Children of Winter: On the Betrayal of Children by Catholic Educators

Rating:
Summary: Tracing today's cultural rot back to clerical treason
Review: I bought *Children of Winter* on the sole basis of the subtitle («How the classroom is murdering the innocence of your child») and the five-sentence description in a specialized Catholic catalogue. I therefore had only a very faint idea of its contents, believing it to be a wholesale attack on «values-free education» combined with an attempt to understand the causes of the general malaise in the educational system, of which I am a firsthand observer.

But James Demers' book is much more focused than that. It can best be described as a semi-autobiographical series of vignettes charting the development of Canadian education and mores from the fifties to the nineties, interspersed with more structured chapters relying mostly on quotations to document the deeper origins of the decay.

As a Catholic, Demers concentrates on religious causes: the abandonment of the Baltimore Catechism, with its clear-cut answers, in favour of bland, relativistic New Age catechisms, in which sometimes as little as 3% of Catholic dogma was covered; the dumbing down of the traditional Mass and its replacement with an impoverished, feel-good, clap-your-hands mockery of the liturgy; and above all, the imposition on children in the «latency period» of highly explicit sexual education stressing mechanics and shedding morality.

According to Demers, all these developments can be traced to the hijacking of the Catholic Church by a small network of «dissenting clergy and renegade theologians» who have betrayed both the faithful and the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy in order to swamp the world with their own brand of modernism, rationalism and liberalism, based on specious interpretations of Vatican II documents.

Demers blames this fifth column, and such collaborators as meddling sociologists, «the feminist movement, Planned Parenthood, gay-lesbian equal rights activists, abortion advocates [and] jackbooted ex-nuns» for our modern despair and its myriad manifestations, from drug-addictions to sexual promiscuity, suicide, pornography and pedophilia.

*Children of Winter* is very different from the more dispassionate scholastic works I am used to reading. It is not the kind of book you reward with a «cogently argued and well researched» accolade: a compulsive underliner myself, I left the volume unmarked. The best way to get an idea of its tone is from the presentation of the author as «a broadcaster, teacher, and playwright with 25 years experience in education and the arts.» With his flair for drama, characterization, telling anecdotes, pop-culture references and high-impact images, Demers writes in a style much more reminiscent of a Stephen King than of a Catholic scholar like, say, Michael Davies.

The result is as good as modern journalism gets, which in my opinion deserves three stars, or the equivalent of two (frozen) thumbs up...

Rating:
Summary: Tracing today's cultural rot back to clerical treason
Review: I bought *Children of Winter* on the sole basis of the subtitle («How the classroom is murdering the innocence of your child») and the five-sentence description in a specialized Catholic catalogue. I therefore had only a very faint idea of its contents, believing it to be a wholesale attack on «values-free education» combined with an attempt to understand the causes of the general malaise in the educational system, of which I am a firsthand observer.

But James Demers' book is much more focused than that. It can best be described as a semi-autobiographical series of vignettes charting the development of Canadian education and mores from the fifties to the nineties, interspersed with more structured chapters relying mostly on quotations to document the deeper origins of the decay.

As a Catholic, Demers concentrates on religious causes: the abandonment of the Baltimore Catechism, with its clear-cut answers, in favour of bland, relativistic New Age catechisms, in which sometimes as little as 3% of Catholic dogma was covered; the dumbing down of the traditional Mass and its replacement with an impoverished, feel-good, clap-your-hands mockery of the liturgy; and above all, the imposition on children in the «latency period» of highly explicit sexual education stressing mechanics and shedding morality.

According to Demers, all these developments can be traced to the hijacking of the Catholic Church by a small network of «dissenting clergy and renegade theologians» who have betrayed both the faithful and the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy in order to swamp the world with their own brand of modernism, rationalism and liberalism, based on specious interpretations of Vatican II documents.

Demers blames this fifth column, and such collaborators as meddling sociologists, «the feminist movement, Planned Parenthood, gay-lesbian equal rights activists, abortion advocates [and] jackbooted ex-nuns» for our modern despair and its myriad manifestations, from drug-addictions to sexual promiscuity, suicide, pornography and pedophilia.

*Children of Winter* is very different from the more dispassionate scholastic works I am used to reading. It is not the kind of book you reward with a «cogently argued and well researched» accolade: a compulsive underliner myself, I left the volume unmarked. The best way to get an idea of its tone is from the presentation of the author as «a broadcaster, teacher, and playwright with 25 years experience in education and the arts.» With his flair for drama, characterization, telling anecdotes, pop-culture references and high-impact images, Demers writes in a style much more reminiscent of a Stephen King than of a Catholic scholar like, say, Michael Davies.

The result is as good as modern journalism gets, which in my opinion deserves three stars, or the equivalent of two (frozen) thumbs up...