The Great Modern Need — Better Mothers
by Rev. Bertin Roll, O.F.M., CAP.
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One of the greatest challenges facing modern society is the making of better wives, better mothers, better grandmothers, so that children growing up at home may learn how to live.
Our school buildings, equipment, books, and teachers have moved ahead with the fast pace of modern development, but our spiritual follow-through in many homes is lagging. Consequently, many boys and girls, despite a Catholic schooling, have become failures just because their homes are spiritually behind time. After all, the school has the children under its direction only about 11 per cent of the time in a year. Mothers and dads have the children the other 89 per cent of the time. That is why more attention must be given to mothers and dads, and especially to mothers who are almost constantly with the children. One of J. Edgar Hoover's reports listed the alarming fact that over 108,000 of our American boys and girls under twenty-one were arrested in one year for criminal offenses. A study of the case histories of these youths revealed that seven reasons led up to their failures. One of the seven reasons comprised such things as had companions, bad literature, bad movies, dirty jokes, and the like. The other six reasons, were found in the home life, or lack of home life, that was theirs. So when the Church works on improving conditions in the home, she shows her divine wisdom because the home is the basic unit of all society. Better homes, better towns, better nations, better citizens! The key to all this betterment is the mother, the heart, and dad, the head of the home.
Don't Leave God Out
Ours is an age of gadgets and noise. Radio-clocks awaken millions of homes each morning. Immediately the noise of the world comes thundering into our minds — weather report, road condition, time, news, spinning of records, commercials — and people don't stop to think they are alive. Children and adults, many of them, do not say any kind of prayer before leaving home. Children in Catholic schools pray along with Sister in the first class and make an Act of Contrition in the last class and consider these prayers as their morning and night prayers. Saturday, Sunday, and all vacation there is no school, no Sisters — and no prayers.. All this in spite of God's warning, "Without Me you can do nothing." Such people become victims of the false standards of success in America — own your own home, your own automobile and have healthy children, two of them. America asks, "What do you have?" "How much do you own?" Christ asks, "What do you do?" "How do you live?" We may certainly have all the modern facilities that America offers — but God must not be left out. "Unless the Lord built the house they labor in vain who build it."
Christian mothers have to be continually reminded to pray with their children, or at least to ask them if they have said their prayers. The sad fact is that 65 per cent of the first-graders coming into Catholic schools cannot make the Sign of the Cross. They can patty-cake but cannot pray. Only a few know the Our Father and Hail Mary by heart, but almost all of them know the songs on the Hit Parade by heart. Could you picture the Blessed Mother living with an ordinary family when one of the fight nights on TV comes along? It is time for the little ones to go to bed, so the Blessed Mother and the dad and mother are sitting in three big soft chairs in front of the television set. Could you picture the mother saying to the little ones, "Now get upstairs, brush your teeth, say your night prayers and get to sleep. We have a good fight coming on here, and we want no noise from you kids."
During the day God is crowded out of the minds of many mothers by the constant distraction of a radio or TV. No wonder some Catholic women have false ideas on marriages and divorce and a warped sense of humor. It is because of some of the soap box serials, songs, and scummy brand of entertainment that at times find their way into homes through the radio and TV. We advocate a quiet period now and then during the day: turn the radio and TV off and teach the children to be quiet for ten minutes. Sit down, relax, think, pray — give God a chance. Ask yourself: "Why am I living? Why am I working so hard? Are my husband and family proud of me? Am I a better person today than yesterday? Better now than the day I was married? Am I grateful for my motherhood?" Such a quiet period now and then works wonders.
Re-Learn the Dignity of Motherhood
Some mothers must re-learn the dignity of their position as mothers. Draw a mother closer to Christ, and you draw a family closer to Christ. Allow the mother to drift from Christ, and an entire family drifts from Christ. Have you ever noticed how bad tempers as well as the virtue of patience run in families? If a mother has a sharp tongue, count on her children's being the same or worse because of the bad example displayed before them for many years. Foul tongues run in families. So do mixed marriages and divorces. Drink and gamble problems are family rooted. That is why the mother or dad who is only half-Catholic is rearing the next generation, in spite of Catholic Church and school, to be the same weak type.
Half -Catholics Not Wanted
Our Lord will not settle for half measures. All or nothing is Christ's demand. Yet there are too many half-Catholics. Spot them!
Haven't you met the type of Catholic who wears a Holy Name button, brags about his membership, and yet disgraces them both by his habitual foul language and dirty jokes?
Half-Catholics loudly pronounce the Legion of Decency pledge, but fail to check on the Legion's list and are seen attending condemned pictures in the theatres and drive-ins, patronizing night clubs with spicy entertainment, and absorbing printed poison in the form of salacious reading material.
Listen to this half-Catholic: "I like kids just as much as anybody does, but no priest is going to tell me how to run our marriage. Father doesn't pay for the shoes or the doctor bills, and besides, birth control isn't wrong because 'everybody does it.'"
The half-Catholic thinks with his heart instead of his head when it comes to divorce and remarriage. God said: "What God has joined together let no man tear asunder," but the half-Catholic claims "I don't agree with the Church on divorce; he beat her and she's still very young. Why shouldn't she divorce him and get someone who can make her happy?" Half-Catholics hate the word adultery.
A typical half-Catholic would not dare miss midnight Mass on Christmas but starts each year with one foot in hell by being intoxicated "with the gang" on New Year's Eve.
The half-Catholic splurges when it comes to costly entertainment, but fails to register in a definite parish because "they'll stick me with envelopes." He shops on Sunday and sees no need for Catholic schools and parish societies. Most sermons are too long for him. He looks for the shortest Mass and hopes to find "a good back seat" so he can be first to leave. Regular Communion, to his mind, is only for "holy old maids." His St. Christopher medal entitles him to break all speed limits. Finally, if his views clash with those of Christ, he says in action if not in so many words: "I'll have to disagree with Him, too."
Such half-Catholics go merrily but blindly on their way, ignoring the terrifying warning of God: "I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. But because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit you out of My mouth."
A Mother's Quiz
It's certainly uphill work for mothers to be good and to keep their children good. Mother's success could in large part be measured by the answers she gives to the following questions:
- Do I cooperate with the Sisters in the education of my children or do I immediately find fault with the Sisters when difficulty arises?
- Can I say to my children: "Never say anything that mother would not say"?
- Do I speak more of the things I like about people than of the things I dislike about them?
- In difficulties and joys do I say to the family: "Let's tell God about it"?
- Are my children learning to be calm when things go wrong because I myself am a patient mother?
- Are my children learning to be charitable and tolerant of the faults of others because I am charitable and tolerant?
- Have I fulfilled my obligation of instructing my children regarding holy purity, or have I allowed them to shift for themselves, getting their ideas from other boys and girls, bad movies and pictures, ungodly literature and from gutters?
- Would Christ approve of the magazines and comic books I allow to come into my home?
- Am I more concerned about keeping my rugs and furniture in good condition than my children?
Make Contributions To The Home In The Home
The self-sacrificing mother who will stay at home and be a mother and a homemaker will form the minds and hearts of her children. However, too many married women — more now than during the war — are working away from home. As one writer put it, "with father on the night shift and mother on the day shift, the children are left to shift for themselves." We pity those who have to work, but too frequently married women are refusing the responsibility of motherhood with all its sacrifices in order to have luxuries and equipment that they have seen in the homes of other people. In their attempt to solve the financial problem, they create two much worse problems: delinquency and divorce. In homes where both mother and dad are away from home, delinquency and divorce are much higher than where dad is the breadwinner and mother the manager in the home.
Let Your Fashions Be Modern, Yet Modest
The matter of decency and modesty of dress bears directly on the question of making better wives and mothers. Women and girls must return to a sense of modesty, and the approach they can take is to dress properly for given occasions.
If we see girls and women at the beach or swimming pool in beach clothes or swimming suits, that is what we expect. But when some Catholic women and girls do their shopping in shorts and halter, and even brazenly come to Confession in slacks, jeans, or shorts, they cheapen themselves, lower the standards of womanhood and become sexually alluring — not attractive — to boys and men. Pity the boy today who is trying to be good and to keep his mind pure. He would have to have ice water in his veins not to be tempted by some of the feminine exhibitionists who flaunt their wares in public.
Our modern advertisers come in for a large share of blame, too. Never before in history has the body of women been exploited for the sake of sales as much as in the past ten years. No matter what the advertisers have to sell: beer, cigarettes, movies, tractors, calendars, cosmetics, towels — no matter what — they expose to some extent the body of a woman. Today we find smiling out from billboards, newspapers, magazines, posters, and even from the living-room TV, half-nude women.
How far away are such girls and women from the Catholic thought that their body is a temple of God, a shrine for new life, destined to spend eternity with God in heaven!
All in all, without touching on other problems faced by the Church today, the great modern need still remains better mothers who will, as did the original group of Christian Mothers, strive to better themselves, assist one another, and thus educate their children at home to be ideal Catholic boys and girls.
Discussion Questions
- What is your practicable plan for increasing the prayer life of your family?
- It is a woman's greatest dignity to be a mother. Discuss.
- What points should be stressed in the mother's education of her daughters?
- What constitutes the ideal mother?
© Family Life Bureau
This item 7857 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
