By Anthony Esolen

I am relieved to find that Pope Francis has refrained from saying that someday we may be conferring, or pretending to confer, Holy Orders upon women. It keeps alive the possibility that the churches East and West may reunite. It averts an inevitable and devastating schism. It allows the faithful to retain their trust that, as Sigrid Undset's convert Paul Selmer says in The Burning Bush, it is the Church's boast not to have changed her doctrine, so that what we believe is but an organic development of truths revealed already to the apostles.

Nor do I think it wise to attend to anything at all that the current culture, or whatever we call whatever it is that is widespread and that mimics the action of a culture without its soul, has to say about sex. Al Capone, I have heard, repented of his crimes in prison, but before he did that, I would not consult him for moral advice, nor would I have him fill out my taxes. Yet I think that even the unrepentant Capone would be a more reliable guide on right and wrong than our society is on sex, marriage, and the raising of girls and boys. I am not going to order food from people who come unwashed from swimming in a sewer.

To take but one obvious form of our madness, we now have men and boys competing against women and girls in sports, clobbering them, and we have decided that all the armies in the history of the world have gotten it wrong until now, so that women must be allowed to be in the infantry, in combat.

Pride goeth before a fall, we say, but what shall we say when pride persists even after embarrassment upon embarrassment, defeat upon defeat?

The German prelates, standing in the midst of the collapse of the faith in their own nations, instead of donning the sackcloth and heaping ashes over their heads in penitence, not only insist on continuing to dose themselves with the secular nostrums that have rotted their lungs out in the first place; they insist on prescribing them for everyone else.

Religious sisters who have presided over the disastrous collapse of their orders, learning nothing by it and repenting of nothing, still pluck away at their single-stringed harp, demanding an innovation that would seem pretty clearly at odds with somebody named Saint Paul, and they do so while invoking "the Spirit," presumably a different Spirit from the one who inspired Saint Paul.

Unless, perhaps, the Spirit is not a Person but a vague movement, a something-or-other working its way by fits and starts through human history, a Spirit of democracy, a Spirit of political freedom - who knows? The shadowy sisters know.

Do you wish, sisters, to be leaders of men? How about first being teachers of boys? If you cannot do the lesser, you can forget about the greater. Do you wish, German prelates, to instruct the world? How about first instructing the couple shacking up down the street? Do you wish, whoever in the Vatican came up with the silly idea of an anime-cartoon figure named Luce to represent a pilgrim in the faith, to appeal to the natural human hunger for beauty? How about first reckoning with the flood of clumsy music, garish art, and blank architecture heaved upon the faithful for the last sixty years?

Your foundation is sagging because you built upon the sands of mass entertainment and mass production, but instead of condemning the mold-ridden and rickety things, and humbly learning the arts from builders who succeeded in the past, you go farther out into the void, thinking, "This time it will work!" It won't.

I should not suggest that only churchmen behave in this way. Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955, shortly after the chic wisdom had it that we should not teach reading as it had always been done in English, swiftly and efficiently, with phonics, but rather as if English were made of pictograms.

It is nearly seventy years later, and still the educational establishment has learned nothing from the failure. We can apply the analysis to other educational failure...