In 1865 the American poet, William Ross Wallace, wrote a poem in praise of motherhood. The refrain of the poem was the sentence, “For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” In the first half of the twentieth century, “He who controls the teachers’ college controls the future,” was an adage bandied about in graduate school classrooms in universities and in boardrooms on Wall Street. I believe it was Jonathan Kozol, the ex-officio grandfather in the U.S. of home-schooling education, who insisted that government control of the content and methodology of education in public schools was a way of channeling students into a future that primarily served the interests of the elites. As insightful as these thoughts were in their time, their roots go back as far as Plato, who taught, “The direction in which education starts a person will determine his future life.”
Today, childhood education in the so-called “First World” takes place in large part via mass media communication platforms, e.g. films, television, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Tik Tok, etc. Just thirty-seven years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Today, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom. This means that approximately 232 media executives are calling the shots for the vast majority of the information adults are presented and for what is placed before children and embedded in their brains.
If as Plato wrote, “The direction in which education starts a person will determine his future life,” then practically every child’s mind is putty in the hands of the wheelers and dealers who clawed their way to the top of the communication-media industry.
Every Christian parent, every Christian educational institution, every Christian Church, every Church leader is commissioned explicitly by Jesus to “teach” every Baptized child “to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19-20).This at a bare minimum means they are commission to teach the Baptized children in their spiritual care to obey Jesus’ “new commandment, love one another as I have loved you.” For example, to teach by word and deed the Baptized child to “love your enemies” “as” Jesus loved His enemies. And since this “new commandment” of Jesus is the only new commandment He reveals to humanity, and since as the Catholic Church teaches it “contains the entire Moral Law of the Gospel” (CC #1970) and “summarizes the will of the Father which is to be done on earth as it is in heaven,” (CCC #2822), it self-evidently requires that those responsible for teaching a Baptized child “to obey all that Jesus has commanded,” do and use those means that are reasonably commensurate with fulfilling this Divine Obligation.
So, whether you be a pope, a bishop, a priest, a minister or a parent, in this New Year of AD 2023, ask yourself in conscience and before God what realistic and authentic steps and actions you must take to truthfully and effectively nurture the mind of Christ in the child for whom you are responsible in light of the content of this video? What can you do to effectively protect the mind, soul and spirit of the child for whom you have spiritual responsibility from the systematic evil and systemic spirit of evil that is being exposed in this eight-minute video? Obviously, infinitely more needs to be done by all at all levels of the Church, who have been entrusted by Jesus with the spiritual responsibility of caring for, guarding and guiding the souls of these “little ones.”
