Saturday, December 21, 2019

Changing Times, Timeless Truths


December 21, 2019

By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In 1919 my father was mustered out of the Army after World War One. That was a pivotal year for millions of young men. They were making decisions about their own future as well as that of their country. Dad was making plans too. Years later, he remarked that, as he had surveyed the America of 1919, the most respected members of the community seemed to be the teacher, the doctor, the lawyer, and the priest.
At this time of year, folks often reminisce about how things were when they were kids — or when their grandparents were. A century ago, broadcast radio was in its infancy. So too were automobiles, airplanes, even electricity. Yet, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and priests have been around for a long time — for millennia, in fact. One would think that, given the disruptive change in the realm of material progress, those professions that had been so
stable over the years would continue to be practiced and revered has they had since time immemorial. My, how things have changed!
Let’s start with teachers. In 1919 Dad began teaching history at the high school on the campus of Notre Dame University. At the time, that school had as many pupils as the university had students. As a history teacher specializing in American history, dad was able to attend law school on the side, as well as to write an American history textbook that became widely used in Catholic schools throughout the country.
Teaching was a noble profession, to be sure, but since Gorgias (~ 400 B.C.), the profession has been the target of scheming manipulators. As early as the 1860s, John Swett, superintendent of education in California, had challenged Catholic schools in the name of the power of the state. “Children belong do the state,” not to their families, he said. Therefore, the state and its “experts” should determine what children should study and who should teach them (at the time, California parents interviewed prospective teachers every year to decide who should stay and who should go). 
Swett, a Unitarian, was a radical, but he had a lot of allies. Three time zones away, Horace Mann was revolutionizing American education. As secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he developed the model for today’s public school system. He also developed what has become a critical ingredient in the corruption of modern public education: teachers’ colleges. We note that, once upon a time, teachers were among the brightest of their generation. Well, those days are over. Today, as Dr. Walter Williams laments, “schools of education” have become “the slums of the campuses,” and those attending them come from the lowest-performing tier of students in their high school graduating class.
The Wanderer has examined often and at length the vile concoction of ideologies that now constitutes “public education” and its impact on public policy. Here we offer only two observations: First, to this day, California’s largest government school union names its “highest honor” awarded every year after its founder — John Swett. And second, in spite of this record, countless Catholic schools in the United States require as a prerequisite for teaching the “professional” credentials bestowed by those same dubious “education schools.”
What About The Doctors?
In 1919, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin lay ten years in the future. Yet the doctor who delivered my grandmother’s first child on a hot July day in 1911 saved my grandmother’s life. On July 4, a neighborhood boy had thrown a firecracker under the porch on which she was sitting, and she went into labor. Alas, two painful days later, the baby was born dead and laid aside, as the doctor struggled to control its mother’s hemorrhaging.
Fortunately, the baby’s maternal grandmother, who had come to accompany her daughter during the last weeks of her pregnancy, was a Catholic. She picked up the “blue baby” and carried her to the nearest source of water — the bathtub. Turning on the cold water full blast, she held the baby under the faucet and said, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father and the Son….”
WAAAAA!
Well, my mother was baptized again some days later, and lived a vibrant life for 84 more years. And anyone marveling why I’m still a Catholic these days gets treated to a recounting of this rather central event in our family history, rendered under the portrait of my great-grandmother prominently displayed in our dining room.
Medicine has made great strides in the past century, for good and for ill. I wonder today whether its practitioners would merit the bow of respect with which my father honored it in his youth.
Lawyers . . . Their
Number Is Legion
After he graduated in 1922, my father continued teaching, this time across campus at Notre Dame’s Law School. Countless disasters have been wrought in the name of the law in the years since. Were they the fault of lawyers? The late Charles Rice, The Wanderer’s longtime friend who began teaching Con Law at Notre Dame fifty years ago, blamed the corruption of the law and the legal profession on the widespread adoption of Legal Positivism.
In the words of Justice Arthur Goldberg, we might call this creation of Austrian law professor Hans Kelsen a “gross canard, cut out of whole cloth.” The theory’s fundamental quality is its total rejection of the natural law. According to Kelsen, if the law was legally adopted by a legitimate body, there was no higher standard by which to judge it.
Consistent to the end, Kelsen survived both world wars and, in his autumn years, insisted that there was no moral basis for condemning the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. After all, they were authorized by the law existing at the time. Today’s legal atrocities can be traced by the gradual adoption by law schools, the courts, and the legal community of the Kelsen standard.
But wait — what about the Constitution? Thomas Jefferson warned in 1798 that we must stand firm in its defense: “In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” he wrote. But slowly, beginning over 100 years ago, the virtue of judicial restraint — the “chains” invoked by Jefferson — were gradually loosened, then sundered, giving way to judicial hubris and arrogance.
“We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is,” New York Gov. Charles Evans Hughes said in 1907. And as chief justice, Hughes presided over the Supreme Court in the 1930s as KKK alumnus Hugo Black and his radical colleague William O. Douglas dismantled those chains, to the applause of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
That corrupting enterprise has continued virtually without interruption through the years. Will it be reversed? Many today are hopeful, but few are really optimistic. And if it is, don’t expect lawyers to be in the lead.
Thou Art A Priest Forever
“Satan has a fierce hatred of priests. He wants to defile them, to make them fall, to pervert them. Why? Because by their whole life they proclaim the truth of the Cross” — Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent.
Perhaps we should let Cardinal Sarah have the last word. A blessed Christmas to all.

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