Chapter 7: Tradition and the Family

Chapter 7 of Dr Edward Schaeffer's new book, A Simple Man’s Case for Tradition, written for the average Catholic in the pew, not a professional "liturgist".

From One Peter Five

By Edward Schaeffer, PhD

Editor’s note: we continue our weekly serialisation of Dr. Edward Schaefer’s new book A Simple Man’s Case for Tradition. This book is an excellent introduction to Traditionalism and provides an easy way for Trads to introduce the movement to fellow Catholics who are seeking deeper answers to today’s questions. Proceeds from the book sale also help promote the Collegium Sanctorum Angelorum, one of only two traditional Catholic colleges in the United States.

Read the Introduction
Read Chapter 1: Equally Valid and Holy
Read Chapter 2: the New Mass
Read Chapter 3: Latin

Read Chapter 4: Practice and Belief

Read Chapter 5: One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

Read Chapter 6: Modernism

Changes in the Family Since WWII

Women in the Workplace

The second half of the twentieth century may someday be described by historians as an era of change that compares to the Millenium or the Protestant Revolt.  The changes were many, in every facet of society, and they left no one unaffected, including Catholics and the Church.  Here I will give just a few examples of changes that affected the lives of American Catholic families in particular.  The list is demonstrative, not exhaustive.

During WWII women, whose husbands were at war, left their homes and replaced their husbands in factories across the country, making needed machinery, munitions and supplies for the war effort.  Collectively they became a cultural icon known as “Rosie the Riveter.”  After the war, these same women returned to their homes, took up their traditional roles as homemakers and, along with the husbands, helped to fill the country with children, over 68,000,000, who would come to be known as the Baby Boomer generation. 

However, the door had been opened for women in the workplace and two wage earners in the family.  Offices and factories would no longer be solely the domain of men.  For just one example, there is a compelling non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly called Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race that documents the contributions of black women working as mathematicians at NASA in completing the first successful US space flight orbiting the earth.[1]  Today, over half the households in the US have two wage earners,[2] which has resulted in over 12,000,000 children under the age of five in daycare.[3]  Families are hiring institutions to raise and form their children, institutions that often do not share the values of the families that have entrusted them with their children.

The pressures of managing a family with two wage earners has also affected family time together.  For example, a 2017 study revealed that while “84% of parents agreed that family meals were important, only 50% of family dinners were eaten together.”[4]  Another study “found that the average American only has three dinners a week with their families.”[5] While the benefits of family meals are well documented,[6] families are having fewer and fewer meals together.

Television and Electronic Media

Also, after WWII, televisions became more and more common in US homes.  On the one hand, information, education, and entertainment that had previously been unavailable to families was now accessible with the click of a switch and the turn of a dial.  On the other hand, the family home, which had been an impregnable fortress against outside influence and where the guidance and formation of the parents had reigned supreme and unquestioned, was now invaded by an external force that brought unfamiliar inspiration, sway, and even authority to the family discussions.  With the continued development of electronic media devices, such as computers, cell phones, large-screen TVs with hundreds of cable channels, etc., that outside influence has only accelerated since the early post-war years.

Economic Prosperity

The economic boom that followed WWII benefited everyone, Catholics included.  Catholics, whose parents had entered the US as factory workers or laborers in the industrial revolution, began to move up in society filling colleges and white-collar positions.  Perhaps the culminating sign of Catholics becoming mainstream in the US was the election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, to the presidency.  Today, Catholics enjoy virtually all the material benefits that American society offers them, along with all the temptations that materialism presents to them.

Contraception

In 1960, the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive, the birth control pill.  Sex was now separated from childbearing.  Catholics, who were often noted for having large families because of the Church teaching that every act of sexual intercourse must be open to creation, were not immune from the pressures that both the materialism of American society and the easy availability of contraception bore on them.  Catholics began to contracept, and Catholic families began to shrink in size.  After Vatican Council II, there was widespread belief that the Church would change her teaching against the use of contraception.  Most Catholics were already using the pill.  In fact, in 1968, when Pope Paul VI affirmed the constant Church teaching against the use of contraception,[7] there was a revolt.  Even clergy, one of the most prominent of whom was Rev. Charles Curran of The Catholic University of America, publicly dissented.[8] At first, Catholics were publicly hostile.  If a priest preached against contraception at Mass, he might well be accosted by angry parishioners afterward.  Eventually, however, Catholics simply began to ignore the official teaching, justifying their decisions on the primacy of their personal conscience, which the documents of Vatican Council II were widely interpreted to affirm.[9] 

There were efforts by some Catholics to keep faithful to Church teaching by practicing what was called Natural Family Planning, which consisted of monitoring certain symptoms in a woman, such as basal temperature, cervical mucus, and cervical opening and closing, to determine when a woman was fertile and, therefore, when intercourse was likely to result in pregnancy.[10]  Using this system, Catholics could time when to engage in sexual intercourse and avoid pregnancy without using the forbidden contraceptives. Technically, they were remaining open to the possibility of pregnancy. However, depending on how scrupulously the system was followed, the likelihood of avoiding pregnancy could be increased to 98%, equal to or greater than the likelihood offered by the pill or condoms. Thus, many Catholics – not all – employed Natural Family Planning in a way that technically fulfilled the requirements of the law, but that was, in spirit, used with a contraceptive mentality. Catholic families continued to shrink in size. The mandate to “increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it,”[11] was seen in the context of having to provide various material needs for the family, which only continued to grow.  This contraceptive mentality was even supported by Pope Francis himself when he said, “God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that – excuse the word – that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No.”[12] In short, the various societal pressures mentioned above have resulted in the vast majority of Catholics being no different from the general population with regard to their thinking about sexual intercourse and childbearing. They have separated the two.

The Women’s Movement

While the women’s movement has roots that reach all the way back to 1792,[13] the cultural revolution of the 1960s gave it a surge of power that it had never experienced before. Carrie Gress, in her persuasive study of the movement entitled The End of Woman – How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, discusses the women’s movement of the 1960s, known as feminism’s “second wave.”[14] She notes that events and phenomena such as

Vietnam, Woodstock, psychedelic drugs, universal consciousness, the civil rights movement, the Pill, a string of political assassinations, the Second Vatican Council, the Cold War, and the nuclear threat rocked the culture with change and transformation. These were a backdrop that allowed feminist leaders of the 1960s to build upon on earlier feminist and communist ideas and lay the groundwork for and execute the ideas of second-wave feminism.  The sexual revolution, in particular, was in full swing, and the second wave feminism was like gasoline on its early flames.[15]

In the late 1960s, somewhere in the west Greenwich Village section of New York City, at Lila Karp’s apartment, twelve women, led by Kate Millett, sat around a large table and repeated this chant: “Why are we here today?” the chairwoman asked.

“To make revolution.”

“What kind of revolution?”

“The Cultural Revolution.”

“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?”

“By destroying the American family!”

“How do we destroy the American family?”

“By destroying the American Patriarch.”

“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?”

“By taking away his power!”

“How do we do that?”

“By destroying monogamy!”

“How do we destroy monogamy?”

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality!”[16]

The movement has been inordinately successful in accomplishing these goals. The family has collapsed (discussed below); men have been emasculated; the word “patriarch” has ominous connotations; committed monogamous relationships are passé; and promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality are all normal parts of everyday American life.

Even the Church has not escaped feminism’s influence. For example, women are commonly seen in the Mass (novus ordo Missae) as readers, acolytes, and ministers of communion. The recent 2023 Synod on Synodality even discussed the topic of ordaining women to the diaconate, and Pope Francis has asked members of the International Theological Commission to help “demasculinize” the Church, stating that, “one of the great sins we have had is ‘masculinizing’ the church,”[17]

The Result

What has been the result of all this change?  It is not possible to say that any one particular societal change has caused a particular result.  The picture is complex.  However, no matter how one might analyze the present-day situation, one thing is clear: the societal convention of marriage and the traditional family has all but collapsed.  The following statistics come from a study titled “The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home” that was produced by a Joint Economic Committee of Congress:

• In 1962, 71% of women ages 15-44 were married. By 2019, this was down to 42%.
• In 1962, 5% of women ages 30-34 had never been married. By 2019, this was up to 35%.
• In the 1960s, less than 1% of couples living together were not married. Today, it is over 12%.
• The percentage of births to unmarried women has risen from 5% in 1960 to 40% in 2018.
• In 1970, 85% of children lived with two parents. By 2019, this was down to 70%.[18]

In citing these statistics, reporter Star Parker asks, “Why should the collapse of marriage in the United States concern us?”  His answer is twofold, both spiritual and economic:

To the large but dwindling number of Americans who care about traditional biblical morality, the collapse of marriage and family, the openness to other lifestyles prohibited by biblical morality, is of concern. It is not a healthy sign about what is happening in our culture.

For those whose concerns are more secular, the collapse of marriage is of concern because the practical results are not good.

A large body of research exists showing the social benefits of traditional marriage and family, and the social costs of their collapse.

In a recent interview, Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist James Heckman observed: “The main barriers to developing effective policies for income and social mobility is fear of honest engagement in the changes in the American family and the consequences it has wrought. … The family is the source of life and growth. Families build values, encourage (or discourage) their children in school and out. Families—far more than schools—create or inhibit life opportunities.”[19]

Star also concludes that while “families build values,” the collapse of the family indicates a change in values. “What seems clear,” he says, “is that the collapse of marriage and family that has been occurring in our nation is not occurring in a vacuum. Values are changing.”[20] He then demonstrates this with some revealing statistics, putting them in the context of significant legal decisions:

Gallup has been asking since 1952, “How important would you say religion is in your own life—very important, fairly important or not very important.”

In 1952, 75% said “very important.” In 1970, this was down to about 60%, and by 1978, this was down to 52%.”

It was in this environment of a dramatic drop in Americans’ sense of the personal importance of religion that, in 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion.

A wave of court decisions banned religion from the public square. In 1962, prayer in public school was banished.

In 2002 Gallup polling, 45% said to have a baby outside of marriage was morally acceptable. By 2015, this was up to 61%, and by 2019, it was up to 64%.[21]

The implication is that values are not simply changing.  At least from a biblical Catholic perspective they are declining, and Catholics have not escaped this decline in embracing and living biblical Catholic values.  At the risk of stating the obvious, this decline in embracing and living biblical Catholic values among Catholics has accompanied the decline in Mass attendance, discussed in chapter eight,[22] along with all the societal changes discussed above. 

This decline in Catholics embracing and living biblical Catholic values can be seen nowhere better than in the national elections.  In 2016, 51% of Catholics voted for Biden, a pro-abortion candidate, and 47% for Trump, a pro-life candidate, according to one poll and 50% for Trump and 49% for Biden in another poll.  Regardless of which poll is more accurate, both polls suggest that the Catholic vote was evenly split.[23]  Commentators talk about the importance of the black vote, the Hispanic vote, etc.  However, national elections are determined by the Catholic vote.  There are approximately 30,000,000 registered Catholic voters in the US.[24]  In the 2016 election mentioned above, if all Catholics had voted pro-life, that would have removed approximately 15,000,000 votes from the pro-abortion side of the ballot and added them to the pro-life side.  It would have been not just a victory for Trump; it would have been a landslide.  If Catholics voted “Catholic,” pro-abortion candidates, whether Biden or someone else, would never win a national election.  If Catholics voted “Catholic,” there would never have been the political will to legalize abortion or legalize gay marriage.  The fact that these phenomena exist is due in no small measure to the collapse of the family, especially in the Catholic Church, and the dissolution of biblical Catholic values among Catholics.

It is not a stretch to conclude that this change, or decline, in biblical Catholic values has been behind not just issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but also many of the other crises that are threatening the very nature of our country, such as exorbitant debt,[25] corruption in the government,[26] racial violence,[27] and open borders,[28] to mention but a few.  The collapse of the family and the decline of Catholics living biblical Catholic values is destroying American society.

The Resistance

There is, however, hope for the future.  A small but growing number of families are resisting the onslaught of societal changes that are destroying the family and our society.  These families have many, if not all, of the following characteristics:

• They make the sacrifices required to be one-wage-earner families.  Typically, the father is the bread winner, and the mother stays at home with the children. 
• They monitor and limit technology in the home.
• They have many children, ostensibly embracing God’s command to “increase and multiply, and fill the earth.”[29]
• They homeschool the children, or they form co-ops, or they send the children to private independent schools that are parent-run and unabashedly mission driven.[30]
• They adopt family policies of modesty.
• They eat family meals together.
• They pray together.

In addition, many of these families flock to the traditional Latin Mass.  In tradition they find support for the traditional values and lifestyle they embrace.  The traditional Latin Mass gives them an ecclesiastical partner in their efforts to live holy and virtuous lives, as they embrace the piety and sacramental life that the traditional Church promotes.

Conclusion

I find inspiration and hope in the resistance movement.  There is something profoundly holy in the choices these families make and the sacrifices they make to live out those choices.  These are families with whom I want to associate and with whom I would have my children associate.  They make excellent arguments – not in words, but in their actions, that is, in the way they live their lives – for choosing tradition.  Thus, because of the inspiration they give, the hope they offer, and the models they provide, I, too, choose tradition.

Continued next week.