How to teach girls virtue

Why I watch reality TV with my teenage daughters

I watch Made in Chelsea and Love Island with my teenage daughters to teach them about how sex outside marriage wreaks individual and social havoc. It’s a highly effective way of helping them see why Catholicism is correct about sexual morality. As Cardinal Mercier noted in his ‘The Duties of Married Life’, a Pastoral Letter from 1909, the ‘loose principles’ derived from such entertainment ‘prove excellent foils for the teachings of Christianity.’

‘Dastardly propaganda’

This warning reads like it could have been written today:

‘A dastardly propaganda, carried on by means of lectures, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and practical demonstrations, encourages the suppression of childbearing and induces parents to adopt homicidal practices in circumstances and to an extent hitherto unheard of…And, little by little, into every class of society there filters a series of rotten, unwholesome ideas, which threaten danger to the unborn child, if they do not render parenthood wholly contemptible. Before long, child-bearing will be viewed, not as a duty, but as a burden so inconvenient that it may be — perhaps ought to be — thrown off.’

As I have drawn attention to elsewhere, a falling fertility rate is throughout history the main sign of a collapsing civilisation.

Cardinal Mercier also stresses another familiar theme: male failure.

‘Have fathers of families displayed the watchfulness they should in bringing to justice the ruffians who, relying on our natural propensity to vice, are endeavouring to deluge decent homes with filthy literature?’

Muslim mothers protesting LGBTQ lessons outside schools, for example, have recently shown more courage than many Christian fathers.

‘Handing down treasures’

Whatever the propaganda, however, a victim narrative must be resisted.

‘The primary causes of the limitation of child-birth are hidden and personal. The notions of conjugal duty, of the healthy and vigorous education of children, are either changed or altogether perverted; and these are precisely the notions which must be strengthened in, or restored to, the moral conscience of parents.’

They must be restored because marriage is ‘an institution at once religious and national’. It ‘should by no means be confounded with those short-lived intrigues which last as long as the caprice of passion dictates.’

Just ‘as Christ desired to unite Himself to the company of believers that He might lead them to the happiness of Heaven’, so a man joins himself to a woman to continue his Christian civilisation:

‘the primordial raison d'etre of the union of man and wife is the foundation of a family, the procreation of children, whom they have the honour, not less than the obligation, of bringing up in Christian faith and morality; to these children they are commissioned to hand down the treasures which they themselves have inherited by the fact of their incorporation in the society called the Church.’

This is what sexual pleasure is for:

‘Just as Nature has attached a sensible pleasure to eating and drinking-functions by which the life of the individual is sustained-so she has placed in the attractions of love a guarantee of the perpetuation of our species.’

‘Rebels against God’

Indeed, those ‘who seize the joys of conjugal intercourse and refuse obedience to the laws which govern the reproduction of life … are rebels against God and the Gospel of His Christ; they are false to all that gives a man the dignity that should be his.’

Even more so than in Cardinal Mercier’s day, the spectacle of modern entertainment presents us with a world ‘where morality is made of no account, where man and woman seek for and find one another solely for purposes of pleasure, and where greed and vice supply the motive for everything that is done.’

Has there ever been a better description of Love Island?

As Cardinal Mercier points out, ‘We have here a study in contrasts, by which no little emphasis and light are thrown on Catholic doctrine.’

‘Man’s life is a relentless warfare.’

Cardinal Mercier also has strong words for anyone daunted by the prospect of marriage in the modern world. What children need, Cardinal Mercier stresses, is ‘confidence and energy.’ So parents must ‘give it them: give them force; give them buoyant courage, give them fearlessness.’

Above all, we must ‘teach them that their social duty is to produce before they consume.’ And this is because, ultimately, ‘there is only one doctrine that makes for progress, and that is Christian morality, combined with conjugal duty and integrity.’

Sexual pleasure comes with duty, and the attempt to evade it eventually destroys the pleasure. Sex aims at producing children; the Sexual Revolution made it about aborting them. It aims at rearing children; the Sexual Revolution made it about abandoning them. It aims at educating children; the Sexual Revolution made it about morally corrupting them.

The world, Cardinal Mercier says, is

‘wide enough to contain and support the swelling generations of the children of men, but it does not yield up its treasures overwillingly — they must be wrested from it by main force…Man’s life is a relentless warfare — militia est vita hominis super terram (Job vii. 1) — and civilization is the fruit, progress the reward of conquest.’

There is no equilibrium. Each day brings a new battle.

And ‘there you have the teaching of Christian morality to the family and the nation.’ ‘Culture’ comes the Latin cultura, meaning ‘the tilling of land, act of preparing the earth for crops’. Cultura comes from colere ‘to tend, guard; to till, cultivate’.

If nothing is planted, nothing grows. And what’s planted needs to be tended and guarded.

Civilisation has no save button.