Priest: You've contracepted our parochial school out of existence

[Bubba_Switzler]

I intended to devalue the secular world. I do not think there was/is or ever will be a golden age for the Church/faith. However, I do believe we have seen many down ages for the Church, and I believe we might be living in the very worst ever.

I have a different perspective: each age has its social challenges and ours is the challenge of neopaganism. I don’t share your disdain for the secular world, I think the challenge for the Church today is to reclaim the secular world from the pagans. I don’t think Catholicism can survive, much less thrive, by abandoning the secular world to the pagans.

I do believe that Catholicism has something important to contribute to the secular world, not just promises for the afterlife, and that much harm is done by disjoining the two. And by “important” I don’t mean just a more comfortable mortal existence, I mean cosmically, theologically, eternally important.

Under several Roman emperors the Church was persecuted and Christians martyred. We are not yet to that point, the battle is entirely intellectual at this point. (Setting aside persecution in the Islamic world here.) It may yet come to that if the Church hides from the world.

 

[Brendan]

I know of a family with 5 children in a small, three bedroom house. The kids are home-schooled, so the family only has one income. …

What you describe is pretty much our family. I make a good living (an engineer), but we are a single income home.

We lived in a 1400 sq ft home, 3 bedroom with 5 kids. I will admit that when the real estate bust hit, we took the opportunity to upgrade to a 4 bed 2800 sq ft home. We purchased our house before the boom, so didn’t really lose anything in the bust

We have six kids now, high school down to preschool, and yes we do homeschool ( Catholic school is just too expensive with 6 kids)

So yes it can work.

 

[Brendan]

But of course the marginal child does not cost the same as the first child …

I was one of six kids myself. Back in the 70’s and 80’s it was unusual to have a family that six, but not especially so.

But even then, my dad was asked how he could afford to have six kids.

His response was that it cost just as much to raise six kids and it did to raise one…every cent you got.