, and it was all over. I lasted only about as long as my seniority demanded before I added my complaint, and we packed everything up, and Dad rowed in, returned the boat, and we headed home with very little said.

Finally, on the quiet ride home Dad pulled over to pour a cup of coffee from a thermos, and I asked, “Dad, are you mad at us?” Being the older one, I was more sensitive to that sort of thing.

Dad said to us, “You know, you guys, I told you that you should put on warmer clothes, and that you wouldn’t be warm enough with what you had on, but you guys had to find out for yourselves.”

He pointed out that we were getting older and that we were going to have to make more and more decisions for ourselves, that we would need to learn from our experiences, but that it was equally important to learn from the experience of others.

Dad had given up a precious opportunity to go fishing alone so that we could go along. Then he sacrificed what remained so that we could learn a valuable lesson.

The happy accident of his fruitful career resulted indirectly from his life-choice for love.

Andy Griffith Kind of Guy

In short, Dad was an Andy Griffith kind of guy and, together, he and Mom made an Andy Griffith kind of home.

This point really came home to me once, when I was working for a real estate company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The atmosphere there could get a bit pretentious at times, and so, periodically, I would go home for lunch and watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show while I ate.

These retreats to the world of Mayberry, where people seemed to have an innate sense of what was really important, had a rejuvenating effect on me, and I suspect that it showed in a sunnier disposition, a lighter step, a general air of joie de vivre, as I returned to the old place of employment.

One day when I returned from lunch sporting that sunnier disposition, I was asked by a coworker if I had again watched Andy Griffith during my lunch. To my affirmative reply she offered a pleasant but condescending smile and said in that knowing way, “Peter.” (People in that area called me by my full name.)

I said, “What?”

She said, “You and your Andy Griffith.”

I said, “What’s wrong with Andy Griffith?”

She said, “Nothing, it’s just not real life.”

I thought, “Who’s real life?” But I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Nobody’s dad is like that.”

And I said, “Mine is.”

As she stood and looked at me for a moment, a kind of soft, wistful smile came over her face, and I realized how blessed our family had been in having my dad for a dad. And we were so blessed because my parents prioritized their individual lives, and their life together, in a certain way.

Life-Choice for Love

A man by the name of Phillip Sloan once said, “Should the careerist choose love, he would cease to be a careerist.” And though we are assembled here tonight to celebrate his career, those of us who know Jim Ritzer know that he has never been a careerist. The happy accident of his fruitful career resulted indirectly from his life-choice for love.

In our world today, love has been reduced to a feeling or an emotion. That is not what I mean by love.

Love is a theological virtue, a divine prerogative into which the human is elevated to share. Love is God’s, and God allows us to enter and share in it.

Since it is a divine prerogative, to know love the human being must accept God as the center of life. God our Creator alone knows our true purpose. Without commitment and submission to God, in prayer, the human cannot attain fulfillment.

Dad and Mom have committed to God as their center, and their marriage is a sacramental witness of that fact. With that commitment comes a certain priority that ranks the family above most other demands in this world. Few things on earth can be as sacred as participation in God’s creation and nurturing of other human beings. The most important jobs that we can do cannot be done for pay, and parenting is one of them. My parents understood that, and prioritized their lives accordingly.

That priority, and the morals and values that go with it, form the basis for whatever success Dad has achieved in any area of his life. I’ll leave it to his professional colleagues to rate his success in their area. In the area of family and fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, he has been very successful. As proof of his and Mom’s success as parents, I look to the people at our table, my family. (See “One Big Family.”)

Ours is not a perfect family. There is no such thing. We know each other’s worst as well as each other’s best. But I have met people from all over the world, and my family members are some of the finest. And they have married fine people, and they are raising fine people.

In the end, no other achievements or awards or accolades can compare to the achievement of having raised human beings who love God and neighbor and live out that love, as do these people I call my family. And that is an important thing to keep in mind as we celebrate the retirement from a career. (See “Making Room and the Courage to Love.”)

Superlative Retiree

And so, as Dad moves into retirement, I recall for him something he told me many years ago.

I was at one of those stages of childhood when people kept asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. And one day Dad asked me with genuine hope and curiosity.

I was pretty tired of the question by then and tired of the mentality that sought to define my person and encapsulate my potential within some generic future career, and I said to him, “Dad, sometimes I just think I want to be a bum.”

And Dad responded, “Then, Pete, be the best bum you can be.”

Now, this response may seem trivial at first appraisal, but in reality it is a very weighty statement.

In giving me the permission to be a bum, Dad also gave me the injunction to do even that to the best of my ability. In short, Dad allowed me the awesome freedom to seek what God called me to in life with its risk of failure, but not without the equally awesome and necessary responsibility that corresponds to that freedom.

And I have tried to accept that way throughout my life.

Now, as Dad enters into retirement and faces a new stage of life, a stage as yet far off and alien to me, and one that my inexperience disqualifies me from commenting much upon, I turn back to the advice of the young sage who guided my steps into successive new stages of life, and as father enlightened son, so son reminds father, “Dad, be the best bum you can be.”

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

Again, please see the introduction to this article, the preceding post: “The Man Who Stays:.”

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An Introduction to “‘Should the Careerist Choose Love,...’”

When my father was considering retiring over thirty years ago, he asked a friend what he liked best about retirement. The friend succinctly responded, “Sunday nights.”

Before long Dad too was enjoying Sunday nights in a way he had never done before. At his retirement dinner, several people spoke of working with Dad for years, and yet little if any of what they said had anything to do with his work, as I remember it. Instead they spoke of his character and what a good man he was and how they had been blessed by knowing him. Two men who had worked under Dad for decades spoke of how they had often looked to him for advice on matters of faith, family, and home: on being good husbands and fathers, and on how best to tackle home remodeling projects. They wrestled with their emotions as they spoke and seemed loath to end their remarks, as if by continuing to speak they would not need to accept Dad’s leaving.

My six siblings and I were also invited to speak, and some of us did. The nature of the remarks made by the two men mentioned above, and all the other speakers, validated words from my own remarks that encapsulated all the rest of what I had to say: “And those of us who know Jim Ritzer know that he has never been a careerist. The happy accident of his fruitful career resulted indirectly from his life-choice for love.” I collected those words and all the rest of what I had to say that night into the article “‘Should the Careerist Choose Love.’” Catholic Digest published a version of it under the title “‘Be the Best Bum You Can Be’” in January 1995. I thought I would share that article here in the month in which my father would have turned ninety-five years old on 14 August 2026. This introduction has grown into its own article, so “‘Should the Careerist Choose Love, . . .’” should appear in the next post.

It was an unforeseen special time together for the three of us in the old house before they moved and I got married.

A few years into retirement, Dad and Mom, after years of unhurried looking, found a home with nine acres of wood and pasture north of Menomonie, Wisconsin. The house already had an offer on it, but Mom said, “That’s our house,” with no doubt that it would be. The offer fell through, and they bought their house.

Now remained detaching from and selling the nearly ninety-year-old Victorian house in south central Wisconsin, that had for thirty years been the home in which they had raised seven children and experienced countless changes, challenges, and celebrations. And to sell it, Dad would need to finish several remodeling projects. I was visiting from Texas at the time and could see that Dad was overwhelmed at the prospect of finishing all his projects according to requirements and timelines stipulated by their real-estate agent. He did not say much but just kind of looked off as if into the impossibility of it all. I had never seen him like that. He had always been industriously working on the house, tearing apart and building anew. But now, he was overwhelmed. It struck me that he really needed help, and it dawned on me that I was one of the very few people, if not the only one, whether justified or not, he would trust to do a job to his satisfaction.

That experience reoriented me to consider whether I could somehow help. I determined that I could take some time off from the project I was working on and stay and help Dad finish his projects. When I asked Dad if it would help if I would stay and finish up the projects with him, it was as if clouds broke from his mind and light shined through. Thereafter I heard him tell people that I would be helping him finish his projects, even though I had not yet decided to, and thus, I decided to.

His biggest unfinished project was the den (which years before had been the kitchen before Dad moved it to the back of the house). He had torn off the north wall and bayed out the new wall with windows on all three sides of the bay. Dad went to work on finishing the outside and I went to work on the inside. I hung sheetrock, taped, plastered, sanded, and painted the den, hung a new sheetrock ceiling in the long upstairs hall, put in light fixtures, patched plaster. In addition, we finished every other project, one after another, while Mom cleaned. It was an unforeseen special time together for the three of us in the old house before they moved and I got married. After a few weeks, the real-estate agent stepped into the house and said that if we had told her we could have got all of that work done in the amount of time we did, she would not have believed it. She raised the price of the house.

Dad’s retirement further demonstrated that he was no careerist. Rarely if ever idle, he would say of his retirement that he did not know how he had previously had time to work. Besides working on landscaping and remodeling projects at the old house, and after they moved, at their new home, Mom and Dad attended Mass and prayed their rosary, volunteered installing emergency call buttons for seniors (some younger than they were) and at their church, attended local plays and other events, hosted family and friends, took drives into the Wisconsin and Minnesota countryside, and stopped for coffee, pastries, and meals. Meaningful though their professional work had been, Dad and Mom did not miss it as they lived out the fullness of their lives.

“The prototype of all careerists is Judas,” according to Dom M. Eugene Boylan.

On the other hand, history presents us with the most tragic example of a careerist. “The prototype of all careerists is Judas,” according to Dom M. Eugene Boylan. Those words struck me, as I read a meditation on Judas conspiring with the chief priests to betray Jesus in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, and Jesus revealing to the Twelve that he knows one of them will betray him and, to Judas, that he knows it is he. The quotation is part of a longer passage from the Irish Cistercian, offered as the meditation on the gospel reading (Matthew 26:14-25) of the Mass of Wednesday, 1 April 2026, in the Magnificat.

Still, more of the Dom Boylan quotation offers a larger context:

It often happens in the service of God that those who are seemingly zealous for his service are really serving themselves. They are pursuing their own career. Their zeal is not so much for God’s glory as for their own. . . . They are living their own life—not the new life of union with Christ. . . .

And he had more to say about Judas specifically that might give us pause:

He seems to have been one of the ablest of the apostles, one who felt that he was sure to rise to high estate in the new kingdom which all the apostles understood Jesus was to found on earth. He was minister for finance in the apostolic college, a man of affairs and prudence. . . . He began to realize that our Lord’s policy was not going to lead to the temporal greatness on which he had counted. Christ was an impartial idealist! He was deliberately setting a course that would bring him in conflict with the authorities and openly spoke of his crucifixion. . . .

And so this prudent man decided to cut his losses. . . .

The story of Judas has a lesson for us all. God’s plans for our sanctification are never quite what we expect them to be; and are often quite contrary to our own ideas, no matter how well we are acquainted with God’s ways. He always hides his sanctifying work from our eyes, for he must preserve in us that humility and poverty of spirit which is essential for sanctity. Even though we avoid the error of Judas of expecting temporal success instead of eternal love, still we must not expect to see our plan for our own sanctification being realized instead of God’s plan. His plan for us is his secret—a lover’s secret—and we must trust his love. In fact, our trust in God, especially when we see our own unworthiness, is the greatest compliment we can pay him.

So Dom Boylan, in exposing Judas as the prototypical careerist also exposes the characteristics of a careerist. Selfishness prevails in delusions of self-importance, self-sufficiency, self-actualization, and self-glorification. While presenting himself as serving God, he serves himself, pursues his own career, is zealous to glorify himself, lives for himself. When temporal success is threatened by the plan of the omniscient God of eternal love, he “cut[s] his losses.” He will not trust—in essential “humility and poverty of spirit,” and in recognizing his own “unworthiness”—“God’s plans for our sanctification,” proudly preferring his own expectations and ideas. He is not a man who stays, who commits. Ever watchful for a better situation, when he does leave he does so dishonorably in betrayal.

Children were able to propel the structure to such a high state of rotation . . . that those who hung from the poles could achieve perfect perpendicularity before they were either flung from the device or were able to again gain terra firma with its slowing or stopping.

It should be no surprise then that it has long struck me that this careerist, Judas, was a communist, as relevant a consideration today as ever. He “who was to betray him,” is scandalized when Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’ feet with “costly ointment of pure nard.” He blurts out, “‘Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?’” You may notice that for those on the Left, the problem is always about money. There is never enough money. And thus the solution to everything is more money (of which they are happy to take their abundant cut). How neatly it all fits into Marx’s historical materialism. So, it should be no surprise that the Bolsheviks, at the beginning of their takeover in Russia, built a statue to Judas Iscariot in Moscow, as Darryl Cooper revealed to Tucker Carlson. And that should be instructive for those of any age who would be seduced by communism.

But John, who for a good three years of following Jesus had lived with Judas as two of the Twelve, was not having it. John makes it clear, about Judas, that, “This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it.” And it must have galled Judas no end, as it would the communists of today, that Jesus responded: “‘Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you will always have with you, but you do not always have me.’” For the Lord, if anyone, knew that the real problem is not about money but about love: there is never enough love, and the solution is more love.

That makes me think of an experience I had in graduate school years ago. I was passing through the detectors on my way out of the the library, and for whatever reason, the security guard asked me how Catholics could accept all the wealth that the Catholic Church (I think he specifically mentioned the pope) had in the form of magnificent churches and art while people were starving in the world. In the vein of St. Mary of Bethany, Jesus, and St. John, I found myself almost speechless at the absurdity of the question. Three responses struck me, and I believe I gave voice to them in the abbreviated manner required by the inadequate amount of time allowed by the circumstances. One was that the Catholic Church was one of the, if not the, biggest charitable organizations in the world (with many of those in the consecrated life living out vows of poverty as they serve the poor). Another was that (as Mary anointed Jesus with costly nard), people will always, even in their want, build beautiful temples and make beautiful art, with what is available to them, to raise the human soul and honor God. [I discovered after posting this article that Bishop Barron has made a film about this very topic: “Heaven in Stone and Glass.”] Another was that people cannot eat stone, paint, canvases, in short, church buildings and art. These were created to enhance people’s worship of God. They could only be sold for money because people value them. And even if these were all sold, which could only be done once (or, as a friend concisely put it, “Then what?”), people could not eat the money raised. They need food. Money merely provides a medium of exchange. (Remember, for the Left, it is always about money.) (Beyond all that, Catholic church buildings range from grass huts to grand basilicas, based on what kind of temple the faithful of a parish are able to build. And unlike the multi-million-dollar mansions that house certain televangelists, the Vatican is not just the home of the pope, but the administrative center for the largest church on earth as well as for a country, housing many departments and individuals.) The young college woman, who overheard at least part of our conversation on her way through the detectors, appeared to take umbrage at my remarks, as she “humphed” and grabbed and threw her backpack over her shoulder and hurried off as if to, almost violently, remove herself from my presence. Pity, I would have enjoyed a civil discussion of the matter.

Additional context for “‘Should the Careerist Choose Love, . . .’” comes from the Western Shane, not the excellent movie but the classic novel. In a recent conversation about that work, it came out that a new reader of the story (a long-married and faithful husband and father) had expressed reservations about the relationship between Shane and Marian Starrett. And this revived latent misgivings that have stayed with me from my boyhood about that relationship.

For years thereafter, of course, dealing with the female of the species became ever more bewildering and complex.

Marian is the wife of Joe Starrett and the mother of young Bob Starrett, through whose voice the story is told. Though Shane and Marian never crossed physical boundaries, as I remember it, I still remember feeling uncomfortable with the blurring of emotional boundaries between them. And I was young when I read the book. At first I thought maybe I had read it in my late teens, but as I remember it, I had read it well before college, and I believe well before high school, and even before middle school. Like I say, I believe I read it while still pretty young. And that is relevant because the Marian/Shane relationship, and the memory of it, and its deeper and broader implications, made an impression upon me from a young age and made me aware of a certain temptation in dealing with members of the opposite sex.

“As I remember it,” I wrote above, and that is important, so much so that I do not intend to reread or check the story for the purpose of this article, because it is the memory of it that is important here, the memory of it that stayed with me and served as a reference. To set the stage, I must confess that the charms of the fairer sex made a deep impression on me from a young age. I recall being captivated before I was even in school by a girl who visited my sister on the farm, by a classmate’s mother in kindergarten, by a sweet eighth-grade blonde beauty when I was in first grade, and simultaneously by the incomparable Robin, a classmate of bobbed black hair and pure white smile that subtly suggested a bit of a wince, who had a propensity for flying off the merry-go-round and splitting open her knee.

Younger readers might wonder how such a thing was possible. I do not even know if playgrounds still have merry-go-rounds as they did in our day. The comedian Jeff Allen, in his standup special “I Can Laugh About it Now,” provides excellent context. After lamenting, “What happened to playgrounds!” he describes trying to help his granddaughter play on a slide only “five-feet high, made out of plastic. She would go four inches and stop, four inches and stop, four inches and stop. That’s not a slide; it’s a scoot!” Then he describes the slides of our day. “We had a six-storey high, solid-steel structure, by mid-July it would hit a temperature of about 285 degrees. You lose two layers of skin on the way down, another layer when you hit the ground like a flat rock on a pond.” Close enough. And what did we have to cushion our landing should we fall from its heights? Foam-rubber mulch? Synthetic turf? Wood chips? No. Asphalt.

And asphalt lay under and around the merry-go-rounds too. I use the plural because our school playground was graced by not one but two merry-go-rounds sure to excite horror in the parents of the present age. One was the fairly standard rig of thick steel arms radiating out from a hub to a hexagonal or octagonal frame that held wooden benches on which children were to sit facing inward holding onto the steel bar over their laps, as other children either ran inside the frame in between the radiating arms or outside the seats to push the thing round and round. I say “were to sit,” because veterans of the device may well remember that the manner in which students rode the centrifugal-child-chucker varied to the extent of children’s imaginations and their inclinations to wager life and limb on their ability to defy Newtonian physics. Were a child to be whirled from the apparatus or to fall while pushing in the space between seats and hub—with or without being struck by the steel arms or trampled by other pushers before he or she could roll or crawl out from the revolving mass—he or she would either return to action or be assisted into the school to triage by the home-room teacher. Substitution would then be effected by the next in line eager to test his or her lot, whether or not the spinning had been first slowed or terminated according to the individual inclination of the parent-volunteer supervisor, usually a seasoned mother, of several children, long immune to even a hint of squeamishness.

The other was a contraption unique to our midwestern Catholic school, or so it seemed, as I had never elsewhere beheld its like. Memory depicts it as a steel structure with a hub some eight feet high with arms radiating out from the top to an octagonal frame from the angles of which hung poles hinged top and bottom that connected to more steel framing which held wooden planks just above the ground, so that riders could either sit on the wooden planks and drag their feet or stand at full height on them and hold the hinged poles. Chains draped from the center to the outer frame to complete the assemblage and the terror-inducing image for modern parents. All the laws of physics operative with the first device were at play here too, but add to it the action of pushing and pulling the hinged poles so that, as the monstrosity spun, the poles and planks could zigzag back and forth testing young riders to the very limit of human tenacity. Children were able to propel the structure to such a high state of rotation—by either running and pushing against the chains inside the frame or by pushing it around running outside the frame—that those who hung from the poles could achieve perfect perpendicularity before they were either flung from the device or were able to again gain terra firma with its slowing or stopping. One can see how Robin, on more than one occasion, joined the ranks of the flung.

At the time, it seemed apparent to me that the author, Jack Schaefer, was presenting Shane, to a receptive audience, as the hero: the mystery man of few words, silent about his past, tough, resilient, dangerous to the unrighteous and impervious to their attacks, all but irresistible to women, even to a devoted wife and mother like Marian Starrett, and thus, who, to a young boy reading the book, was just plain cool.

After Robin experienced one such mishap, I entered the classroom and immediately felt the familiar pang of heart at the sight of her, as I was surprised to find her seated on a chair while a teacher or two fussed about her trying to mend her knee (again) and tend to a bump on her forehead. There she sat, with that enchanting demure smile, betraying none of the pain she must have been experiencing. Her response to whatever I said was to modestly make light of her condition. When next I saw her, she sported a cast on her knee so that the gash could heal, and no doubt so that she might be, to some degree, less able to split it open again. One day she appeared at school no more, and we learned that her family had moved to Chicago. She took a part of my young heart with her. But the rest of my heart remained, and its crushes settled upon one girl after another in the ensuing years. Tom Sawyer would have undoubtedly appreciated that it was in the fourth grade, within the chalk-dust ambience of a romantic eraser-clapping interlude, that I first proposed marriage to a girl, who accepted me. The seriousness of the affair impressed itself upon me when she asked about a ring before we were forced to return to the classroom. As fickle fate would have it though, the engagement just faded away. For years thereafter, of course, dealing with the female of the species became ever more bewildering and complex.

Now it is within that context that I read Shane for the first (and maybe the only) time, I am guessing some time before middle school. And, of course, especially at that age, the manly chopping-out-the-stump scene touched something in my heart and soul, as did the fight scenes, whether of fist or gun. Still, as indicated above, the relationship between Shane and Marian made me uncomfortable, but it was more than just their straining appropriate emotional boundaries. That was just part of the whole tension I felt about who was the real hero. At the time, it seemed apparent to me that the author, Jack Schaefer, was presenting Shane, to a receptive audience, as the hero: the mystery man of few words, silent about his past, tough, resilient, dangerous to the unrighteous and impervious to their attacks, all but irresistible to women, even to a devoted wife and mother like Marian Starrett, and thus, who, to a young boy reading the book, was just plain cool.

But was Shane a good role model for boys, especially in regard to relations with girls and, later, women? I remember being consciously aware, even at that young age, that the ride-off-into-the-sunset motif of the Western, and in particular of Shane, held a certain fascination for a boy, as crushes on girls became increasingly more interactive. How tempting was it to be the man who loves and leaves: the flawless man, ever attractive, ever cool, ever withdrawn, impenetrable, inscrutable, invulnerable, unassailable, ever memorable? Tempting enough that books, shows, and films are replete with examples of such characters. On the other hand, how perilous was the alternative? To let a girl see your imperfections, your weaknesses, your failings, your vulnerabilities, your blemishes, your wounds? How frightening was it to stay?

And the truth nagged at me throughout my youth—even as I wrestled with, to some degree or other, the allurement of the Shane persona—that though Shane was certainly the romantic hero in risking his life and removing a ponderable threat and riding on when it was appropriate to do so, perhaps the more authentic hero was the one who stayed, the one who shouldered the risk of vulnerability and commitment. And though boys would witness time and again examples of the disturbing and destructive phenomenon of girls inexplicably falling for the bad boy, in time they would see that the mature girls, the real women, valued the men who stayed.

Now, I am not saying that men should not leave relationships. In fact, Shane was right to leave. Of course, saving the settlers and gunplay and killing and all of that also figured into his decision to ride on, but all of that also coincided with his recognizing that he could not remain in the relationship he had cultivated with the Starrett family he had come to love, given the feelings that had developed between Marian and him and the inappropriateness of those feelings in respect to Marian, Joe, Bob, and the Starrett marriage and family. In fact, more men should follow Shane’s lead and leave more relationships. Men, and women, should move on and on, even though each time they may be required to courageously bear the pain of broken hearts, until they come to the relationships they know in their souls to be the right ones, the ones that will result in the life-long Sacrament of Matrimony, from which they only move on by death. But that has been made all the more difficult since the sexual revolution and the normalization of extramarital sex and contraception, and the assault on the appropriate boundaries of chastity.

Shane may have proven almost irresistible to Marian Starrett in the imaginations of Jack Schaefer, adolescent boys, and romantic-minded men, but to authentic women in the real world, the true day-in-and-day-out heroes look a lot more like Joe Starrett.

Since the fall of man, the sexual union of man and woman has been under attack by the devil, the world, and the self: by sin and evil. Thus, the Sacrament of Matrimony is required to order, protect, and sanctify the union. Eroding the boundaries of chastity and engaging in the union without the Sacrament while rejecting its procreative essence is a profound affront to God, man, and nature, and therefore throws those engaging in the union into grave sin and its concomitant confusion. In such a state, they are in no condition to discern whether or not their partners are the right ones, or to enter into the lifelong commitment of the Sacrament. Throw in the hormonal upheaval caused by contraception, and the divinely designed intricate interplay of mind, body, and soul—that makes up the attraction between those who would commit their lives to entering into the Sacrament and thereby creating a family, which is already compromised by original sin—is thrown completely off.

So Shane was right to leave, and all men should leave before they enter deeper into a relationship than they should. Still, there was something about Shane’s leaving and the whole ride-into-the-sunset theme that I recognized, even in my young age, as dangerously alluring even as it was oft glamorized in literature and on screens large and small. It was the heartbreaking. Now when a couple separates, there will often, if not always, be heartbreak, whether of both or one. Normally, that heartbreak will heal, especially if the couple has stayed within the bounds of chastity. Such, did it appear, was the heartbreak in Shane. But it is another thing altogether for a man to intend to break a woman’s heart or even to just enjoy it. Far worse is it for a man to enter into a relationship, however long or short, with the intention of breaking the woman’s heart, whether consciously or subconsciously. How tempting is it to be the invulnerable heartbreaker, to be the man who leaves the woman behind broken hearted, infatuated with him, insensible of his weaknesses, failings, and faults? How tempting is such an ego trip? How tempting is it to glamorize all of that? How tempting and, thus, how dangerous?

How dangerous is it to so objectify a woman, to so inflate the ego, to so deceive oneself and others? Indeed, when even good men leave because it is the right thing to do, as probably more men ought to do more often, they may well leave the woman behind broken hearted, but that ought to be for the man a regrettable result of a righteous act not an end in itself or an enjoyable ego trip, even if the leaving was righteous. For the ego trip, whether intentional or engaged in even after a righteous breakup, is hollow. In the end, the authentic woman loves the man who stays. She may have had her heart broken, even by good men acting righteously, but her heart will heal and be fully given to the man who stays.

So even though Jack Schaefer portrays Shane as the hero—the dangerous mystery man of character who befriends and works for the settler Starrett, captivates his wife and son, stands up for the settlers, fights and kills the bad men, and rides honorably off into the sunset—he has nothing on Joe Starrett. Shane may have proven almost irresistible to Marian Starrett in the imaginations of Jack Schaefer, adolescent boys, and romantic-minded men, but to authentic women in the real world, the true day-in-and-day-out heroes look a lot more like Joe Starrett. Because in the end, there is only the man who stays, the man who marries the woman, all else leave, for better or worse. Starrett is that man who stays, the man who commits in marriage, the man who shoulders the regular drudgery, dirt, discipline, tedium, battles, injuries, uncertainties, weariness, and emotion. The man who shoulders the responsibility. Of course, in Starrett’s case, you can add his taking on the regular life-threatening challenges of frontier life like weather, floods, drought, disease, accidents, armed conflict, predators, and famine. Regardless, he is the man who stays, who courageously gives his very self, who risks opening himself to the vulnerability of being known with all his flaws and fallibility and to staying when flaws and fallibility are exposed. Ultimately, he takes on, along with all its joys, all the risks and demands of real love. And thus, he stands in stark contradiction to the treacherous careerist, and in some degree of communion with the “sign of contradiction,” the One who stayed, to be hung stripped bare, fully exposed, in all the suffering of perfect sacrificial love, due to the careerist’s betrayal, and the betrayal of us all.

Of another staying man, who was no careerist, who gave himself in sacrificial love, who I was blessed to have as a father, I wrote “Should the Careerist Choose Love, . . .” which should appear as the next podcast.

Please like, share, restack, comment, subscribe, as you feel inclined.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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The article “An Authentic Woman,” about my mother, Margaret Mary Costello Ritzer, was so well received that I thought I would share more information about Margaret from photos and articles, displayed at her wake, that my sister had found in a box. Learning things about Mom at her death, in our older ages, that we never knew, gives us an even greater appreciation for her life.

Facing the Future

All that would be Mom would emerge from the young woman pictured in the splendid black-and-white, college-senior photograph above. Next to the photo in the College of St. Catherine’s 1950 yearbook appeared the following: “As president of the senior class, Margaret is kept busy planning and working. She is on the Executive Board, schedules senior activities, and is a ‘jack-of-all-trades.’ Margaret spends her spare time sewing and avoiding cooking.”

That gives rise to a certain fascination. The photo is so singular. It is just her, just Margaret. All alone she gazes into the unknown at the end of her college education, in the process of leaving home and family years before she would join Jim Ritzer in creating their own. Latent lie her intrepid early working years, her marriage, motherhood, grandmotherhood, old age, and passing. Latent too, in a down-to-earth example of marital dying to self, lies the cooking she avoided in her single life, perpetual cooking, of good meals, for a family that would grow to nine people, day in and day out, through a course of decades: no small sacrifice there. All that was to fill, mold, develop, and shape her, and those whose lives she would touch over seventy-six more years on earth, are to the photo’s subject and the surrounding world unknown. Known now to us we can look on that face and wonder.

All that was to fill, mold, develop, and shape her, and those whose lives she would touch over seventy-six more years on earth, are to the photo’s subject and the surrounding world unknown. Known now to us we can look on that face and wonder.

“What a Gal”

It is fascinating to find out from her St. Paul, Minnesota, Harding High School newspaper, the Beacon, article “What a Gal,” of 6 June 1946, how Margaret was viewed by her peers at that time with words like: “modest,” “a tall Irish brownette with a ready smile and quick wit,” “has endeared herself to everyone,” “admirable,” “efficient and charming,” “dependability,” “winning personality,” “intelligence,” “a little shy,” and “a good leader.”

We, her children, did not know that Margaret had been named Outstanding Senior Girl (which thrilled her) and Most Likely to Succeed in high school. I was surprised to see how involved she was: “president of the Scribbler’s Club, secretary of the National Honor Society, and editor of the Beacon” (“the greatest thrill in my life”). (That requires a correction to her obituary: the weekly high-school newspaper, of which she was editor in chief, was the Beacon, not Saga. Saga was the yearbook, but she also served on the art and editorial staff of it. Paul Haller—the fellow who possessed the qualities she admired in a boy “a sense of humor, and a nice personality”—was one of the three editors of Saga.) And she was “also a member of the Spanish Club.” We never knew Mom studied Spanish, Latin yes, but not Spanish. Was that to accommodate plans for travel abroad? We do not know. We also did not know that “girl smokers” were “her pet peeve,” especially since she was smoking up to three packs a day (as I remember it) some eleven years later when she quit cold turkey, throwing her cigarettes into the fireplace, at a party at my father’s house, before they were married. She had related many years ago that the girls of her age thought Peter Lawford pretty special. I seem to remember that my dad, more a Jimmy Stewart fan, did not have much time for him.

And who was the “big, handsome football player” from Grand Meadow who drew sighs and a smile? Was he the fellow to whom Margaret was engaged to be married when she was seventeen? Was he the “Ralph” whose photograph was in an old locket and who appeared with her in photographs of a formal in her college freshman yearbook? Apparently so. I learned of this earlier engagement decades ago, when she told me that she had been engaged when she was seventeen and had considered relinquishing her scholarship and dropping out of college to get married. She was grateful that her father had discouraged the plan by saying that he thought an education was so important. She added about her father’s advice and her taking it, “Thank God.” This prompted me to ask about her prior fiancé, “Why, was he a bad guy?” “No,” she made clear, “he was a very good man, but he wasn’t your father.” Though thus summarized unceremoniously decades later, the breaking of an engagement could not have been at the time easy, trivial, or devoid of emotion.

My father, Jim Ritzer, Margaret would not meet until she was twenty-eight and marry when she was twenty-nine, a fairly advanced age for marriage at that time. Did she ever wonder if she had made the right decision about breaking up her earlier engagement during the intervening single years? She told me once that a priest she had consulted during those years had said that the single life was itself a vocation, which suggested that she had considered that she might never meet the right man to marry. But, of course, she did meet Dad and they were married at St. Michael’s church in Stillwater, Minnesota on 27 December 1958. And because she would marry in Minnesota in December (partly to take advantage of all the beautiful flowers and decorations ornamenting the church during Christmas) she sewed her wedding dress, and her bridesmaids sewed their dresses (green while they held bouquets of red), out of corduroy, providing another example of how, fundamentally traditional though she was, she was never one to be constrained by convention when common sense or practicality recommended a better way.

Though thus summarized unceremoniously decades later, the breaking of an engagement could not have been at the time easy, trivial, or devoid of emotion.

Patrick Edward (Ed) Costello (born 1889), Margaret’s father who had encouraged her to finish her education rather than drop out and get married, had himself dropped out of the College of Saint Thomas in the early 1900s to start a newspaper, had later received a field commission to lieutenant during World War I, and had been saved from participating in that war when it ended before he shipped out. The crucifix he carried in his rucksack hangs on the wall in the room in which I write this. He had been the “Irish son” (my mother’s term) who had returned to run the family farm for his widowed mother, until she passed away, and then courted and married my grandmother, Vera Odell, when he was thirty-eight in 1927.

Vera (born 1895), whose ancestry Margaret traced back to a Matthew Camfield (somewhere down the lineage it was changed to Canfield) in Massachusetts in 1631, had known her share of tragedy. Her father, Herbert (Bert) Odell, a Methodist (if I remember right), had been a professional hypnotist. (His father was Francis Marion Odell, apparently named after the Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion of South Carolina, which I find intriguing considering that I remember some tradition about the Odells coming up from Tennessee at some time, though I know of no record of it.) Bert had also been an alcoholic who had taken “the cure,” which would make one seriously unwell (physically and mentally, as I understood it) should he ever take another drink. Someone encouraged Bert to take that next drink at an Independence Day celebration in 1899, and he went home and shot himself in the head. (I suspect that both Bert and Vera may have been afflicted with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, unknown at the time. Please pray for his soul.) Vera, not yet four years old, was in the house at the time, and no one knew what she witnessed. (A babysitter locking her in a closet when she was little was referenced as the reason she was claustrophobic and would not ride elevators.) Every year after her father died, his brother and his wife would visit from Michigan to make sure Bert’s widow was all right until she, Sarah Margaret (Calvin) Odell, married Catholic Joseph C. Schierts in 1904. Sarah, Vera, and Vera’s sister, Bess, converted to the Catholic Church. Apparently Mr. Schierts was a successful businessman which led to the family enjoying a standard of living, including an automobile, that was a good deal above that known to the average citizen of Kellogg, Minnesota. Vera graduated from Minnesota Normal School and taught school for four years before going to work in her stepfather’s office.

Margaret discovered in Vera’s later years, as her father had when he sought to marry her, that Vera had been previously married and divorced. She had been engaged to a young man who had gone off to World War I. When he returned, they were married and embarked on a two-week honeymoon. Upon their return home, Vera was in a state of emotional and psychological turmoil that led to a divorce. Apparently Vera had succinctly said that “the French women had ruined him.” When Ed Costello courted her years later and she told him she was not free to marry because of the previous marriage, he said, “Oh, I think that can be annulled.” It was annulled after the man’s sisters testified that he had not been baptized.

After leaving the farm, Ed worked in various roles in towns in the Mississippi River valley. He ran at least one grain elevator. Margaret remembered experiencing some degree of ostracism in one town because her family did not speak German as the locals did, those locals did not always take kindly to their produce being rejected by her father due to moisture content, and she was moved ahead a grade because she was completing her schoolwork so expeditiously. When she suffered an accident on the playground (flying off the merry-go-round, if I remember correctly), the other students rallied around her and treated her with kindness, and she began to feel more at home. Eventually Ed and his brother ran a general store in Weaver, Minnesota, but he left the business during the Great Depression because it was not making enough to feed two families. A woman years later told my mother that had the brothers collected all the credit that they had extended to people during the Depression, they would all be “living on Easy Street.”

Her sister, Pat, also a librarian, used to laugh that when she would recommend a book and a patron would ask if she had read it, she would reply, “No, but my sister did.”

But they were not living on Easy Street. Instead they had been living at an aunt’s summer home while Ed was unemployed. When he mentioned the name Billy Hamms in a story about his time in the army, I believe it was that aunt who said something to the effect, “Ed Costello, you know Billy Hamms and you are sitting here unemployed. You sit down and write him a letter and let him know you need a job.” Grandpa did so, and some weeks or months later at a board meeting of Hamms Brewery in St. Paul, when the retirement of the grain buyer and the need for a replacement was announced, Billy Hamms said, “I know just the guy.” Grandpa went from being unemployed to having an excellent job, and the family moved to St. Paul. Grandpa worked at that job until the day before he suffered a stroke and slid under the table at dinner and died a day or so later in the hospital at the age of 72 in 1961, just three months after I was born. The Hamms job had provided for the family and would provide for my grandmother until she died with just enough left over to cover all her funeral expenses. Providence. Providence. No surprise for a man who daily prayed his rosary. My mother said that, when he was in his chair with his rosary, he was not to be disturbed. My paternal grandmother said of him, “Mr. Costello was such a dignified man.” Vera keenly felt his loss ever after.

Rebuilding the Library

Ed Costello was still living, though, when Margaret returned to Minnesota to settle in Stillwater. There, only months after accepting the job of librarian of Stillwater High School, she was tasked with rebuilding the library after the high school burned down on 3 December 1957. According to the article in the Stillwater High School’s The Pony Express issue of 7 February 1958, “It’s A Big Job, But New Library’s Off To A Good Start:” “The huge task is underway, and in the capable hands of SHS’ cheerful librarian, Miss Costello.” The article thereafter details some of the extent of the job before her that is expected to “take about three years.” Margaret would bring to that task her broad knowledge of literature. Her sister, Pat, also a librarian, used to laugh that when she would recommend a book and a patron would ask if she had read it, she would reply, “No, but my sister did.” Unbeknownst to her at the time, Margaret would not be there to oversee the end of the three-year library rebuilding process. Three years from the publication of that article, Margaret would be over two years married, have two young children, and have just lost her father, Ed, who passed away on 5 February 1961, two days after he turned 72.

Warm Memories

It was at Eastside School in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, that Margaret would again don the mantle of librarian in 1976, at the age of forty-seven, when her youngest was starting second grade at Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary School. And it ought to be noted that Margaret did not want to return to work outside the home. Margaret wanted to be home, as she stated clearly to me just before she returned to work from her summer break one year. At the end of summer for some, if not all, of her years at Eastside, she pushed through a bit of a crisis. But push through she did in her sacrifice for the family, as the economy and culture of the late 1970s made it increasingly difficult for families to make it on one salary. In 1975, the labor-force-participation rate for women with children under eighteen years of age was 47.4%. By the next year, when Margaret reentered the work force, it had risen to 48.8%, and she and Jim had not one, not two, but seven children under eighteen. By the time she retired in 1991, it had climbed to 66.6%. Though, as much as Margaret would have preferred to be at home, she committed herself to her work, gave it her best, and enriched the lives of those whom she served and with whom she worked in a meaningful way.

Her love of children and literature and of forming children through good books, exercised in her reading and making books available to children, and her interaction with parents and peers, had so inspired those peers that they had invested no little time, talent, and effort in collaboration to create a thoughtful, meaningful, memorable, practical, and nostalgic work that kept her warm, body and soul, against the cold of the world till the very moment she left it.

The thoughtful article “Teachers turn quilters to honor librarian’s 15 years,” from Sun Prairie’s The Star of 23 May 1991, illustrates how Margaret’s peers and students valued her and her work at the time of her retirement fifteen years later. It would take no little regard for “teachers, principals both old and new, and other Eastside staff” to bring out “their paints, appliqués, and their needles and threads” to create “an extra large quilt featuring their favorite children’s stories, that Ritzer has read in tireless fashion to class after class” “in an effort to celebrate Margaret Ritzer’s 15 years as librarian at the school.”

Among the items depicted are The Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Prince, and a Beatrix Potter illustration. Margaret mentions favorites like The Secret Garden and Miss Rumphias, about a librarian who travels the world and settles by the sea and, to fulfill her grandfather’s directive that she make the world more beautiful, throws lupine seeds into the wind, which then grow and provide a playground for the children to whom Miss Rumphias then tells her stories. Margaret would read such stories to the students for their first three years at the school until they could read well themselves. The children were “the best part of her job,” and she enjoyed that she was able to work with all the students in the school every year rather than just one class each year. She always took very seriously the importance of reading to children, and having children read, good literature.

At Sentry, Sun Prairie’s main grocery store, young people working at checkout or carryout would often remember her fondly from their grammar-school days. As the article points out, when one young man found out that she would be retiring, he reflexively responded, “Who will read to the kids?”

The Star article thoughtfully concludes:

Having traveled and told her stories, will she make the world more beautiful? Well, if all else fails, a grateful third grader recently presented her with a packet of lupine seed. Now, all she needs is a little wind.

She found that wind at their home Reverie just north of Menomonie, Wisconsin, to where she and Jim retired in the late 1990s. There the lupine flourished in the pasture just north of the house. Their children and their children and the children of other relatives and friends were encouraged to enjoy them in their walks on paths Jim mowed through their prairie and trekked through their woods. Inside the house, around table and hearth, family and friends gathered and told and retold and heard and enjoyed stories of people and places and experiences from near and far. And at the end of the day, when all nestled into their beds, Jim and Margaret would drift off to sleep in the warmth provided by the storied quilt that lay over them.

It was “whispered” with awe by those who witnessed the attention and care given my mother by her children and their children who often visited her and spent time with her, and now and then spent time with those who so whispered.

As the years passed the gatherings eventually grew smaller, and Margaret and Jim let us all know that they could only host one family at a time. Then they could host none, and they moved from Reverie. Jim had said, when they bought Reverie, that if they could have ten years there it would be well worth the move. They had over twenty. Jim died within months, on St. Patrick’s Day, at eighty-nine. Margaret pressed on to ninety-six. As she relinquished earthly possessions in successive moves from Reverie to Croixdale to Boutwells Landing, the quilt always made the cut. As her spaces got smaller and her things fewer the quilt was always there atop her bed to keep her warm, and under it she passed from this world to eternal life. Her love of children and literature and of forming children through good books, exercised in her reading and making books available to children, and her interaction with parents and peers, had so inspired those peers that they had invested no little time, talent, and effort in collaboration to create a thoughtful, meaningful, memorable, practical, and nostalgic work that kept her warm, body and soul, against the cold of the world till the very moment she left it. No small thing to consider when you sit down with a child to read a book.

Conclusion

I was originally motivated to write “An Authentic Woman” to share my mother’s life story after reading accounts of authentic womanhood versus feminism by Substack contributors Elisabeth Stone, Abigail Austin, and others. As our culture still throws up manifold temptations and seductions of women (and men) away from authentic womanhood (and manhood), I wanted to bolster those who choose authenticity and struggle against all the attacks and stumbling blocks the self, the world, and the devil throw in their way. And I wanted to present those who have no experience or concept of authenticity with a depiction of it lived out. Given my mother’s recent passing, I wanted to show how authentic womanhood is lived out, and how it ends.

How it ends. That deserves no little consideration. My youngest sister, Kate, regularly visited my mother in her time at Croixdale and Boutwells Landing. She would customarily take Margaret down to a favorite spot by the large fireplace where they would enjoy a cup of tea and visit. Every now and then Kate would hear from other residents they would pass, or who would be sitting in the same vicinity, in the stentorian whisper of the elderly, “She has seven children.” It was not shouted or hissed as from some bitter misguided overpopulation doomsayer. It was “whispered” with awe by those who witnessed the attention and care given my mother by her children and their children who often visited her and spent time with her, and now and then spent time with those who so whispered. It was spoken with reverence by those whose circumstances at the end of life continually whittled away the superfluous to expose the essential; the important; what truly and only matters; what truly makes one rich when material possessions fall away; what mitigates or keeps at bay the abject loneliness, emptiness, spiritual poverty in which too many of our elderly languish unto death no matter how lavish their physical surroundings. Children, loved into being by God and spouses, raised in that sacramental love by parents, however imperfect, in a family, prove to be a true treasure that enriches the bare existence of those being stripped of health, vigor, and worldly possessions in preparation for eternal life or punishment. That reality, so understood by those to whom it is made abundantly clear at the end of life, lends great credence to the value of an authentic life like the one lived out by Margaret Mary Costello Ritzer and women like her. That reality also serves as a blessing to those who, though they themselves may have had no children of their own because they never married or they took vows of celibacy or their marriages were not blessed with children, lived authentic lives open to love and life. And all of that, in our brief span of life on earth, is worthy of no little consideration.

(Please also see these relevant articles: “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It;” “One Big Family;” “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” “Nature, Control, and Sin;” “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” “Fear, Control, and Death;” and “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control,” and “Godzilla Plus Redemption.”)

Please like, share, comment, or subscribe as you feel inclined.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Introduction

This is the final episode of “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Perspective of One Raised Between the Catechisms,” which I wrote in 1993 and which was originally published in the Summer 1994 edition of The Living Light: An Interdisciplinary Review of Catholic Religious Education, Catechesis, and Pastoral Ministry an “official publication of the Department of Education of the United States Catholic Conference.” It was later republished in abbreviated form as “Raised Between the Catechisms” in Catholic Digest, September 1994. It appears here, with the permission of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), in three parts (episodes one, three, and four; episode two is a digression), in the form in which it was submitted for publication in 1993 with some minor editing.

CHURCH OF AMNESIA

If we deny Catholics that religious education, we deny them an intimacy with that tradition that manifests the salvation experience of all creation and its articulation by the inspired prophets across the millennia. We must not deny young Christians that catholic relationship. One knows who one is in context. How can we deny Christians their catholic context, and then expect them to grasp their Christian identity in the world?

To deny the catholic context is to render an amnesic church. Yes, classes should discuss current issues confronting students in their own lives and in the lives of their contemporaries, but these must be discussed in light of the Judeo-Christian salvation tradition, the Catholic Tradition. This demands a systematic study of that Tradition. Otherwise, the Church is a church of amnesia, knowing its present without any sense of its past, and thus its context in space-time. And like any person with the same symptom, it is sick. It cannot properly relate to its world, because ultimately it does not know who or what it is.

Ours is the Church in which sacramental remembering—grace-filled, communal remembering that makes present—is central to our very existence.

CHURCH OF ANAMNESIS

In reality, ours is the Church of anamnesis, a Greek word used in the Eucharistic celebrations of the early Church that can be translated as memorial or remembrance (1 Cor 11:24, Lk 22:19). Ours is the Church in which sacramental remembering—grace-filled, communal remembering that makes present—is central to our very existence. Our collective memory begins with the ancient people of God, whose tradition set the context for the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Just as the Jews handed on the Passover tradition that provided the anamnes-ic context for the Paschal Mystery, so must we continue to pass on the tradition in our catechetical programs, lest the Church of sacramental remembering forget.

RESPECT WITHOUT APOLOGIES

So that we do not forget, I suggest that we start respecting the intelligence and maturity levels that young people of various age groups should have reached. Let’s respect the very real questions that these young people pose or will have posed to them, and challenge them to use those fine minds, with which our Creator has endowed them, to wrestle with these questions in light of the Gospel. Let’s stop trying to compete on the same level with what passes for entertainment on television and in the movies, and instead offer young people challenging alternatives.

The Gospel, if presented in a respectful, mature manner speaks for itself. Young people deserve to know that we respect them enough to realize that we do not need to trick them into coming to religious education by promising them what a middle-aged religious-education teacher thinks is “fun” for present-day high schoolers.

And this respect demands that we quit apologizing for the Gospel. What is good for us is not always fun. This should engender no surprise or embarrassment in a people who hold up the Cross as a symbol of their salvation experience. Let’s quit tiptoeing around the Gospel, with an attitude that seems to say, “Our religious education program is too cool to talk about God, until we’ve roped you in with a fun activity.” Let’s stop sliding the theology in around the edges of playtime. Let’s stop the coercion and start expecting a little more from young people. My experience is that they rise to the occasion.

So, if this is the most important area of life, does it not stand to reason that it should demand at least as much preparation as sports, or band, or the school play, or for that matter, the career?

GIVE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION A VALUE

Demands

If we do recognize the need for a substantial religious education, we will need to realize that it will make demands. Just as students will need to study, practice, and work to succeed in other areas of their lives, they will need to study, practice, and work to succeed in the religious area of their lives. And if we truly believe, we know that the religious area is the most important one, and that all other areas must fall within it for there to be any value in them. So, if this is the most important area of life, does it not stand to reason that it should demand at least as much preparation as sports, or band, or the school play, or for that matter, the career?

That being the case, we should not beg young people to attend religious-education programs and then offer them something less than substantial. Neither should programs allow volunteers to be misused with lack of adequate materials and training, and little disciplinary support. (Of course, adequate materials and training lessen the need for disciplinary support.) Catechists should be expected to teach real classes and be supported in doing so. Catechetical programs should offer these real classes and not apologize for offering them. Catholics should offer the support, spiritually and economically, necessary to an educational program that exists to educate Catholics in the most important area of their lives.

When I talk to students in religious education at the beginning of the year, I remind them that in the end they will be the ones to decide whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, atheistic, agnostic, or whatever. I remind them that that decision is one that will affect how they relate to the entire cosmos, and that no other decision will be as important, as all other decisions flow from that one. It is imperative that they make that decision from the best-educated standpoint. Thus, they owe it to themselves—or to their parents or other persons for whom they have the respect that motivates them to attend the classes—to get the most out of religious education. Every adult Catholic owes it to them to make sure they get the best religious education possible.

Study

Thus, students, as the word suggests, will need to study. Study demands something of us. When we meet the demands of study, we witness to the value of the subject. Let’s give religious education a value. Like those most popular sports, let’s require committed sacrifice. Do not apologize for examinations and progress reports, when appropriately used. I can still remember how enthusiastic our teachers at St. _______ were after their first class examinations. The students had studied and had actually learned about the sacraments, the gospels, Church history. The teachers, too, had learned so much. The students were pleased that they had done well, and they had made that information their own, available to serve them as their questions and understanding grow more profound.

They have no idea of what they have given up sacramentally, because they never learned much about what a sacrament is.

Memorization

For students to make the information their own, they will need to make use of an important educational tool that has fallen on hard times due to misuses in the past: memorization. I know that the word memorization registers as profanity in many religious-education and secular-education circles, but that has got to change. The narrow perception that memorization as a catechetical tool is outdated or primitive is based upon a misguided tendency to use memorization as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. [Sadly, I am convinced from experience that at least some, if not most, of those of the clergy, religious, and laity who so energetically opposed memorization preferred ignorant clergy, religious, and laity for reasons questionable at best.]

People do need to memorize. Memory is basic to human identity and function. [Indeed memory relates to the theological virtue of hope, as intellect does to faith, and will does to love.] We could not relate to others, or even find our way home at night without memory. Memory tells us who we are. As mentioned above, a person or a church with amnesia is sick. We do not know who we are as the people of God, unless we remember our story, our teachings. How would Jesus have discerned his mission without the collective memory of Jewish salvation history and his own memory to pull it all together? What solace and encouragement might he have been denied throughout his passion had he been without the memory of Sacred Scripture, tradition, history, and fruitful events of his earthly life and ministry? What intellectual links have we missed because we have not stored the information necessary for the links. What enrichment and preparation are we denied by those who would spare us the effort to memorize? Can we afford to give up that effort of memorization as a component of effectual study? I do not think we can.

Application

If young people learn through study about Sacred Scripture, Holy Tradition, the Magisterium, and the provenance, history, and theologies of the Catholic Church, they will be better equipped to enter the world and see in it the active presence of the Creator and how he relates to the people of his creation.

I am reminded of a publishing-company representative who came to talk to me last summer about his company’s new, highly touted and immediately popular religious-education program. I looked over the program, as I had the previous spring, to no greater satisfaction. Finally, I frankly stated that I realized that this program taught about sunshine and water and farming and baking practices in various parts of the world, but that I found it deficient in teaching about the Catholic Church Tradition. He stated that in this program, theology serves the human experience. Though I am not sure how one separates human experience from theology, I believe religious education will be more effective if it first concentrates on the Catholic Church Tradition, systematically, equipping the young people—already endowed with the power to reason—to apply knowledge of the Tradition to draw orthodox conclusions about the world around them. Each classroom is overflowing with human experience from each of the students to the teacher. Teachers can present and adapt human experience that is more relevant to students’ lives than the generic human experience of a publication. We have rooms full of human experience. What we do not have, without study, is knowledge of the Christian Tradition.

Teachers can help students view and evaluate their experiences and every aspect of their lives in the context of the Christian Tradition. Through that evaluation process students can learn more fully about the sun in science class, or various types of baking in home economics, or various farming practices in social studies. But if they cannot learn about the Christian Tradition in religion class, where are they going to learn about it? And if they do not learn about it, how can they gain the right perspective on the world to render their own unique, orthodox theologies to guide their lives? How do they make the connections? How do they see the real value in the experiences and cultures of the disparate people about the globe?

We need to teach the Tradition validated by Jesus’ commissioning of the apostles, where method serves the matter, not vice versa. Students already have the power to reason, and it is a good thing to challenge them to exercise this power. Still, they need pertinent information to reason effectively.

If in their youth, Catholics develop a substantial base of Catholic teaching and an understanding of how and why it is taught, I believe that they will find it a great aid, not an encumbrance, during those tryings times of early adulthood.

Adults

We must also invite and challenge adults to continue in their unending catechesis, especially if their early religious education was deficient. For example, one of our catechists at St. _______ also attended the Reichert workshop mentioned above, and afterward the subject of Vatican II came up in conversation. Now, this teacher had been a convert, who had sought out the Catholic Church as a young man eight years previously. He had studied and been confirmed. He had taught in the religious-education program and been involved in the RCIA program. He attended Mass daily and was involved in all aspects of the parish. As we talked, something finally occurred to me and I asked him, “Do you know what Vatican II was?” He hesitatingly responded that he did not. Many of our generation will say the same. I did not know what it was until I heard about it in college and learned about it in graduate school. The single greatest ecclesiological event of the present century, and many Catholics have either never heard of it or have no conception of what it, as an ecumenical council, was. That is a symptom of amnesia.

CONCLUSION

To put it bluntly, the religious-education approaches of the 1960s and 70s have left many adult Catholics with insufficient understanding about the Church and its Tradition. It is time to learn from our failures and approach religious education with a little more discipline. I am increasingly aware of this as I meet former Catholics, who, seeking a meaningful religious education, have left the Church, ignorant of what they have left, to join fundamentalist denominations where members teach what they believe. These people who have left often have no knowledge or understanding of the united, apostolic, catholic Church. The local church that meets their needs and reaches out in its solitary way is enough. They have no idea of what they have given up sacramentally, because they never learned much about what a sacrament is.

Of this phenomenon the publishing representative mentioned above told me that we can take for granted that most Catholics will leave the Church in their late teens or early twenties, but most of them will eventually return. I do not accept that. If in their youth, Catholics develop a substantial base of Catholic teaching and an understanding of how and why it is taught, I believe that they will find it a great aid, not an encumbrance, during those tryings times of early adulthood. But that means that we must help young people develop that substantial base by making demands on them now, that it better serve them later. If we use it wisely, the Catechism of the Catholic Church could prove a valuable tool in that effort.

Thank you.

Please like, share, comment, or subscribe as you feel inclined.

Again, thanks,

P. A. Ritzer

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I believe this Easter Season is a good time to treat of Godzilla. “Godzilla!” Yes, Godzilla. “Why?” say you. Because I finally saw one, a Godzilla movie, that is, and it jarred me into thoughts of redemption. “Redemption?” Yes, redemption. Let me explain.

At the very beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, I took a trip and visited my nephew, a graduate student in archeology, for a few days, and on separate evenings we shared favorite movies. First, we watched a favorite of mine, The Greatest Game Ever Played, which I believe is one of the finest films ever made. He reciprocated by offering a movie that he thought I probably had not seen, Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One (2023) to be precise. I was a little surprised but managed to tamp down a decades-long dismissal of Godzilla that dated to my first being introduced to it in the mid-1960s by a loud, spoiled (three older sisters, enough said), youngest-of-five, rough-and-tumble, but amiable neighbor boy who’s enthusiasm for the subject fully baffled me at six or seven years of age. From the time of my introduction to them by the kid next door, I utterly could not understand the appeal of the Godzilla movies or their ilk. They struck me as so fake, unrealistic, and implausible that I just could not imagine why anyone would waste their time watching, let alone making them.

Still, as an old parent and a former teacher, I had learned over the years to show interest in and not to dismiss things that interested my children and students, and so I was in good practice not to dismiss this interest of my nephew. After all, he was an intelligent, thoughtful, and knowledgeable young man who deserved to be taken seriously. In addition, though his choice of film surprised me, it also intrigued me because my wife had told me years before that she and her family had watched and enjoyed Godzilla movies when they were new refugees to the United States after fleeing the fall of Saigon in 1975. These, too, were intelligent people. And though not Japanese, they were Asian. Maybe the Godzilla story touched something common among cultures of the far east that escaped my northern-European-heritage mindset.

What struck me most about the film fell within the realm of what my nephew had referred to as its humanity.

In recommending the movie, my nephew said that he had been interested in Godzilla movies from childhood, and that he appreciated the humanity of the film. He also pointed out, and emphasized, that they had only spent $12 million dollars making the film, compared to the hundreds of millions that would go into a Hollywood production of the kind, and that they had made several times that at the box office. He asked if I knew what Godzilla represented, and when I answered that I did not, he said that it was nuclear war. Who better to recognize the monstrosity of nuclear war than the Japanese.

So, given all of the above, I was content to settle in to a viewing of Godzilla Minus One, directed by Takashi Yamazaki. We watched the movie with subtitles, my nephew rejecting outright the idea of listening to the dubbed version. It was well made with good acting and higher-end production values. The plot was predictable (Son Two’s response to that observation was, “Really, Dad, Godzilla was predictable?” OK, OK), but that did not make it less entertaining. I thought it wise that they did not overly CGI the monster as to make him unrecognizable from the ancient guy-in-the-rubber-suit presentations known to my wife’s family, the kid next door, and other aficionados across the decades. As a neophyte to the genre, I am guessing that the star-shaped spikes that lit up and popped up when it was going to use its “heat ray” or “atomic breath” was an innovation, but that is speculation on my part.

What struck me most about the film fell within the realm of what my nephew had referred to as its humanity. The main character, Kōichi Shikishima, played by Ryunosuke Kamiki, fails to carry out his kamikize mission and lands on an island. A mechanic, Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), intuits Shikishima’s situation and expresses his sympathy for it. But that evening, the dragon Godzilla attacks the island, and Tachibana demands that Shikishima run to his plane and fire its guns on the monster. Shikishima does run into the danger and jumps into the plane but freezes and does not fire upon the monster who thereafter kills all the other soldiers on the island but Shikishima and Tachibana (we will drop a nod here to Son Two). So, now Shikishima’s guilt and shame are compounded by another failure with tragic results. Thereafter, it appears that every attempt to destroy Godzilla only serves to enlarge it and make it more powerful and destructive, which also ought to put Shikishima’s failure to destroy it into some perspective.

Suffice it to say that Shikishima’s survival and return to his destroyed home, the knowledge that his parents have been killed, and people’s reaction to his returning from the war alive—most dramatically presented in that of his neighbor Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando)—all exacerbate his profound guilt. This keeps him from moving on into his life that has been enriched by a young woman named Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby named Akiko (Sae Nagatani). He cannot find peace and live in the present free from his grievous past failings; instead he just carries on in what Noriko calls “your war.” Kamiki as Shikishima, in several scenes, evocatively conveys the intolerability, inescapability, self-loathing, fear, rage, obsession, and desperation of his condition. His failings, his sins, are just too great, too heavy for him to bear, too great for him to ever make proportional reparation. In this state, he takes a job that is high paying because it is so dangerous, that of working on a mine sweeper with obvious passive suicidal implications.

Wow! thought I—in light of Kamiki’s gut-wrenching portrayal of Shikishima’s plight—there is the human condition. And there is the human stuck without Christ. Only Christ could provide deliverance from the torment of Shikishima’s condition, and indeed the condition of every human being. (See “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament.”) And yet, it was apparent that Christ was not available to Shikishima in this Japanese film. Of course, the film—as perhaps films are wont to do in whatever culture—provides Shikishima an alternative deliverance. Fair enough. I continued to watch as Shikishima’s expected opportunity to redeem himself emerges in a way in which his old acquaintance, Tachibana, plays an essential role. (I am really trying to avoid spoilers here, but . . . aw shucks, folks, in another nod to Son Two, it’s Godzilla, after all.)

All right, so Shikishima is presented with the opportunity to destroy the monster that has multiplied its size and power exponentially—apparently due to mutations caused by exposure to radiation from United States’ nuclear weapons tests on Bikini Atoll—since he failed to try to eliminate it. So, in this fantastic story, the protagonist around whom the story is built, who has failed to die for his country, Japan, in which the mindset is that by so doing he has allowed its devastation, gets a chance to redeem himself and save his country in one epic, glorious, sacrifice.

His failings, his sins, are just too great, too heavy for him to bear, too great for him to ever make proportional reparation.

Well, that works out just great for Shikishima, and those in his orbit. But what about the other kamikaze pilots who did not carry out their missions? What about any other Japanese men who did not die defending their nation? I remember being fascinated as a boy by books about Japanese soldiers who had come out of the jungle twenty-five years or so after World War II had ended. Apparently they too had been fighting what Noriko would have recognized as their own private wars. I later read or heard that they had continued to live as soldiers in the jungle because they had not been killed and that to return alive from the war would have been considered a dishonor. What about all of them? They had not that one opportunity, which could be filled by one man, that Shikishima was privileged to get. So, no-one but Shikishima—and, to a far lesser extent, the very few who contributed in far lesser degrees to his action—could redeem himself from the onerous liability of his failings, his sins? Shikishima’s redemptive act in Godzilla Minus One may remove the threat of Godzilla and save the people from it (at least temporarily), but it does not redeem them. They are left mired in their failings, guilt, and shame. There is no larger-than-their-sins Godzilla left for them to slay, no glorious act that will wipe away their depravity. They are stuck in misery of mind, body, and soul.

But they need not remain so if St. Maximilian Kolbe—the Polish Franciscan who built a monastery at Nagasaki, Japan, and later died at Auschwitz after taking the place of a family man sentenced by the Nazis to starve to death—was right that the Japanese people truly are “a people who really search for authentic religion.” While viewing Godzilla Minus One, my limited knowledge of Japanese culture rose up in memories of reading Shusako Endo’s Silence some forty years before, and seeing the Martin Scorcese film adaptation some thirty years after that; and of learning about the Japanese Martyrs of Nagasaki and of the Kakure Kirishitan or “Hidden Christians” of Japan. In all of that was a sense of resistance of the Japanese to Christianity. Endo himself described in the Japanese a spiritual laziness that he referred to as a “mudswamp” that made them unsuitable for Chrisitianity. His Father Ferreira character, after his apostoasy in Silence, accepts the conclusion that the Japanese “never had the concept of God; and they never will.” And yet at the same time my memory presented accounts of Japanese Christian martyrs holding steadfast to the Catholic Faith through horrific tortures and executions and of the Hidden Christians who had kept alive that outlawed Catholic Faith without priests, at great risk of torture and death, for some 250 years until Catholic missionaries returned to Japan.

Yes, the Catholic Faith was outlawed, no little resistance there. St. Francis Xavier had introduced Christianity to Japan on 15 August 1549. By the time of the death of the incomparable ruler Oda Nobunaga in 1582 , there were 250 churches and 200,000 members of the faithful in Japan. But due to several developments, Japanese leaders began to see Christianity as a threat and began proscriptions and persecutions that led to the the six-hundred-mile march from Kyoto to, and crucifixion at, Nagasaki, of St. Paul Miki and twenty-five companions, who “died preaching and singing to the end,” on 5 February 1597, when there were some 300,000 members of the Catholic Faith in Japan. After 1598, persecution waned, but by 1614, Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa published the edict of destruction to eradicate the Catholic Faith. This led to the “great martyrdom,” on 2 September 1622, at Nagasaki, of fifty-two Christians either decapitated or burned alive. Jesuits and Dominicans who tried in following years to enter Japan on missionary efforts were horrifically tortured and martyred. Thereafter, countless numbers of the faithful were sought out and ruthlessly tortured and martyred and the Church outlawed until, not long after United States Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in 1853, Japan signed treaties with the United States, Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, and France in 1858.

Finally, Christianity was once again allowed in Japan, and missionaries who had long sought to enter Japan arrived and began building churches. It was at such a church in Nagasaki, city of martyrs, on 17 March 1865, that fifteen native Japanese from the village of Urakami identified themselves as Christians to French missionary Father Bernard Petitjean, and indicated that there were as many as 50,000 Japanese Christians, a surviving remnant of the outlawed Church, who had kept the faith without priests and the sacraments, but for baptism, for some 250 years. These “Hidden Christians” (Kakure Kirishitan) had refrained from making themselves known to missionaries until they could be certain that they were of the true Faith by three criteria: that they honored the authority of the pope in Rome, that they venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that their clergy practiced celibacy.

Coming out of hiding led to renewed persecution of the Hidden Christians of Japan in 1867, and some 3,700 Christians were exiled from Urakami, and more from other locations, when they refused to renounce their Faith. In 1873, they were allowed to return and the persecution stopped, but as many as a third of those exiled had died or did not return. Finally, on 11 February 1889, Japan recognized freedom of religion in a new Constitution. The next year, on 17 March 1890, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of the Hidden Christians, the bishops of Japan held their first synod in Nagasaki. Five years later, in 1895, the construction of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral was begun in Urakami on the site where for centuries Christians were forced to endure the fumi-e interrogations during which they were required to step on images of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary or be tortured, executed, or both. The cathedral was completed in 1925.

In addition to that history, my limited knowledge and imperfect memory served up additional evidence of a culture resistant to Christianity. I recall the young Japanese woman in power suit and heels who interviewed me in the early 1990s about a job in Japan disabusing me, in no uncertain terms, of the romantic notions people in the West entertained about Japan. She let me know that Japan was not just a land of meditating monks, green tea, and rock gardens, but was instead a nation of people committed to the dog-eat-dog realities of business. Of course by then, Japan had long ago traded its healthy pyramidal population graphs of the early 1950s for the irregular diamond graphs that have been edging year by year toward an inverted pyramid prelude to population collapse (see “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda”). It brings to mind the many articles I have seen over the years of Japan’s population sliding toward extinction.

There is no larger-than-their-sins Godzilla left for them to slay, no glorious act that will wipe away their depravity.

I remember reading in one article in particular some years (probably decades) ago, about Japanese women choosing the career path over marriage because it gave them freedom from the traditional subjection to a husband. Japanese women interviewed spoke of how they intended to never marry because they wished to be free from the tyranny of husbands and the demands of child rearing and housekeeping. At the same time, the article pointed out that Japanese women bought small funerary statues and set them out to honor children they had aborted. I remember being jolted by the poignant reality that these women knew and accepted that by choosing abortion they were killing their children, and they mourned and honored those children with statues, but they aborted them anyway. (See “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death.”) As nations all over the world wallowed in denial of their slow suicide through the culture of death, these women at least had the honesty to admit what abortion was. (See “The War on Women and Population Control.”) Therein, it occurred to me, lay an opportunity to present the alternative to the despair of abortion and the culture of death, that of hope through the culture of life, exercised in no small part in Christian marriage and the begetting and rearing of children. (See “Making Room and the Courage to Love.”)

And all that takes us back to the Catholic Faith in Japan. The Catholic Church commemorates the Japanese Martyrs on 6 February with the Memorial of St. Paul Miki and Companions, the twenty-six Christians who, in 1597, rather than slaying the monster in one glorious heroic act, accepted rejection by their countrymen and long, slow humiliation, torture, crucifixion, and death at their hands in imitation of and communion with their Savior, Jesus Christ. Whereas in Godzilla Minus One, Shikishima’s sacrifice (which involves an anticipated twist) may have saved the people from Godzilla, a representation of the evil of nuclear war, Christ’s sacrifice saves the entire human race from the totality of evil of which nuclear war is but a drop.

In the sacrifice of Christ we can all find redemption, relief, from even the worst of sins because the eternally begotten Son of God took on human nature itself and lived it through obedience even unto death on a cross. His was not an epic, fantastic, glorious, magnificent destruction of the monster in a spectacular blaze and blast. He did not die in a flash of glory but suffered ignominiously through abject torture and humiliation for hours: abandoned by his apostles; beaten, accused, and beaten some more; dressed and stripped, dressed and stripped, dressed and stripped again by strangers in public degradation; scourged naked, front and back, shoulders to ankles; crowned with thorns driven deeply into his skull and mocked and rejected by his own people; forced to carry his cross and fall flat on his face on the pavement over and over; nailed naked to that cross for all the world to see; rebuked, mocked, and vilified as he hung on that cross for hours from nails driven through his wrists and ankles; thus tortured to an unclean and scandalous death and even after that pierced by a pike in the heart.

That is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross that saved the crucified Nagasaki martyrs and the Hidden Christians of the underground church and that would save all those who were not able to take on Godzilla, and that would save Shikishima too, whether he took on Godzilla or not. For Shikishima’s plight is the plight of us all, though his may be more dramatically evident.

Our sins are too big for us to make satisfactory reparation. Unlike for Shikishima, the expanding resulting devastation from our sins will not present itself as some colossal monster that we will be able to slay to redeem ourselves and put all things right and bring peace to our souls. Neither can we conjure up and assault and slay a representation of our sins and the immeasurable damage they have wrought. We cannot make the monster big enough, and even if we could, we could not kill it in one heroic deed. Godzilla Minus One even hints at that reality in the survival of Godzilla’s essence. It is not about what deed we could do to redeem ourselves. It is about the deed that was done by the One who is the Christ. It is about joining ourselves to the redemption won for us by Jesus Christ in that deed. The sacrifice of the Son of God is big enough to atone for all of our sins. There is the redemption that frees us all from the weight of our sins and our sinfulness.

Man need not lie under the burden of sin and guilt so masterfully portrayed by Ryunosuke Kamiki in Shikishima’s anguish.

That deed, the sacrifice of Christ, was not instantaneous and glorious but agonizingly slow, brutal, dirty, grisly, ghastly, degrading, and appalling. It did not occur in the big city for maximum exposure but in a forgotten backwater of an ancient empire. What made the act fully redemptive and victorious was Who accomplished it. It was not the great deed that made the savior but the Savior who made the deed great. The Son of God lived out his life, despite all that evil could throw at him, in perfect obedience and, in so doing, redeemed all of human nature for all of eternity for any who wish to join themselves to him.

One can be overwhelmed by every bit of what Jesus suffered by meditating on the passion narratives of the gospels, or praying the Stations of the Cross, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, or the Divine Mercy Chaplet. And though he could have stopped it at any moment and destroyed those who were tormenting him, on that cross he hung until he had wrung the very last moment he could out of life, thirsting every second to live life to the end and save every human soul in the obedience that redeemed human nature from the disobedience of the original sin of the first man. The Japanese martyrs grabbed onto and clung tight to that gift of salvation to the extremity of human endurance in imitative participation in and communion with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Like the martyrs across nations and races, they participated efficaciously in Christ’s sacrifice in a profound way through their suffering.

And the “humanity” of Godzilla Minus One, that so impressed my nephew, is the common ground for that salvation embraced by the Japanese martyrs, whether depicted in the profound, multifold suffering of body, mind, and soul that the war imposed on Shikishima and indeed all the people of Japan who lost so much; or the bitterness of Tachibana and Sumiko, but then their acts of understanding and kindness and those of Noriko and the minesweeper crew and others too, and even those of the tormented Shikishima; or the innocence and dependence of Akiko. That humanity of the Japanese people, so evocatively portrayed by these characters in Godzilla Minus One, that they share with all the people of the earth—and even the humanity that procures and sets out funerary statues for aborted children—avails them of the true salvation in Christ. And all those humans need to do to be redeemed by that sacrifice is to join themselves to Christ normally through the sacraments of the Church that Christ established on Peter and the Apostles and that lives on to the present day in the Catholic Church heroically represented by that portion kept alive by the Kakure Kirishitan to make it available to the Japanese people to this day.

For if Godzilla is to be understood to be nuclear war, then when it struck Japan, it struck that Church too. After generations of gruesome, cruel, unimaginable torture, and death, and being forced underground, and then coming out from hiding, and then being subjected to persecution again, and finally being allowed to practice the Catholic Faith again, the remnant church found itself almost at ground zero of Godzilla’s destruction. On 6 August 1945, the United States of America dropped the first nuclear bomb used in warfare, a uranium bomb called Little Boy, from the B-29 Bomber the Enola Gay onto the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 70,000 people instantly, and 100,000 by the end of the year, and tens of thousands more of radiation poisoning over the years. Less than three miles from that blast, the Jesuit church Our Lady of the Assumption, though its stained-glass windows were blown out, was left standing amidst miles and miles of demolished buildings. More astonishing yet, eight Jesuits (the Hiroshima Eight) walked away from the bombing and lived into old age without the effects of radiation poisoning that soon killed the very few for miles around who survived the initial bombing. The eight attributed their miraculous survival to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and their daily rosary.

Three days later, Godzilla struck again when the United States dropped a plutonium bomb called Fat Man from the B-29 Bomber called Bockscar on Nagasaki, the traditional center of Japanese Catholicism and martyrdom, almost directly above the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary that had been erected in Urakami from 1895-1925, leading to estimates of 40,000 killed immediately and 70,000 by the end of the year, with thousands dying in the years afterward from radiation poisoning. The dead included 8,500 of Nagasaki’s 12,000 Catholics, many of whom were attending Confession before the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15 August. In a film I saw some years ago, Catholics of the area expressed their belief that the death of the faithful Catholics who were the successors of the Kakure Kirishitan were the ones who were truly worthy to unite their sufferings to those of Jesus Christ in the vein of Colossians 1:24 to bring about the end of World War II. Survivors rebuilt the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and other churches. And despite only one percent or so of Japan being Christian and only half of that Catholic, and Japan being considered one of the most secular nations in the world, St. Maximilian Kolbe (whose Franciscan monastery in Nagasaki survived the blast), before he was starved to death by the Nazis, not only said that the Japanese were “a people who really search for authentic religion,” but also, “I will never forget Japan; indeed, I always pray for it.”

The Japanese martyrs grabbed onto and clung tight to that gift of salvation to the extremity of human endurance in imitative participation in and communion with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Japan and its remnant Catholic Church survived Godzilla, but Godzilla Minus One leaves us with the ominous scene that Godzilla has not been fully destroyed, that some essence of it survives from which, we are left to consider, it can return to wreak more havoc. Fair enough, especially for a film made in the one nation that has been the target of not just one nuclear attack but two. God forbid there ever be another. Japan lost perhaps over 200,000 people to those two bombs, 3.1 million people to the whole of World War II, about four percent of the population. Still, as long as it lies dormant, Godzilla is not killing the Japanese. But something else is. As indicated above, as recently as 1953, Japan had a healthy pyramidal population graph. But that has been shifting slowly toward population collapse. That is not Godzilla’s doing. The population of Japan is not collapsing because of nuclear war. The Japanese are not being attacked by some gigantic, rampaging, roaring dragon with atomic breath from which they can be delivered by heroes like Kōichi Shikishima and companions. Instead, they are being seduced by an invisible, slinking, insinuating dragon with lying voice from which they can only be delivered by Christ and his Church.

Certainly the specter of nuclear war, like the germ of Godzilla, lies dormant among us ever able to rise up in inconceivable destruction at the decision or blunder of man. But throughout its dormancy, over decade after decade, the Japanese have been methodically killing themselves by falling prey to the devil’s deceitful seduction. The population of Japan is collapsing because of national suicide. Behind the gleaming cities, orderly society, efficient business, tidy homes, and tiny families lies the dark, ugly, chaotic, wasteful, filthy reality of the culture of death: abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, varied and assorted immorality, and other ever-evolving and ever-multiplying manifestations. Thus lurk death and destruction on a massive scale hidden behind the facade of honor, order, and cleanliness. One might say that Japan is committing hara-kiri, except there is no honor in this decades-long self-destruction. From this evil, Japan needs redemption, and no Shikishima—with all his friends and their wisdom, knowledge, cleverness, and courage—will be able to slay this beast. (See “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It.”)

But they do not need to. The Japanese can most effectively participate in true protection and deliverance by entering into the Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ and animated with the Holy Spirit, and participating in her sacraments. The redemption Japan (and indeed the entire world) needs has already been accomplished in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. And it is readily available, normally through his Catholic Church, which he founded on Peter and the Apostles (e.g. Mat 16:13-19, 18:18) and endowed with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2). Redeemed by Christ, the Japanese can enter into the communion of the Church and avail themselves of the sacraments and reject the lies of the subtle dragon and his culture of death and embrace the culture of life that will renew the people and the nation. Christianity is no more foreign to Japan than it is to any place or people. The heroic Japanese Martyrs like Paul Miki and Companions and all of those Christians who underwent unspeakable tortures and death rather than relinquish their Faith; who kept the Faith alive underground during centuries of persecution; who were annihilated by the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and those who survived the blasts did not relinquish being Japanese to become Christian. Like peoples, nations, and cultures throughout history, they kept the best of who they were and brought it into the communion of the Catholic Church, which was further enriched by it.

And in doing so, they did not avail themselves of the redemption of the one man against Godzilla, they availed themselves of the redemption of the God-man against the devil and the entirety of evil. In that redemption, every single person who ever lived on the face of the earth is invited to participate no matter what evil he has committed. Man need not lie under the burden of sin and guilt so masterfully portrayed by Ryunosuke Kamiki in Shikishima’s anguish. By participating in the sacraments of the Catholic Church man is delivered from sin and death, vanquished once and for all, to new life in Jesus Christ.

A notable example exists in the person of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who though he was not Japanese was a committed practitioner of the culture of death. Dr. Nathanson, a self-professed atheist, organized in 1971 and ran the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health in New York. And he admitted that he presided over sixty thousand abortions in the course of about a year and a half before he recognized that he was murdering children. In his own words: “In any case, the change of mind began with the realization, the inescapable reality that the fetus, that embryo, is a person, is a protectable human life.” Sixty-thousand brutal murders of innocent, defenseless, dependent children. How could one ever be redeemed from such wicked carnage on that scale. In light of Shikishima’s guilt, shame, and denial, imagine the real-life anguish of Dr. Nathanson and his temptation to despair. But Nathanson sought the truth and turned his life away from the the evil of his past and turned it into work to end the culture of death. His conversion eventually led to Christ, the one person who could forgive and redeem him from all of that sin and guilt. And so he entered the Catholic Church in 1996. He said of his conversion, “No religion matches the special role for forgiveness that is afforded by the Catholic Church.” (More on Dr. Nathanson here.)

Forgiveness, redemption, and renewal are all available to those Japanese who follow the saints of their nation into the Catholic Church and embrace and live out the culture of life. Like all of us Christians who still must contend with the dragons big and small of evil in this fallen world, they can rest in the assurance that those dragons have already been defeated by the God-man, Jesus Christ, and that he and his warriors, like the Japanese martyrs, will help us fight our battles to fully participate in his victory. And participating in that victory as members of the Catholic Church, the Japanese can emerge from the culture of death to embrace and celebrate their fertility and the culture of life and be authentically and abundantly Japanese with a nation teeming with hope as evinced in countless fresh-faced children, a population pyramid turned right side up, and a people availing themselves of redemption from the vast ocean of evil of which Godzilla is but a drop.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Introduction

We return to “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Perspective of One Raised Between the Catechisms,” which I wrote in 1993 and which was originally published in the Summer 1994 edition of The Living Light: An Interdisciplinary Review of Catholic Religious Education, Catechesis, and Pastoral Ministry an “official publication of the Department of Education of the United States Catholic Conference.” It was later republished in abbreviated form as “Raised Between the Catechisms” in Catholic Digest, September 1994. It appears here, with the permission of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), in three parts (episodes one, three, and four; episode two is a digression), in the form in which it was submitted for publication in 1993 with some minor editing.

SYMPTOMS OF A DEFICIENT CATECHESIS

In reflecting upon my experience of being catechized between the catechisms, I sorted out what I believe can be some symptoms of a deficient catechesis. We might keep these in mind as we plan the implementation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Whence came the Church’s authority, how was it exercised, and what made it valid?

Assumption

What often strikes me about many Catholics who had a pre-Vatican II religious education is their assumption that we Vatican II Catholics were taught what they learned in their religious education, even if they are not aware of this assumption. For example, in the context of a recent meeting I was attending, a priest said to a young catechist, “You remember the Baltimore Catechism?” Of course, the young man knew nothing about it. I had to point out that not only had he never seen it, but that I, ten years his senior, had never seen it.

Another less obvious example of catechetical assumption manifested itself in the late 1970’s religious education and still affects religious education today. Instead of a systematic study of religion, we students were invited to engage in discussions, projects, or games presumably designed to help us examine how Catholic teaching applied in everyday life. It was obvious that our teachers presumed knowledge of Catholic teaching, that they had learned at school and religious education, that we had not learned. Like our parents, they used terms and phrases from their religious-education background that were supposed to mean something to us, but these meant nothing. They assumed a religious-education background similar to their own, but ours had been so different.

Sure, discussing and reasoning out the proper behavior in a limited number of situations could be useful, but we were already capable of reasoning and arriving at conclusions before we entered the classroom. What we were not capable of doing was applying teaching we did not know. And we did not necessarily know Church teaching on given issues and the profundity of reasoning behind it. That is why we attended religious education. The educational approach described above was why we left disappointed.

Furthermore, there seemed to be a reluctance on the part of many religious-education representatives to talk much about Church teaching and the reasoning behind it. It was as if they were afraid that we might not like it. Or perhaps, in the catechetical climate of the time, they were less sure of things about which they had been very sure in the past. Whatever the case, we usually skirted around the material instead of going through it, which was a very frustrating experience for those of us who wanted to learn.

Moreover, what was not addressed at all was how the Catholic Church taught what it did and why that was relevant. We young Catholics could see that our Protestant friends were taught many of the same general moral principles that we were. We were able to reason to the same moral conclusions that the Catholic Church taught on specific issues. But how did the Church teach what it taught, and what made the fact that the Catholic Church taught it relevant? How did the Church teach and why did its teachings matter? The question ultimately came down to one of authority. Whence came the Church’s authority, how was it exercised, and what made it valid?

That assumption precluded a thorough examination of one of the major elements that sets apart the Catholic Church from Protestant denominations: the Magisterium instituted by Christ, documented in Sacred Scripture (e.g. Mt 16: 13-19, 18:18) and handed on through Tradition and Apostolic Succession.

My impression is that Church authority and its provenance, however simply understood, were so ingrained in the generations that preceded ours that they assumed an appreciation for that authority that they themselves had learned. That assumption precluded a thorough examination of one of the major elements that sets apart the Catholic Church from Protestant denominations: the Magisterium instituted by Christ, documented in Sacred Scripture (e.g. Mt 16: 13-19, 18:18) and handed on through Tradition and Apostolic Succession. That preclusion simultaneously precluded an examination of the Church’s provenance, sacraments, history, and teachings, relevant in a way that it would only be relevant to the Church that bases its authority on its institution by Christ and its apostolic succession and professes the sanctification of history in the mystery of the Incarnation.

How can young people understand or appreciate the authority of the Magisterium if they are not taught about its provenance and validity? And if they do no understand or appreciate that authority, why should they take its teachings seriously? If they first understand the grounds for the authority of the Magisterium, they might give greater credence and respect to its teachings, even unto delving deeper into consideration of the teachings, whether they agree with them or not.

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Condescension

If assumption is one repercussive symptom of a deficient catechesis, then condescension is another. Condescension of this kind is more often found in small pockets within that ethereal world of academia, but in rare instances, can seep into the catechetical program through an individual influenced by it in his or her training. In avoiding this symptom, catechetical leaders must guard against the temptation to create or maintain their own necessity by keeping people ignorant in a subtle, self-perpetuating condescension that underestimates people’s ability to learn.

Though we must respect the varied levels at which individuals will join the discussion, we must reject the notion that somehow the average person cannot grasp what the catechetical director or the liturgist or the priest has grasped. Otherwise, the catechetical director might bend to the temptation to leave out the substance in religious education and substitute “fluff,” thereby devaluing the Gospel and perpetuating the ignorance that makes his knowledge and thus himself special and necessary.

Ignorance breeds dependence, and in the milieu of dependent ignorance a certain mystique may surround the catechetical director, but at what cost? The cost is personal stagnation for the catechetical director and a diminished capacity to progress in their own faith for a congregation ill-informed about what their Church is and what and how it teaches.

Ignorance stands in the way of the full consensual participation of individuals in the Body of Christ.

Relevant to this point, I was once remarking on the need for a more substantial religious education for the Catholic in the pew, and a friend responded, “Not everyone can have an M.A. in theology.” My reaction is that they should not need one. Catholics should not need a master’s degree to know what their Church is, whence comes its authority, what it teaches and how it does so, what its history, its Scriptures, its Tradition, and its sacraments are, and how they might be better understood. These are fundamental features of the Catholic Church, and there is no reason that Catholics participating in a catechetical program should not be able to learn enough about these features to more fully invest in their Catholic commitment. This increased knowledge validating fuller investment allows Catholics to be the responsible Christians necessary to the health of the Church.

Basic knowledge about the Church is not some luxury reserved for those who earn an M.A. in theology. It is a necessity for all members of a Church that demands participation by its very sacramental nature. Ignorance stands in the way of the full consensual participation of individuals in the Body of Christ.

Ignorance

Of this symptom we must all claim a share.

I do not believe that most catechetical leaders have denied a substantial religious education purposely. As stated above, I believe that, in some cases, catechetical directors and catechists have assumed knowledge of information that they had learned and students were never taught. In other very rare cases, they may underestimate their students’ capacity for understanding. In other cases, they themselves may not have been confident in their own knowledge of the subject.

Regardless of our lack of knowledge we must continue to encourage students in their questioning. If we cannot help them from what we know, then we must commit to helping them find the information they seek. Our Faith, founded on Jesus, should fear no questions. The truth need fear no questions. Only the lie needs to fear questions. Still, as finite beings we must accept that though the truth can answer all questions, some questions may be beyond our capacity to answer because of our limited capacity to understand the truth. These mysteries allow us the opportunity to ponder in prayer toward a greater intimacy with God through that kind of enlightenment that changes one’s being and is so difficult to express. They also allow us an opportunity to appreciate the need for an inspired Magisterium to guard the faithful from error in pondering those mysteries that our finitude renders impossible for us to grasp.

Our Faith, founded on Jesus, should fear no questions.

Manipulation

This symptom was quite familiar to many of my generation and younger, and is still in use today. In the absence of substantial religious education, catechetical leaders believed that their role was to “get the kids to talk.” In this scenario, success in religious education classes is judged by how much the individual “shares,” despite the fact that the Church herself witnesses to the propriety of privacy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

This intrusive approach has guaranteed the absence from religious-education courses of some of the most intelligent and sensitive young people in our communities. Many of these young people have a much healthier sense of privacy than do some of our catechetical leaders, and no student should feel that how successful he or she is in religious education depends upon how well that individual bares his or her soul. Students should not leave religious-education classes or other catechetical events feeling that their privacy has been violated. Most of our students are well-adjusted young people who have confidantes whom they trust, and they do not need to be pressured by a person representing the Church who has an unhealthy need to know what is none of that person’s business.

A scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet may prove instructive. When Hamlet has wearied of the inept attempts of the shallow Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to “find him out” for his mother and his uncle/father, the king, he requests that Guildenstern play some music on a recorder. Guildenstern responds that he cannot, but Hamlet persists, until finally, Guildenstern states, “I have not the skill.” Hamlet responds:

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

(Hamlet III, ii)

We have many young Hamlets in our congregations, and they resent, as well they might, misguided attempts, like the one illustrated above, to casually pluck out the hearts of their individual mysteries.

A substantial religious education guards against such unhealthy intrusions. Such a religious education helps give young people the knowledge with which to approach many of their issues and discuss them with others in a healthy way. This does not remove the catechetical director or the catechist from the role of confidante or counselor, but leaves the choice with the young person, rather than assume it without respect for that young person’s thoughts and feelings.

We have many young Hamlets in our congregations, and they resent, as well they might, misguided attempts, like the one illustrated above, to casually pluck out the hearts of their individual mysteries.

“Fun”

In guarding against manipulation, we must examine the word fun. Fun was and is the operative word for many catechetical leaders and decreasingly so for many parents. Religious education must be fun. The emphasis on this short, monosyllabic word concerns me. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against enjoyment, even frivolity on occasion, but the question arises, “What is fun?”

“Ah, there’s the rub,” and there would seem to fit that ancient truism “different strokes for different folks.” That being the case, how do you determine what is fun for a variety of young people with a variety of tastes? One answer seems to be to have high-school students play games, some of which are physically intrusive, many of which are designed for much younger children. This will probably appeal to some, but I can relate that it did not appeal to the majority of high-school students who attended religious education in the 1970s, and I do not believe that it appeals to the majority of high-school students today. It certainly does not appeal to those who are not coming to religious-education programs that employ it. As with manipulation, many intelligent, mature students resent being forced to participate in intrusive, childish games or be branded an attitude problem.

Even if we could make religious education fun for everyone, is that how we want to order our priorities? Patrick F. McManus writes in Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink!:

Educators now take a more civilized approach and try to make learning an enjoyable experience. I agree with that. I know all my children enjoyed school much more than I did. On the other hand, none of them knows how to multiply and divide fractions. I suppose that’s part of the trade-off.

What has been the tradeoff for the catechesis of fun? Are we willing to continue accepting it?

I am not suggesting that fun be entirely removed from catechesis, but what are the limitations of the catechesis of fun. First, I am not overly confident that middle-aged catechetical leaders are the best judges of what is fun for high schoolers of today. Second, we are not going to compete with the multi-million-dollar productions of MTV for entertainment. Third, why should we substitute questionable entertainment for the enjoyment of real learning about God and God’s creation.

Certainly, students can learn about Christian fellowship on trips to amusement parks, especially if the trip is prayerfully offered up to God. But amusement parks, camping trips, lock-ins, and roller skating do not summarily dismiss the need for an academic component to catechesis, namely, a religious-education program. Sure, we can have the kids flocking to our youth-ministry events and believe that our catechetical program is successful, but we are not serving the youth if when they enter young adulthood and meet some of the crises, minor and major, of that period of life, they despair of their Catholic Faith, because they are ignorant of its truths and their access to deeper understanding of those truths that would serve them so well in their crises. It is often at that time of their lives that young people abandon the Catholic Church for fundamentalist churches that offer answers, however simplistically inadequate, with which to deal with the issues that confront them.

Perhaps, catechetical leaders need to recognize the distinction between catechesis and religious education as suggested by Thomas P. Walters and Joseph P. Leddy in their article “Religious Education: Focusing the Light of Faith” (The Living Light, Summer 1991). Whatever the case, we must offer an academic component in which the word enjoyment might better serve than fun. Then even young people who do not like to play games could find a satisfying place in catechetical programs.

Of course, without fun to fall back on, catechetical leaders will be challenged more than ever to probe the depths of the wealth of Catholic teaching to meet the needs of our young people. We will be forced to respect the fact that many young people have thoughtful questions, and that they want to know how the Catholic Church answers them, and why. This will be especially true, because without fun to fill the space, we will be more inclined to invite the challenges of young people and to respond to them from the wealth of the Tradition of our Church, growing ever more intimate, students and catechists, with that community with, in, and through which we come to know our Lord unto eternity.

Part Four to follow shortly.

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Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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Introduction

I will digress here from “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church” (episodes one, three, and four; this episode, two, is a digression) to share a bit of my experience in religious education in the 1970s-1990s. The examples I provide below illustrate not exceptions to religious education as I experienced it but rather the norm. They are shared not with the intention of criticizing individuals but to alert people to evils of religious education done badly. I would like to think and hope that all those who led and participated in catechetical programs meant well. But even so, ignorance, pride, immaturity, jealousy, retribution—and any other of the myriad failings we sinners participate in to greater or lesser degrees—can twist our behavior to do more harm than good at times. I believe that happened in too many cases in religious education. I also believe that in recognizing that and in guarding against it, we can develop catechetical programs that are more worthy of the subject matter they are designed to hand on. A good place to start is for catechists to put in the effort to learn about the Catholic Faith before they put themselves forward to teach the Catholic Faith. Having done that, it is also essential to remember that no matter how intelligent one is, and how much time and effort one puts in to learning, and how much one knows, one must beware the intellectual pride that is all too prevalent among those who think they know about the Church and her teachings. One must always remember that what one knows is infinitesimal compared to what one does not know.

All that physical work—besides developing the impressive biceps that I marveled at as a young boy when I sat next to him at the table—along with his intellectual pursuits and an insatiable sense of wonder, helped to make my father into the well-rounded man who would appreciate the need for solid catechesis to live a good and abundant life.

Catechetical Background

My father, James (Jim) Ritzer was committed to religious education. Born in 1931, he was raised with the Baltimore Catechism and, as a young man, competed in Baltimore Catechism quiz-team contests for his Knights of Columbus council. He also attended, through the Knights of Columbus, annual three-day silent retreats, offered by the Jesuits, from the time he was seventeen years old until well into his later years. And I think, when he started attending those retreats as a teenager, he attended with his father. Still, developing a scholastic education did not come easy for my dad. His father, my grandfather, had dropped out of school in seventh grade, if I remember right. Grandpa told me that he had seen, out the window, his friend walking away from school and had asked the sister who taught his class where he was going. She answered that his friend was going home and that he ought to leave too. So he did, and he never went back. Some years later, a college rowing coach saw him working as a landscaper and told him he had one of the best physiques he had ever seen and that he could get him a scholarship to row at the college. He replied, “I’ve got work to do,” and went back to his digging. An intelligent, knowledgeable, and insightful man who read a great deal, attended Latin Mass every Sunday, and daily prayed the rosary, Grandpa might have agreed with Mark Twain that he never let schooling interfere with his education.

And Grandpa might have kept schooling from interfering with my dad’s education too, had he had his way. He introduced my dad to landscaping at a young age. From the time Dad was in third grade, around 1940, he would go out and “shovel dirt” with his father after school until it got dark. Then they would go home and eat supper, and then he would go to bed. School was given a low priority. “Homework,” Dad once said, “there was no time for homework.” Grandpa wanted to make Dad a partner in the business when he was fifteen year old. Dad hated having to tell men far older than he what to do. He once said that he joined the army to get away from home. Decades later, when a friend with a successful family business suggested that Dad start a business so he could have jobs for all the kids, he responded that he had spent half of his life trying to get away from a family business. He said that one of the things he liked most about the army was that he did not have to tell anyone what to do; he could just take orders. Still, that only lasted so long, because he was promoted to the rank of master sergeant.

Dad’s first foray into higher education landed him at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota—which his father expected him to do in his spare time outside of his full-time landscaping work—until he dropped out and joined the army. The philosophy and theology courses he took during his time at St. Thomas made a lasting impression on him. He later enrolled at the University of Minnesota and completed a degree in agronomy with a minor in art after he had married and had his first two children. Four or five years later, in 1966, he left the family landscaping business again—and he and my mother turned their farm, their equity in it, and its mortgage over to the family business—and, starting over from scratch, he took a job in another state as a landscape architect.

So, when Dad was in his mid thirties, he left physical labor for a creative desk job, but one that allowed him to get out into the field now and then to check on how his plans were being implemented. And he still continued to do physical work in the many projects he undertook in remodeling and refurbishing our Victorian house built in 1910. He came to that task with no little experience. He had worked with his father on such projects including digging out, with shovels, and pouring a basement under the family home. He had designed and built his own house when he was in his mid-twenties, all by himself but for some help with the electrical. In fact, he had been sued by the city for plumbing the house without a plumber, but since the work met code and passed inspection he was only sued fifteen dollars.

With such experience under his belt, he went to work on our family home. He tore off both front and back porches and built better ones, moved the kitchen to a different room, bumped out the north wall of the house to create a bay of windows, built a recreation room in the basement, replumbed and rewired the house, dug out by hand the back yard and laid out and poured a patio, and shouldered countless other projects. He even considered tearing down the garage and building another, so that he could use the cherry wood of which it was constructed to make furniture. And throughout all of his projects, he maintained the original character of the house, for instance in using maple flooring that he had removed in one project to fashion a countertop in one of the bathrooms.

We continued to watch, indeed were almost incapable of tearing our eyes from the spectacle, as the presenter repeatedly yelled her message while the crowd of late-middle-aged women and at least one man shouted, jumped up and down waving their arms, and moved about in any way that could interfere in this communication.

I helped my dad with many if not most of the projects from the time I was young. In fact, I was one of the very few people on the face of the planet that my dad, a perfectionist craftsman, trusted with a paint brush. (My mother enjoyed no such distinction. In fact, I believe even the idea of my mother painting disturbed my father’s very equilibrium in no small measure. On one occasion when I was painting dark-stained cupboards the first coat of a light beige, my parents came in to see how it looked. My mother pronounced it complete and left the room as my father suppressed a grin and gave me a knowing look before he left. I covered it with three more coats.) All that physical work—besides developing the impressive biceps that I marveled at as a young boy when I sat next to him at the table—along with his intellectual pursuits and an insatiable sense of wonder, helped to make my father into the well-rounded man who would appreciate the need for solid catechesis to live a good and abundant life. And that man would naturally recognize the importance of sharing that catechesis for the benefit of others.

Once settled into his new life, Dad put his knowledge of theology and philosophy to work as a volunteer catechist. A priest once reminisced to me about how, when he had been a young assistant pastor at our parish, my parents and several other couples had made up a great team of catechists. I remember how, when my siblings and I were young, our parents held religious-education classes at our house and how we would try to sneak a peek, on our way to bed, at all the high-school kids who would gather in our double living room. My mom would credit our dad when she told us how other catechists would be amazed that certain students would attend Mom and Dad’s religious-education classes, because when they had been assigned to their classes they had not shown up. Dad believed in teaching substance, no gimmicks. He encouraged questioning and seeking the truth, confident that both would lead one to the Catholic Faith. In our family, he would always challenge us to think critically and would often cite the Baltimore Catechism, Scripture, Church teaching, canon law, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and other saints and theologians.

With a family of seven children, my parents had plenty on their plates, and so my mother dropped out of teaching religious education. She also made the case to my dad that he should cut back on some of his volunteering so that he could spend more time at home. Dad had been volunteering as the president of the parish council, with the Knights of Columbus, with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, as a catechist, with an organization called the Foresters, with the city historical society, as a lector at church, to name but a few things. He cut it all back to mainly concentrate on two things: the Knights of Columbus and teaching religious education. And thus, he could be found on Sunday evenings at the dining-room table poring through Scripture, catechisms, theological works, church documents, and other sources, planning his religious-education class for Wednesday night.

After Dad had been teaching religious education for some thirty years, my mother let him know that she thought he had taught long enough and that he should step out of the way to let others do their share. Dad had two reactions. One was: “You’re never done.” He believed that one has a lifelong obligation to keep giving of oneself that never ends as long as one draws breath. Second, he said that when he showed up to teach religious education—far from the days when men, women, and couples taught—he was the only male catechist there. He said that if he were not there, all the catechists would be women. “What does that teach all the boys who are there?” he would ask. And then he would answer, “That religion is for women.” He felt that even if he were the only man there, he needed to be there. (I just have to wonder to what degree contraception, and the entire culture of death, plays a part in men abandoning their essential role of handing on the Faith to their children. Contraception emasculates men as it defeminizes women, killing the most profound communion and responsibilities of marriage in rejection of fertility and unity, turning spouses, and sexuality itself, into mere playthings and robbing the participants of true adulthood and indeed of their very humanity with a subtlety worthy of its diabolical origin. See “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death.”)

Consequently, the catechesis that should have steeped its participants in at least the basics of Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, sacraments, saints, and church history was supplanted by a distraction of games, nonsense, silliness, childishness, and a “bag of tricks.”

My siblings and I attended the Catholic school in town up through eighth grade and then attended the public high school (from which I graduated in 1979), which I thought was a good balance. Regardless, there was no Catholic high school in town, so that was not an option. On Wednesday evenings we attended religious education at our parish. I have no memories of learning anything about the Catholic Faith at those classes. I remember playing volleyball and having rap sessions and little else. I told my dad I did not want to attend any more because it was a waste of my time. He told me that he understood but that he wanted me to continue attending to support the religious-education program, which he thought was so important. Out of respect for him, I continued to attend. Had I had more sense, I would have attended his class, where something was actually taught and learned, rather than avoid it because he was my dad and I was a teenager.

That was part of the context of religious education for me. I first volunteered as a religious-education teacher while in high school and did so in different places as I got older. I later taught middle-school religion as well as English and history and geography at a Catholic school. After completing a masters in theology, I took a job as a director of religious education in 1991, and entered into what catechesis had devolved into since my father was the last man standing in his parish program. The religious-education programs like the one I directed were led by either a director of religious education (DRE) or a coordinator of religious education (CRE). As I remember it, the distinction was that DREs had degrees in theology or a related field, and CREs did not. The programs relied on volunteer catechists. We were supported in various ways by the diocese. Additionally, our parish was one of five regional parishes that collaborated on various things including matters of religious education. I was in my early thirties at the time, and the catechetical leaders of the other four parishes were all women about in their mid-forties or so, three CREs and one DRE, as I remember it, who had worked together for several years.

To give some sense of my experience as a director of religious education in the early to mid 1990s, I share the following memories:

Experience as a DRE

Catechist’s Bag of Tricks

For the training of catechists, the diocese had developed an impressive outline that consisted of ten topics. I do not remember all of them but they included the fundamentals like Old Testament, New Testament, Sacraments, and Church History. For each of the ten topics, trainers were to present two hours of instruction on that topic, to add up to twenty hours of training altogether.

The catechetical leaders of the five parishes judiciously concluded that we would collaborate on catechist training. I suggested that each of the five parishes take two of the ten topics and prepare the two-hour training for each of them. The director or coordinator could prepare and present the training, or the parish could choose someone else to do so and bear whatever cost that might entail. Then each semester, each parish could offer one or both of their two topics either in a gathering at one parish or in separate gatherings at each of the five parishes to which all catechists from the five parishes would be invited to take whichever of the presentations they wished. That would accommodate all ten topics being presented each semester or each year. If each catechist attended just one presentation each semester, he would have completed the entire training in five years.

I often wondered, when I considered such examples as those described above or inservices of the same ilk that I experienced while teaching at Catholic schools, what respectable priests, given their level of education and maturity, would think if they were required to attend such presentations and be subjected to such fare.

Instead the other four catechetical leaders, at the urging of the two who may have been the least qualified among us, decided that we would give one presentation for the catechists of all five parishes, and it would be called “Catechist’s Bag of Tricks.” As I sat in a dissociative state, all-too-familiar in such meetings, the other catechetical leaders devoted most of the rest of the preparation to how we could make centerpieces for each of the tables out of paper bags filled with “tricks” as in various little toys.

Given my years of experience with religious education, I was not surprised by this development but nonetheless sick at heart. Here we were, members of the Catholic Church founded upon Peter and the Apostles by none other than Jesus Christ himself with all its riches like Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, Apostolic Succession, liturgies, patristics, theology, history, and on and on, with myriad saints like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and we were talking about “catechist’s bag of tricks” and table centerpieces. Had we cooperated to offer a substantial catechist training, we still would have been only scratching the surface of the eternal richness of the Catholic Faith that stretches off into infinity. One could spend his entire life studying one tiny aspect of the Catholic Faith, and still just be scratching the surface, and yet we were not even going to be attempting to scratch that surface.

I floated through this preparation and the event itself as if through some out-of-body experience in which I was required to participate but was utterly incapable of being a part. In addition I felt a certain degree of responsibility, apprehension, and guilt about catechists from my parish attending the event. A day-care director whom I knew—who had long been away from the Church but was edging back toward it and had signed up to be a catechist at one of the other parishes as part of the volunteer work that would help her get her son into its school—was in attendance. As the “training” had worn on, I had caught glimpses of her and had seen in her expression that same mixture of bewilderment, wonder, disbelief, consternation, and vexation that I had regularly experienced at such “religious-education” events. Therefore, I was not at all surprised when she approached me at the end of the event and, barely able to contain her fury, locked her wide eyes on mine and seethed, “I got a baby sitter for this!” Head down, I muttered, “I know, I know,” as she stormed away. I was in complete agreement with her about the waste of time and the insult to hers and other’s maturity and intelligence, but what further impressed itself upon me was that the attendees had not only been deprived of a presentation of the richness of the Catholic Faith but had, in its name—and in silly, vapid, nonsensical blather—been subjected to a misrepresentation of what catechesis truly ought to be. Paradise lost, maybe not; but opportunity lost, profoundly. And incalculable damage done, however casually accomplished.

Running Interference

On another occasion, I attended with other leaders of parish catechetical programs, a workshop on how to give Confirmation retreats presented by a catechetical director who was considered something of a guru on the topic. After being instructed on how to stage various games that were supposed to be all the rage with high-schoolers (though I would not have expected third graders to participate in them), we arrived at the pinnacle of such games “Running Interference.” And we were all invited to stand and gather in a space cleared in front of the presenter. I could not bring myself to join the group and enjoyed a rare sense of silent camaraderie with a fellow catechetical leader when a quietly dignified Native-American woman seated across from me also refrained from participating.

It was just plain creepy that catechetical leaders would want to—and think they had some kind of right to—invade a young person psychologically and spiritually, and then actually attempt to do so after wearing down the child’s natural defenses against it.

Without a word to each other, we sat and watched as one person was chosen from the crowd to stand against the back wall with the crowd between the presenter and her. Then the others were informed that the presenter was going to try to communicate a message to the person at the back of the room, and all those in the crowd that stood between the presenter and the woman in the back, should do all that they could to make sure the message did not get through. Then the bedlam commenced. We continued to watch, indeed were almost incapable of tearing our eyes from the spectacle, as the presenter repeatedly yelled her message while the crowd of late-middle-aged women and at least one man shouted, jumped up and down waving their arms, and moved about in any way that could interfere in this communication. One person turned the lights off and on, which later drew high praise from the presenter for its originality and ingenuity. As the participants, flushed from their recent exertions, returned to their seats, the presenter explained that this was how it was with our relationship with God, who is continually trying to communicate with us while the world continually throws up all kinds of interference to keep the message from getting through.

I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

Musical Chairs

At another training of religious-education leaders, we were taught yet more games that were supposed to instruct high schoolers in religious education. One game, taught by a former religious sister, a variation on musical chairs, had male and female students circle around, while music played, a group of too-few chairs. When the music stopped they were to sit on the chairs. But those who did not find chairs were not put out of the game, as was the custom, but were instead instructed to sit on another person who had managed to sit in a chair. Here we were being instructed to have high-school students, boys and girls, randomly sit on each others’ laps. I believe the idea was that it would help break down barriers. Indeed, I suspected it would. The glaring impropriety was completely lost on those leading the training.

Pictionary

The five parishes also presented a program on human sexuality. I asked my pastor to excuse our program from participating in it. He denied the request. (I successfully insisted on our not participating the following years.) Thus our parish’s program would be included. While the catechetical leaders from the five parishes were planning the sexuality program, I heard from each of them that their parents had not taught them about sexuality. They shared stories about how their parents had avoided doing so and about the awkward and inadequate ways they had been left to learn about it instead. I shared that my parents had instructed us age-appropriately about sexuality as we had grown up, and that when we were approaching puberty, my dad had explained the biology of sexuality in the context of Catholic morality to us boys as my mother had to the girls. The other leaders respectfully marveled at that.

A digression within this digression: One area in which even responsible, mature parents and educators were deficient in our generation, was teaching where to stop. During the catechism gap, television programming that represented the popular culture evolved from Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, and The Dick Van Dyke Show to Happy Days at the wholesome end of the spectrum. And if Happy Days (laughably voted “Greatest Show in the History of Television”) taught anything, it was that dates were for “making out,” with no clear boundaries indicated. Much of the rest of television and film during the catechism gap made it clear that there were no boundaries, and that sex before marriage was “fun” and exciting, and normal, with no attention given to the multitude of detrimental consequences like out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually-transmitted diseases, psychological and spiritual trauma even to the point of spiritual death in mortal sin. The promoters of the sexual revolution were not there to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by fornication. In such an environment, young Catholics wondered and discussed with their peers how far it was appropriate to go within a spectrum that ranged from holding hands to the very threshold of intercourse, with none too few finding that once the threshold was reached it was all too easy to fall over it. Not a few Catholic couples who believed that sexual intercourse outside of marriage was wrong found themselves at the altar with a baby on the way. It was not until I was in my thirties that I heard Molly Kelly set the line at affection, be it in something like holding hands or a kiss, making it clear that arousal properly belonged within the bodily and spiritual communion of marriage. Now that made sense, expressing affection without moving into arousal, a worthy guideline for one endeavoring to practice chastity. It was not about where to stop but about not getting started in the first place.

They had not grown up in the catechism gap; they did not know the deep hunger and need of the generation that had been deprived because of it.

The program that the parishes produced drew, for the most part, from programs of previous years, so that I, as a newbie, was allowed to observe more than participate. I cannot recall all that I observed, but as usual, games were the order of the day. In one game I remember, students were required to draw cards from a deck that described a morally challenging situation in which teens might find themselves. Then they were to discuss what they thought about it. Never in the process was there any Catholic morality applied to indicate what would be the appropriate way of handling the situation. They would talk about it, share their opinions, however well or poorly informed, and then they would move on. Thus did this sexuality program instruct young people in the detrimental art of moral relativism.

But then there was Pictionary, a knockoff of the popular game of that name. Here—we were to understand, according to the snickering catechetical leaders—was the game that would really break down barriers. (You must understand that breaking down barriers was all too often the goal of such approaches to religious education.) To play this game, students were paired with their parents and gathered into small groups. Then they would take turns having one of each pair pick a card and draw what was described on the card while the other tried to guess what it was. The cards described various things sexual including genitalia. Forgive me for thinking that parents can have mature and responsible conversations with their children about human sexuality without drawing explicit pictures in a game with several strangers sitting around a table. If you agree with that, you would have fit in no better than I did in the “catechetical” setting in which I found myself.

Lock-ins

And there were Lock-ins. Thank God (and I mean that) I managed to escape religious education without ever participating in one of these. As I understood it, lock-ins were events where students were locked in to a school or parish hall or gym or some such building with catechetical leaders and chaperones, and then they would—you guessed it—play games, maybe watch popular movies (many of which were hardly appropriate for Catholic religious education), drink soda pop and eat junk food, and stay up all night without sleep. Apparently this was really the setting in which you could “get the kids to talk,” when they were sleep deprived and strung out on sugar and caffeine. Because, as I heard often enough, that was the real purpose of religious education, to get the kids to talk, to get them to lay open the most private parts of their inner selves in the midst of all their peers, under pressure to do so, while all were temporarily given to feeling sensitive to one and all. Never mind that those encouraging, indeed manipulating, this divulging were not priests, counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists. Never mind that at least some of the peers to whom these teenagers were coerced to divulge their deepest selves would be shortly reverting from their momentary sanctity to the kind of cruelty that adolescents can visit upon each other. Never mind that normal young people, who had been compelled to reveal to the group things most private, would leave the event with an unsettling sense of being violated. Never mind any of that. These catechetical leaders knew that their role was to get these kids to spill their guts to themselves and their peers, sinners all, with no consideration of the impropriety of it or of the harm that could be caused by it.

Get the Kids to Talk

The “get the kids to talk” thing always struck me, in my core, as inherently wrong. It brought to mind interrogators in Communist regimes I had read about, who would manipulate prisoners into a relationship with their very torturers. It just struck me as so perverse, indeed, diabolical. It was just plain creepy that catechetical leaders would want to—and think they had some kind of right to—invade a young person psychologically and spiritually, and then actually attempt to do so after wearing down the child’s natural defenses against it. We recognize the evil of adults violating children’s bodies; why would we then allow adults to violate their minds and souls? It is one thing if a young person seeks out an adult whom they have come to trust to share private matters (and even then there should be guardrails), but they should never be coerced to do so. And it is strikes me as wrong even among adults. I remember one time many years later and many miles away, when, though I usually avoid them, I participated in a men’s program at our parish that was surprisingly pretty good. But at one session, after the presentation, the participants were instructed to, in their small groups, share personal experiences about the topic. Though I was not the small-group leader, I immediately said to my group of great guys, that before we started, no one should feel any kind of compulsion to share anything that he was not comfortable sharing, that the Church recognizes the propriety of privacy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and that we should abide by that same propriety. Our leader was grateful that I had said something, and others in the group indicated that they were relieved of a sense of compulsion to share something they might have later regretted having shared.

Not only do catechists and all others now have the Catechism of the Catholic Church available to inform and enable them to hand on authentic Catholic teaching, they also have it available to challenge erroneous teaching, much to the chagrin of those who would subvert authentic teaching, of whom there were and are far too many inside and outside the Church.

Conclusion

I often wondered, when I considered such examples as those described above or inservices of the same ilk that I experienced while teaching at Catholic schools, what respectable priests, given their level of education and maturity, would think if they were required to attend such presentations and be subjected to such fare. It formed in my mind over time that they assiduously kept apart from such events and insulated themselves from such nonsense by no accident. Right or wrong, I had a sense that they knew that there was something just plain weird about the education milieu and those who orchestrated it. And they were right; the education milieu and those who orchestrated it were weird. And destructive, as can be seen in how the disciples of John Dewey, the teachers unions, and the Department of Education have driven down our education system from one of the best in the world to one of the worst. And the incentives, ideologies, and methods used to do so infected Catholic education and catechesis—whether in schools or religious education programs—during the catechism gap by no accident and for no good. Consequently, the catechesis that should have steeped its participants in at least the basics of Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium, sacraments, saints, and church history was supplanted by a distraction of games, nonsense, silliness, childishness, and a “bag of tricks.” I believe that, however well intentioned the catechetical leaders who created and presented the so-called religious education exemplified above, they did more harm than good. Indeed, I believe that that which is exemplified above was not religious education at all but a diabolical counterfeit. And it should be no surprise then that often enough the creators and presenters of that which is exemplified above were hostile to the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church that they resolutely avoided, and hostile to those who believed in it and would teach it, as I can personally attest.

Still there were grounds for hope. While I was directing a religious-education program, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published and promulgated. I was honored to be selected to serve on the diocesan committee for the implementation of the Catechism. There I worked with the auxiliary bishop who chaired the committee, the diocesan director of religious education, the diocesan director of Catholic schools, a parish priest, and another religious-education director who was a religious sister. These were mature, intelligent, knowledgeable, kind, and enjoyable individuals who took the implementation of the Catechism seriously. Still, because the next youngest person on the committee was probably at least ten years older than I was, they did not have the perspective I had on the event. I remember them all looking perplexedly at me when I told them all that the Catechism was going to fly off the shelves when it finally came out. They had not grown up in the catechism gap; they did not know the deep hunger and need of the generation that had been deprived because of it. Thus they were surprised as I was not when, after the Catechism was first published in French in 1992, it sold so fast that the bookstores at the Paris airport could not keep the shelves stocked with it. Had it not been published by six (if I remember right) publishers in the United States in 1994, and thus each of their editions counted separately, it would have been the number-one best seller in the U.S. at the time. The Catechism of the Catholic Church closed the catechism gap, and the Catechism remains. Not only do catechists and all others now have the Catechism of the Catholic Church available to inform and enable them to hand on authentic Catholic teaching, they also have it available to challenge erroneous teaching, much to the chagrin of those who would subvert authentic teaching, of whom there were and are far too many inside and outside the Church.

May the Catechism prove a valuable resource for you too.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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(This is the longer, revised edition, 12 January 2026.)

I have been captivated by the thoughtful, insightful, and often brilliant writing on what I will call authentic womanhood versus feminism by such Substack contributors as Elisabeth Stone and Abigail Austin. In fact, after reading Elisabeth Stone’s “Born to Be a Feminist,” especially the part about her grandmother’s “bitterness and poison” about not doing “her own thing” and instead settling down into marriage and family life, I could not help but see the sharp contrast between such a perspective on life compared to that of my mother, whom we only recently buried after she passed away at ninety-six-years of age. I thought it might be profitable to share a smidgeon of my mother’s story. And so I do so on the anniversary of the day she gave birth to me, 12 November 1960, sixty-five years ago.

(See “An Authentic Woman II.”)

Margaret Mary Costello was born in 1929 in Weaver, Minnesota. Her father, Patrick Edward Costello (Ed) was a hard-working, educated, intelligent, dignified, and devout Irish Catholic, who attended Mass on Sunday and holy days, prayed his rosary daily, and did not drink because he did not like beer and he feared that he might like whiskey too much. Her mother, Vera (nee Odell) was an intelligent, educated, kind, complicated woman, a convert to the Catholic Faith, whose past included some traumatic events that may have contributed to some level of neurosis. Margaret grew up with one sibling, her beloved sister, Pat, (who would also attend the College of St. Catherine on scholarship, become a librarian, and who, though two years younger, would marry three years earlier and also have four daughters and three sons, more about her here). At a young age, Margaret’s teacher walked her home to tell her parents that she should move up a grade. At seventeen she attended a leading Catholic women’s college on an academic scholarship. She graduated with a degree in library science and English and embarked on an eight-year odyssey of work, service, and adventure that many a feminist might have envied. And yet, she never considered herself a feminist.

Photographs of Margaret before she became Mom made us wonder at her pitching hay, riding a horse, wearing an Inuit parka in Alaska, standing atop the continental divide, holding a shotgun in one hand and a bird she had bagged in the other. We remember paraphernalia from her former life: a view finder with slide reels of her travels in the west, Mickey Mouse ear hats, an Inuit cup-and-ball game. It was not to prove something that she excelled in academics, edited the newspaper, served as senior class president, enjoyed football, ventured out to the Iron Range, Green Bay, California, and Alaska. She never renounced men, or marriage, or children. She just lived her life with intrepidness, wonder, and faith, hope, and love. In fact, she once told me that she never had any desire to be a feminist because the men in her life had treated her so well. Of course, her unwavering commitment to the Catholic Faith influenced her experience and outlook.

She just lived her life with intrepidness, wonder, and faith, hope, and love.

At twenty-eight, she settled in Stillwater, Minnesota, where she met Jim Ritzer, also a devout Catholic, whom she married and with whom she raised seven children. What she thought of marriage and family might well be summed up by a conversation I had with her one day upon returning home from kindergarten after I had for the first time met someone—call him Billy—whose parents were divorced.

“Billy’s parents are divorced.”

“Oh, that’s very sad.”

“Would you and Dad ever get divorced?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“We took vows.”

“Billy’s parents took vows too.”

“We meant them.”

Any doubts I may have had about the earthly permanence of my parents’ sacramental union were thus dispelled (see also “One Big Family”).

Another memory was aroused when my sainted sister Mary was trying to coordinate a day for Mom’s funeral that would accommodate all seven of us siblings and families, especially a sister in Montana who had only recently undergone serious surgery. Mary was concerned about whether there could be an open-casket wake over a month after Mom had died. I said to Mary, “Well, you know Mom’s opinion on the subject.” Mary said, “No, what was it?” So I recounted what my mother (at least half Irish) had opined on the subject when she and I were going to attend a funeral for a relative some forty years or so before:

Oh, the Irish and their wakes. They have the casket open and everyone comes up and says, “Doesn’t she look wonderful?” No, she looks dead. Put me in a pine box. Cover it with the lid. Hold the funeral. Put me in the ground and throw dirt over me.

This put Mary at ease, though we did hold an open-casket wake and, ironically, Mom did look so wonderful that I and several other people remarked that we thought she would at any moment open her eyes, sit up, and speak to us.

Full though her life was, with plenty of joys and wonders, it also involved challenges, sufferings, and heartaches. She had several health challenges and surgeries, including a perforated ulcer that was misdiagnosed for several years as “change of life” that destroyed her duodenum and involved chronic intense pain that took its toll on her and the family until finally discovered and corrected by surgery. (One doctor had said to her, “I don’t know what your problem is; I met your husband and he seems like a nice guy.” She said that if she had not been doubled over, she would have hit him.) She relied on her intrinsic Catholic faith to forge her way through all of it.

Margaret was not perfect, as she was well aware. Like the saints, she knew she was a sinner.

Margaret was not perfect, as she was well aware. Like the saints, she knew she was a sinner. But she had the courage to give herself in love to God and His Church and, through its Sacrament of Matrimony, to her husband and the family she formed with him (see also “Making Room and the Courage to Love”). Her self-awareness surfaced once, back in the 90s, when I told her about a television program I had seen about the common characteristics of those who live long lives. When I mentioned that one of them was the ability to let things roll off one’s back, she laughed and said something like, “Then, I’m sunk.” And yet she learned well enough to do so that she lived to be ninety-six. Of course, that laugh exposed one of the other longevity traits in which she proved enduringly proficient, exercising a sense of humor. Then there was the matter of patience. Margaret would say of her sister about her dealings with their mother, “Pat has the patience of Job.” Margaret did not, and yet, as Christ, “learned obedience through what he suffered,” she developed great patience in serving husband, children, grandchildren, and friends, which was never more evident than in her caring for her husband, Jim, into her nineties, as he slid ever deeper into the grip of Alzheimer’s disease.

A note about the obituary: it mentions that “working full time” was something Margaret did as “an expert multi-tasker.” Of course, she did work full time, but for years that was at home as wife, mother, and homemaker. In addition to that full-time work, she would at times add more work to help make ends meet. Hence, she put her sewing machine to good use altering clothing for a local men’s store. She also sewed many a garment for the family, including not only bridesmaids’ dresses for her daughters but even one daughter’s designer wedding dress based solely upon photos in a magazine. That project caused her enough psychological distress that a son and son-in-law, fresh from (and in the clothing and condition of) a full day of physical labor, in response to the emergency, were reduced to discussing the various body shapes of the daughters with a clerk at a sewing store in the process of buying Margaret, on behalf of all her children, a dress form that would fully meet her stitching needs. As for working full-time out of the home, it was not until the economy of the late 1970s put such a dent in people’s earnings, and her youngest daughter was in school, that Margaret went back to work outside the home as a school librarian, with the understanding that she would be home when her kids came home from school.

Margaret had told Jim before they were married that the one thing she did not want to do was live on a farm. Nevertheless, not long after they were married they took her savings from several years of work as teacher and librarian, along with his savings (which included the money he had made from the sale of the house that he had designed and constructed by himself) and bought a farm with a greenhouse just on the outskirts of Stillwater. Jim drove the rats out of the house and put as much time as he could into home improvement as the family grew. They started what Margaret called a truck farm, and she would sell their produce, her young children beside her, on the side of the road, wearing a dress that she said was held together with safety pins. When one farmer offered a low price for her tomatoes, she told him that she would feed them to her family before she would sell them at that price; and so she did.

Providence made its presence known throughout Margaret’s life, perhaps never more apparently than in her final years.

Jim had returned to college and, while on the farm, earned his Bachelor of Science in agronomy with a minor in art from the University of Minnesota. It was also during their years on the farm that they formed an entity with Jim’s parents and his brother and moved the family landscape business to the farm. Jim dug out a pond with a bulldozer, and they planted a sod field and a tree nursery and started a garden store down the road on the corner with the highway. In time it became obvious that the business was not going to provide the income necessary to raise their family of seven, which would grow to nine. So, after no little consideration, Jim accepted a job as a landscape architect in Wisconsin. Margaret wanted to sell the house and use the proceeds to start their new life and keep making payments on the rest of their farm, but the house lot included the well needed to supply water to the the family business. So instead, Margaret and Jim, now in their mid-thirties, turned over their farm and the equity they had invested in it, along with its mortgage, to the family business and drove away with their five children, and little more than what they could fit in the station wagon, to start a new life from scratch in a place hitherto unknown to them. That was one of those things, with all that it entailed over the years, that Margaret found difficult to let roll off her back. Of such things are ulcers made. And yet, decades later, providence would bring the farm back into Margaret’s life in a most unexpected but welcome way.

Providence made its presence known throughout Margaret’s life, perhaps never more apparently than in her final years. At ninety-one years of age, after serving as the primary care-giver for Jim, who had been sinking into Alzheimer’s for several years, Margaret fell and hit her head. Suddenly, Margaret and Jim could not be left alone. Their four children from the Twin Cities area nobly drove out and rotated overnight shifts, and those of us from afar flew back as we were able, to make sure they were never alone in their home in the woods of western Wisconsin. When we all accepted that this situation could not continue, Croixdale, the one place that Margaret had said she would consider moving to, suddenly had an opening in its years-long waiting list for assisted living, if they could take it right away. They took it. Margaret and Jim moved in, and in so doing, moved back to Minnesota, and back into St. Michael’s Parish—the parish where they had met, probably at daily Mass—after fifty-four years away. (Margaret said she used to know if Jim were behind her at Mass because she could hear him clear his throat, a lifelong habit.)

Not long after they moved into their delightful new apartment at Croixdale, it became obvious that Jim’s Alzheimer’s was worse than could be accommodated in assisted living. So Margaret and Jim moved into another lovely apartment in Croixdale’s memory care. Then they both came down with Covid and were moved into quarantine in a hospital. Then they were moved back to memory care, where it was determined that Jim needed more care than could be provided. So we children found an Alzheimer’s-special-care facility that specialized in the 24-7 care that Jim required. Margaret then moved back into assisted living.

After all those moves, Margaret had wound up in an apartment looking out over Jim’s grave. That is providence.

Those were five moves each, within just a few weeks, at ages ninety-one (Margaret) and eighty-nine (Jim). As stressful as all that moving was, the greatest stress of all was that they were now separated. Margaret was often brought to tears because she was living apart from Jim, after sixty-two years of marriage, and not fulfilling her obligation to care for him. We all had to convince her that Jim needed around-the-clock care that not only she but even the memory-care unit at Croixdale could not adequately provide. Then there was Covid, and the mass formation that caused the deranged overreaction to it, which made visiting Jim—at a facility that previously had an around-the-clock-unannounced visiting policy—now complicated almost to the point of being impossible. On the one or two occasions that could be arranged for Margaret to visit Jim, her encasement in a hazmat suit combined with his dementia served only to agitate Jim and compound Margaret’s anguish. After about three months, Jim, who spent much of his days walking the halls, fell and shortly passed away from his injuries, with Margaret and all their children present, including two of us by phone. He received the Last Rites of the Church, including the Apostolic Pardon. That was on St. Patrick’s Day, no small matter for these Catholics, as Jim was a quarter and Margaret was half Irish. The night before Jim’s Mass of Christian Burial, Margaret noticed activity on the top of the hill outsider her window. The next day, at the graveside portion of the funeral, she discovered that that activity had been the digging of Jim’s grave. After all those moves, Margaret had wound up in an apartment looking out over Jim’s grave. That is providence.

Eventually Margaret fell and broke her hip. Not only did she survive the surgery, but she soon learned to master a walker, though she made sure to let you know that her need for it was only temporary. Even so, when she would attend Mass or other activities, she would advance that walker across the room with stunning alacrity to greet her friends. Cognitive decline required she move from her assisted-living apartment at Croixdale to a memory-care one-bedroom apartment—sunny and bright with windows overlooking the pond and its fountain—but she was still able to eat in the dining room and attend the many activities with her friends.

Then she fell and broke the other hip, and survived another surgery. The care she thereafter required led her to the stately Boutwells Landing. Like Croixdale, Boutwells Landing provided excellent care and activities and interaction with our family. As providence would have it, Boutwells Landing had been built on the very land that she and Jim had bought as a farm after they were married. It had been sold years before, and much of the proceeds had gone to the care of Jim’s youngest brother with Downs Syndrome in his final years, which had brought Margaret much peace. The land on which she had begun her life, family, and home with Jim—and which they had lost in a way that had caused Margaret (and Jim) so much pain of mind, heart, and soul—was again to be her home at the end of her earthly life. So there she was, back in the town, the parish, and on the land on which she and Jim had started their married life over sixty-five years before. And there she died. Peacefully, in her sleep. She too had received the Last Rites of the Church and the Apostolic Pardon. Although Margaret had been named after St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, apostle of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the day on which she died was the Feast of Blessed Margaret of Cashel, an Irish laywoman who was martyred on 13 September 1647 at the Massacre of Cashel. It was also the anniversary of the second to last apparition at Fatima in 1917, significant for anyone who observed a lifelong devotion to the rosary, as Margaret did.

Though Margaret had lived a full ninety-six years and had declined substantially by the time of her death, she was loved and appreciated right until the end, and therefore missed. On one of my trips back to visit her, one of her care providers, a mother of five originally from Ethiopia, had told me how much she enjoyed Margaret and expressed how wonderful it was that she received so much attention from her children and grandchildren. Indeed, my oldest sister, Mary, regularly visited and took care of most of Mom’s affairs. The three other local children and their families visited regularly and cared for Mom in various ways. Those of us from afar telephoned regularly and visited at least once a year. And relatives and in-laws also visited. After Margaret died, the overseer at Boutwells Landing told Mary that the staff had loved Margaret as a resident and had loved working with our family and that they would miss her and us. He said that one of Margaret’s caregivers, who used to enjoy occasions when she could sit and visit with her, had gone home the day she died and wept uncontrollably. When her concerned husband asked her what was the matter, she answered through her tears, “Margaret died.”

Margaret and Jim centered their lives, their marriage, and their family in the Catholic Faith.

And about Margaret and Jim’s return to St. Michael’s parish: Jim’s Mass of Christian Burial had been celebrated at St. Michael’s Church, and his body had been laid to rest at St. Michael’s Cemetery. Margaret’s funeral would also have been held at St. Michael’s Church, but the church was having work done on the floors. So, Margaret’s Mass of Christian Burial was not celebrated at St. Michael’s where she and Jim had met and married, but a few blocks away at the other church of the parish, St. Mary’s. St. Mary’s had been the parish of Jim’s family, the parish in which he had been baptized, grown up, served Mass, attended school. It had been combined with St. Michael’s some years before. So, in her death, Margaret not only returned to the parish of the beginning of her life with Jim but also to the parish of Jim’s life before. Then, the graveside part of the liturgy was held at St. Michael’s Cemetery, and her body was laid to rest next to his. In so many ways, this culmination would seem to fit the sense of “coming full circle.”

(See “An Authentic Woman II.”)

The following obituary, amalgamated by her children, summarizes Margaret’s abundant life:

Margaret was born to Patrick and Vera (Odell) Costello in Weaver, Minnesota, on 22 June 1929. She spent her early years in the Mississippi River Valley and would later fondly recall adventures with extended family throughout southeastern Minnesota. When Margaret was in fourth grade, her father accepted the job of grain buyer at Hamm’s Brewery, and the family moved from Wabasha to St. Paul.

Margaret attended Harding High School, where she was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, Saga, and graduated salutatorian in 1946. She then attended the College of St. Catherine on an academic scholarship. She studied Library Science, served as president of her senior class, and graduated at the age of 20 in 1950, with a bachelor’s degree in English.

After college, Margaret went to work as a teacher and librarian in several communities, including Mountain Iron, Minnesota (where she experienced Iron Range culture) and Green Bay, Wisconsin (where she often saw her beloved Green Bay Packers eating lunch at the YMCA). In the summer of 1956, she and a friend traveled by car to the California coast and back, before the construction of the Interstate Highway System. She then ventured north to accept a summer research position at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, prior to Alaska’s statehood.

Finally, Margaret followed her heart to where she had long hoped to settle, beautiful Stillwater, Minnesota, and accepted a librarian position at Stillwater High School. She loved her new job, but tragically lost her library in the 1957 school fire, and then went to work at the new high school. While working at Stillwater High, she found herself admiring a house under construction that she would pass on her way to work. Eventually she met the designer and builder of that house, a fellow daily communicant at St. Michael’s Church, James (Jim) Ritzer, an army veteran and Stillwater native. She would later say that her life did not begin until she met Jim.

Margaret and Jim were married at St. Michael’s Church in Stillwater in 1958, and in 1959, welcomed their first daughter, Mary. Peter, Mark, Gretchen, and Thomas followed. In 1966, they moved to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, where Rebecca and Catherine were born, and Margaret and Jim raised their seven children as members of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Parish. Jim worked as a landscape architect, and Margaret attended the University of Wisconsin and acquired her Wisconsin teacher’s license and returned to her profession within the Sun Prairie School District.

Margaret retired from teaching in 1991, and she and Jim moved to rural Menomonie, Wisconsin in 1998. In their retirement they savored the beauty of the land, foliage, birds, and animals of Reverie, their home in the woods. They also loved attending Mass, praying the Rosary, traveling, entertaining family and friends, watching the Packers, and volunteering for their church and community. They returned to the St. Croix River Valley in 2020, where Margaret enjoyed her final years among the wonderful folks of Croixdale and Boutwells Landing, built on what had been the farm she and Jim had bought and on which they had raised their family until they moved to Wisconsin.

Margaret and Jim centered their lives, their marriage, and their family in the Catholic Faith. Margaret taught her children the importance of faith, hope, charity, humility, frugality, challenging work, sticktoitiveness, and adventure. She also imparted an impressive understanding of, and appreciation for, literature and English grammar. She was an expert multi-tasker: raising a family, working full time, cooking, sewing, helping elderly neighbors, and volunteering for her parish. We will miss her devout faith, sincere smile, kind heart, selflessness, clear logic, quick rejoinders, witty sense of humor, and expansive vocabulary.

Rest in peace, Mom, in the Beatific Vision, toward which your faithful life long tended. We pray you have already heard these words: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Margaret’s funeral may be viewed here.

Her obituary slide show here.

Please like, share, comment, or subscribe as you feel inclined.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

See “An Authentic Woman II.”

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Introduction

Young adults have been flocking to the Catholic Church in recent years, prompting many to question why. Charlie Kirk, not too long before he was martyred, answered that question in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Mr. Kirk said: “First of all, they want something that has lasted. They want something that is ancient and that is beautiful, something that has stood the test of time, something that’s not going to change, something that’s all of a sudden not going to all of a sudden just flip around and have some sort of, you know, transgender story hour.” Yes.

Earlier in the same interview, Mr. Carlson railed against baby-boomers, launching his salvo with: “They’re repulsive. They’ve always been repulsive.” From there, boomer identity slid downhill in the wake of his colorful illustration of its self-absorption that supported the conclusion at which he first arrived in boyhood: “I hated them then. I hate them now.” Fair enough.

And yet, as one born into the latter part of the boomer generation in late 1960, destined to grow up in the 1960s and 70s through no fault of my own, I offer not necessarily an excuse but instead an explanation of why at least the later boomers might have drawn the ire of their successors. We had no catechism. And we were raised in the Church in the catechism gap, the repercussions of which, I believe, have been vastly underestimated. I sought to bring light to that dilemma and its repercussions and to encourage a better way forward in the following article.

This article was originally published under the title “In Anticipation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: The Perspective of One Raised Between the Catechisms” in the Summer 1994 edition of The Living Light: An Interdisciplinary Review of Catholic Religious Education, Catechesis, and Pastoral Ministry an “official publication of the Department of Education of the United States Catholic Conference.” It was later republished in abbreviated form as “Raised Between the Catechisms” in Catholic Digest, September 1994. It appears here, with the permission of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), in three parts (episodes one, three, and four; episode two is a digression), in the form in which it was submitted for publication in 1993 with some minor editing.

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: THE PERSPECTIVE OF ONE RAISED BETWEEN THE CATECHISMS

The Living Light, Summer 1994

INTRODUCTION

We stand on the threshold of the third millennium, poised to receive the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). Our position in salvation history demands of us a responsible reception of the CCC, because the CCC provides a unique opportunity for renewal in the ongoing conversion of the Church. Indeed, it comes to us through that process of renewal begun at the council of renewal, the Second Vatican Council.

In recognizing the CCC as the catechism of that era, which opened with Pope John XXIII’s 25 January 1959, announcement that he intended to invoke the twenty-first ecumenical council, we must also recognize the catechetical needs of the generation raised within that era without benefit of its catechism. As one of that generation, I offer some reflections on my own catechetical experience and some conclusions I have drawn from it.

In a few short years a generation of little children stepped across that epochal line between the old and the new, unaware of their place in salvation history and the implications it would have in their lives.

CATECHESIS IN PERSPECTIVE

I had a rare opportunity to publicly articulate and clarify some of my concerns about the catechetical experience of my generation at a gathering of catechetical leaders of the Diocese of ______ in the fall of 1992. Richard Reichert, Consultant for Adult Education and Human Sexuality for the Diocese of Green Bay, gave a thoughtful presentation on the reactionary mode of the Church after the splintering of Protestant denominations and the Council of Trent in the 16th century, and the consequent reactionary catechesis of that period, a catechesis that concentrated on defining the Catholic Church in opposition to those Protestant denominations. Mr. Reichert contended that the Second Vatican Council finally brought to an end the Tridentine era and its catechism as one of the few, if not the only, ecumenical councils to be called not in reaction to a heresy, but rather as a means of renewal.

As I listened, I realized that we were still talking about the catechetical experience of Mr. Reichert and his contemporaries, which comprised the large majority of those assembled. But the period being discussed had passed over thirty years ago. What about the Vatican II generation, those of us whose catechetical experience began after the start of the Second Vatican Council?

In order to address the serious catechetical needs of those in their mid-thirties and younger, catechetical leaders must shift their focus from the catechetical experience of those who made the transition from pre-Vatican II to Vatican II to the catechetical experience of those of us who grew up in the Vatican II era. Though the transition was not without its difficulties, even trauma for some, it is time to let go and move beyond that period to address the dire catechetical needs of that generation raised within the trauma, unaware of their ecclesiological and catechetical context.

When Mr. Reichert invited us to comment, I pointed out that while it is true that Vatican II was not called in reaction to a heresy, still the catechesis that developed around it was a reactionary catechesis to the catechesis in place before Vatican II. I said that I was born in 1960 and graduated from high school in 1979 (the year of publication of Sharing the Light of Faith: National Catechetical Directory for Catholics of the United States). I literally grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, and I remember nothing from my religious education classes except playing volleyball, having rap sessions and deciding whom we would kick out of a fallout shelter if the bomb dropped, all of which I could have done without religious education.

“He is absolutely right. I was a part of that. We painted rocks for class.”

I do not remember learning much about the Church, its history, structure, magisterium, and Scriptures, and I wanted to know. I do not remember ever seeing anything resembling a textbook in high-school religious education. I wanted to know how we got from Jesus to the Church of the twentieth century, what were the differences between the Protestants and us, why there were different Christian denominations, what made sacraments so special and from where sacred Scripture had come, among other things. I knew my own personal theology, in which evolution figured prominently, but had no way of knowing that it was consistent with Catholic teaching, and misrepresentations of Catholic teaching by non-Catholics and the press did not help matters any. I do not remember ever hearing of Vatican II, let alone knowing what it was, until I went to college. And, again, I wanted to know. I finally decided to study theology at the graduate level, with no other motivation than personal enrichment, to learn basic information about the Catholic Church and its story.

Certainly, parents were responsible as primary educators, and I know that I learned a good deal more at home about Catholicism than did most of my contemporaries [thus, all of my siblings are still practicing Catholics with no divorces]. Still, I think even parents assumed that we were learning more than we were at Catholic school and religious education, because they assumed a systematic religious education similar to the one through which they had learned. But things were changing drastically.

Ours is the generation that arrived at school one day to find Sister in a new, abbreviated habit. On another day we learned that the school would no longer attend daily Mass. My sister, one year ahead of me, learned to confess her sins according to species and number. I cannot remember hearing of such a thing until my sister told me about it well after I had participated in the Sacrament of Reconciliation a number of times. My second grade class was the last one at our parish to march two by two into the church, girls in white dresses and veils, boys in white shirts and dark ties, to receive our First Holy Communion as a class. My brother, one year behind me, and our younger siblings received their First Eucharist at home Masses. In a few short years a generation of little children stepped across that epochal line between the old and the new, unaware of their place in salvation history and the implications it would have in their lives.

Our parochial school was not staffed primarily by the sisters as in days gone by. In eight years of parochial school only two of my teachers were sisters. Still, almost all of the teachers in our school were excellent, but many were young without much background in religious education. At the same time, even the more experienced teachers were expected to adjust to religious education materials that concentrated more and more on personal experience, self esteem, relationships, and less and less on religion.

We must face the fact that my generation is almost wholly ignorant of the catechism that helped mold the majority of Catholics who directed our catechesis.

Amidst all this, Catholics were unsure about what they could teach and with what vocabulary they could teach it, as self-styled progressives denigrated much of pre-Vatican II catechetical content, method, and terminology. Most Catholic parents and teachers probably wanted to support Vatican II initiatives, and they themselves struggled with the changes it brought to their own experience of the Church, but unlike our parents and teachers, those of us growing up in the period did not have the pre-Vatican II experience from which to put it all in perspective.

As I expressed a condensed version of the above, Mr. Reichert nodded his head, and when I finished he addressed the others present, “Ladies and gentlemen, this young man’s catechetical experience is the experience of most of the parents of children in our religious education programs. What does that tell you about where we have a lot of work to do?” And those gathered answered with him, “The parents.”

Mr. Reichert continued, “He is absolutely right. I was a part of that. We painted rocks for class.” He admitted that that was the mood of the times and that catechesis suffered for it.

Further elucidation of this situation might be gleaned from a comment made by Matt Hayes, a member of the United States Catholic Conference’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Implementation of the Catechism. At a recent workshop on the CCC given in the Diocese of _______, Mr. Hayes admitted that many are anticipating the CCC with skepticism because, though it will be a major catechism, the catechetical context for its reception is a minor catechism, namely the Baltimore Catechism (1885), derived from the last major catechism of the universal church, the so-called Roman Catechism of 1566.

And this demands that we stop apologizing for Catholic teaching that was commissioned by Jesus and handed on through the apostles and their successors.

Some may argue that this view ignores such catechetical documents as the General Catechetical Directory (1971), Sharing the Light of Faith: National Catechetical Directory for Catholics of the United States (1979), and the Apostolic Exhortation on Catechetics (Catechesi Tradendae) (1979). I would disagree. I believe that though these are important documents, they are virtually unknown to most Catholics in the pew, and even to many of those charged with directing catechetical programs. Furthermore, unlike these documents, the Baltimore Catechism was a catechism, in a form accessible to the Catholic in the pew, so widely distributed and implemented over such a long period of time that its use and eventual removal affected the catechetical experience of the Church of the United States in a unique and lasting way. Accordingly, the Baltimore Catechism can be properly said to be the catechetical context for the reception of the CCC by the Church in the United States.

If then the Baltimore Catechism is the catechetical context for the reception of the CCC, then for many it is a context of ignorance. Like most of my contemporaries, I have never seen the Baltimore Catechism (except possibly some snippets of it, as of some relic, in a graduate ecclesiology course). This is notwithstanding the fact that I am thirty-three years old and have attended Catholic elementary school and junior high, religious education in high school, a Jesuit college and graduate school in theology.

As a director of religious education, I am fully aware that many catechetical leaders, who dismiss with a shudder the Baltimore Catechism as one might dismiss a period of imprisonment, not without torture, would consider this ignorance of it to be a true sign of the great strides made in religious education since the Second Vatican Council. I leave it to theologians to debate the merit of that point of view. Whether or not the Baltimore Catechism should have been used in our education is not as relevant or important as the blunt fact that it was not. We must face the fact that my generation is almost wholly ignorant of the catechism that helped mold the majority of Catholics who directed our catechesis.

Thus, it is time to realize that if the Baltimore Catechism is the practical context for the reception of the CCC, then the vast majority of Catholics in the United States in their mid-thirties and younger have little or no knowledge of the Catholic Church, its foundation, its history, its Scriptures, its theologies, its sacraments, its hierarchy, its magisterium, its relationship to Protestant denominations, its relevance in their lives. They have never heard of the Baltimore Catechism. Consequently, it is time to stop reacting to the Baltimore Catechism and the methods used to teach from it, and it is time to offer a substantial religious education that puts demands for learning on those who are instructed by it, just as the Christian life puts demands for living on those who are called to it. And this demands that we stop apologizing for Catholic teaching that was commissioned by Jesus and handed on through the apostles and their successors. The Church is not perfect, given the sinfulness of its members, but it was founded and commissioned by Jesus (Matthew 16:18-19; 18:18; 28:18-20) and has a profound theological and magisterial tradition, and that needs no apology.

Part Two to follow shortly.

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Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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