Nothing New: The Corrupting Quality of Popular Media

[Timidity]

Here’s an interesting quote I’ve found in reference to the horrible influence of mass media in the United States.

The media in question isn’t the Internet, nor movies, nor television, nor even radio. Written in 1853, it complains about the immoraility of American literature!

Just goes to show that nothing really ever changes…The corruption of the cheap trash literature, that is now ordinarily supplied for the amusement and instruction of the American people,—and that threatens to uproot and annihilate all the notions of virtue and morals that remain, in spite of sectarianism,—calls for some antidote, some remedy. In every rail car, omnibus, stage coach, steamboat, or canal packet, publications, containing the most poisonous principles and destructive errors, are presented to, and are purchased by, passengers of both sexes, whose minds, like the appetites of hungry animals, will take to eating the filthiest stuff, rather than want food for rumination. It is for the philanthropists of the present day, and for those who are paid for making such inquiries, to trace the connection between the roués of your cities, your Bloomer women, your spiritual rappers, and other countless extravagances of a diseased public mind, and between the abominable publications to which we allude.

Father Hugh Quigley (“A Missionary Priest”)
The Cross and the Shamrock, 1853
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[gam197]

Hope you don’t believe what you wrote…While this was the case in 1853, and throughout history, it can nowhere compare with what has happened in today’s society. After being literally beaten up and fighting for thousands of years , catholics have simply lost the battle. Abortion, contraception,emergency contraception over the counter for all ages, internet pornagraphy,pornography on TV and in most 7/11 type stores plus at most book stores,drugs atc… Corrupt novels would hardly even be addressed today. Yet, we are trying to fight back.

Do people want to go back to the good old days? Many don’t because they remember how difficult they were. The hypocrisy was brutal. Money ruled the day, as it still does today but atleast it is more open. If someone is doing something corrupt inside the church, atleast they address it. That is an improvement over just watching it happen and pretending it didn’t. Don’t believe that outside the church there has been a change as we are still attracted to and ruled by money. That is why shows like desperate housewife(infidelity in the middle class) and Sopranoes(powerful Mafia) are popular. Can’t change some things.

 

[GregoryPalamas]

I teach Comparative Religion classes at a college in our area. The issue of Western moral corruption of the world always comes up. People from Muslim lands always complain that since Christian America produces all of trashy films etc that they do it is obvious that Christianity is week or corrupt. Hence, proving to Muslims once again, that Islam is the one and only true religion and that America is in desperate need of conversion. To a great extent I agree. We do need conversion, and for the reasons listed, but not to Islam but to true Catholicism.

CDL

 

[puzzleannie]

Little Women contained an interchange between Jo March, who had been earning money writing “sensation stories”–many of which have since been re-published, kind of true confessions full of murder, adultery, and other crimes–and Prof. Bhaer, the older man who has become her mentor (and whom she later marries). He warns her of the danger these stories can do to the innocent children and uneducated people who read them and absorb their warped values. In at least two of her other books, Old Fashioned Girl and Rose in Bloom a parent figure warns young innocent girls about the danger of racy novels–especially French novels, presumably Balzac and other of the day.

Some books of what L. M. Alcott was talking about have since become classics, but the market at that time was flooded with pulp fiction pushing anti-family values. Some things never change. Roman commentators warned about the same things.

 

[gam197]

Teresa of Avila.(1500’s) tells in her autobiography, “Way of Perfection” how her mother or step-mother got Teresa involved in reading romance novels.

Books were not freely available until the printing press(1450) invention. The average Joe didn’t learn to read until much later… ( Horace Mann"Father of American Public education" was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, May 4, 1796.From bio…Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, public school students attended classes for only a few weeks each winter, often in poorly equipped schoolhouses with untrained teachers.)

IDoes anyone in America not know that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are expecting??