ALAN writes:

It is doubtful that Leftist Revolutionaries have employed any tactic more lethal in their war against traditional America than their prolonged attack on American families.  The worst thing about that is not that they are so zealous in working toward that goal; that is to be expected.  It is rather that generations of Americans have made it so easy for them.

I never had the benefit of a large family. Someone will protest immediately that large families are not a benefit but a burden. I concede that both are possible, but I suspect that most people who come from large families would say they are a benefit far more often than a burden.

The neighborhood where I grew up and attended grade school was populated mostly by German, Polish, and Slavic families, many of whom had lived there for 70 or 80 years.  One of my classmates who lived in the same block where I did remembers families with ten or more children.

A newspaperman wrote in 1967:

 “One feature of the neighborhood is its many large families—households of 10 or 15 children are not uncommon.”

    [Richard Krantz, “The ‘Scrubby Dutch’ of South St. Louis”, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Feb. 8, 1967 ]

On my daily walk to school in the 1950s, I often walked past a house owned by a Polish family who had 10 children.  The children slept on cots placed throughout the house. Meals were served in three shifts.  Not only did they get by; they took pride in caring for their property and the alley out back.  That was part of the moral fabric of people who lived in that neighborhood.

Three blocks away, there was another family with 15 children.  “We assigned each of the children chores,” their mother told Mr. Krantz, “and when they left for school in the mornings, all the beds were made and shoes were never left lying on the floor.”  

St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church was the center of the universe for such families, as it was for my classmates and me.  At a class re-union a few years ago, I overheard my classmate Larry talking with others about our parents and boyhood homes.  Some of them had gone back to that neighborhood in recent years to drive past those houses and compare memories.  Their parents were not independently wealthy, and my classmates marveled now—half a century later—at how they were able to keep family and household together.  The fathers worked and the mothers looked after home and children.

How were they able to do it? was a question that came up in the conversation, a thought spoken partly in wonder and partly in amazement.  But they could—and they did.  A strong Catholic parish was one reason.  Self-reliance was essential in their moral code; welfare dependence would have been unthinkable.  Then, too, daily life was very different from what it is today:  There were fewer distractions, fewer toys, fewer gadgets, fewer temptations, fewer things.

It was the tail end of a time when grown-ups understood themselves to be grown-up and accepted the corollary responsibilities without reluctance. Parents had a better understanding by far than they do today of what is important and what is trivial. More often than not, they were able to get by on the basis of sheer determination, self-restraint, confidence, and moral certitude. The culture at large did not discourage those things, as it does today.  It was the tail end of an era before longstanding moral and cultural standards–along with the traditional family–would come under vicious attack by those Leftist Revolutionaries and the cultural institutions they would march through and then take over.

And so I extend a tip of my hat to you, Larry, my boyhood classmate and neighbor and fellow baseball player and baseball card collector:  For having the presence of mind to remember such things, to think about such things, to talk about such things; and to remain aware of the moral debt that we owed and owe to those who gave us those wonderful boyhood years in that place at that time.

Laura writes:

What gave those Catholics the strength to have large families?

The sacred liturgy, which has since been purged and banned.

They were also told by clergy that it was mortally sinful to prevent births. That’s a big difference. But even if Catholics today were truly taught that fact, most of them still wouldn’t have the supernatural strength to have large families. That strength comes from one place: the altar.

God makes it possible, not human beings.

We gaze upon a world stripped of sanctifying graces. And courage is nowhere to be found.

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