Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

In the days of Romulus or in the era of Attila, children were exactly the same as those who stroll along Rue Royale or play in the Luxembourg Gardens. Both were the young of the race of man, endowed with a nature pre-existing the barbarian or civilized surroundings which welcomed them as a promise or as a menace for the tomorrows of which history is written. The children were integrated into a specific era, destined to bring to it their share of human initiatives in the form of progress more or less technical and scientific. In addition, they disposed of mental qualities responsible for governing that progress with spiritual values which were, themselves, the determining factor for civilizaiton properly so-called.

Civilized does not by any means signify motorized, electrified, documented; there is such a thing as progress in the service of barbarity–the atomic bomb proves it cruelly enough–just as there are stationary lives of peasants and simple men infinitely more civilized than the strollers on the Champs-Elysées. You have only to visit certain Indian tribes to come into contact, wonder-struck, with moral prestige, the delightful welcome of hospitality, disinterested service, the sense of mystery and of God, to situate immediately the word civilization in those regions personal to man without any reference to fancy cars driven just as well by a boor as by a saint.

Open your dictionary. To civilize: to adapt to society, to polish manners, to give lessons in urbanity, of politeness; in a word, the whole life of the spirit, with or without material progress. It tells you how much the obsession with the priority of the temporal–fostered in the very name of that caricature of virtue called socialism, or even humanism–focuses the attention of altruists and ideologues on that element least vital for civilization, albeit the most vital for progress.

Certainly, civilization, an ensemble of spiritual, intellectual, and political notions, is strictly bound to a concrete material context. We all live subject to similar or analogous concrete material conditions, yet we are not all civilized men because of it. Progress has proven to be the most formidable adversary of civilizations. We have only to turn and look back over the path of time to identify the most catastrophic moments in history as composed of two words which ought to be mutually exclusive: progress and decadence.

The law of progress is to make man lose the sense of measure and order, thus to compromise an entire civilization in its respect for the common good, in its anxiety for a spiritual life qualifying our action, in its readiness to be content with material sufficiency, in exchange for a greater liberty of the spirit, in its conviction that a natural life nourishes thought more than does an artificial life of neon signs, in its need to respect and appreciate one's neighbor not as a well-filled wallet but as a conscience and as a soul designated to our conscience and our soul as a traveling companion placed by God on our path to help us reach our destination.

To be civilized is to find more in oneself than around oneself; it is to experience more by oneself than by progress; it is to touch something infinitely superior to well-being, wealth, pleasure, snobbery, and spring, summer, fall, and winter sports: it is to be obsessed–like Psichari, Péguy, Claudel, Saint-Exupéry, Foucauld[1]–with proving the value of man to the fanatics of the value of things.

This, then, is the heart of the matter. The child stands before modern life like a little bird in front of a shiny decoy which moves, glitters, attracts...and kills little skylarks. Notice where the tragedy begins for the skylark: the decoy makes him lose his independence by obsession. Modern life kills the independence of young people, ironically so intent on demanding it. We will never change the nature of the child–which, as a side comment, highlights the foolishness or the calculated perversion of the campaign for co-education.

The child is not called a man; he is only the promise of a man. He therefore has his chances to acquire a reason, to obtain a character, to consolidate a conscience, to possess a spirit of decision for the good, the better and the best–just as he runs the risk, by the yet amorphous state of his qualities, to vitiate them, to falsify them, or to kill them. The worst service we can render a child is to treat him as a man in possession of a maturity which does not exist, just as the worst service we can render to men is to treat them like boys, whether they be choir boys or soldier boys.

Now, the child's promise of qualities rightfully belongs to the civilization of tomorrow, and modern progress puts all its energy into deteriorating that promise as completely as possible. The reason is very simple: while the promise of the civilized adult remains fragile in a child–as with all things at the embryonic stage–his instinctive vitality, wide open to his sensibility in favor of progress, is, on the contrary, of a violence of expression and manifestation to put him at the mercy of a life temporally inopportune. He is beaten before he even begins, because of the internal discrepancy between his barely conscious duty as a future civilized adult and his all too conscious power as a vital profiteer of progress.

Everything pushes him toward it: his gaze, without interior life, focusing on exterior qualities sometimes the most instinctive or animal; his heart, without experience, burns for every type of experience; his mind, avid for pretensions that far surpass his capacities, judges without knowing the heart of the problem.

And, most of all, his adolescent sincerity plunges head first into the modern circus of progress where his vitality, glutted to nausea, sends him back to sob alone in his room like a poor beaten animal caught in the trap of the fascinations of progress. Still is he blessed if he weeps in rage; if he does not twist his defeat into a disdainful mockery of the attitudes which are the honor of the civilized man.

About ten years ago, in Rome, I came early in the morning to the Coliseum to honor with a few thoughts and prayers this sand which had drunk so much blood, this place which was filled with so many sacred offertories. I will never forget the wave of nausea and the sorrowful indignation that passed over me for a few moments: a group of Parisian students trouped from one end of the other of the Coliseum, hurling at the top of their lungs: "I Love Only One Girl."[2] The French tourists, aghast, looked at each other in disbelief. Vitality, ultra-fashionable outfits: yes. Civilized: absolutely not.

It was 1944. The war has just ended, railroads overloaded with passengers. In the town of Argentan, crowds and chaos. A female amputee, with one leg, is pushed in spite of herself smack into my compartment, which contained only young men. Nobody moved; facing me, a young scout leader with badges, sat motionless. Embarrassed, he pretended to sleep. "Madame," I said very loudly, "when the young are cowards, it is up to the grey-beards to be generous. Please take my seat." The boy flushed red as a berry and buried himself deeper in his seat. Civilized? Come, now...

All of these kids, without civilized humanity, are swept about by the storm of propaganda, performances, snobberies. Progress invents lovely things indeed which it offers to men made ugly by the absence of spirit and soul in their social behavior. The child is demagnetized from his eternal role. There really are the progress-disorientated: the sacred no longer attracts the attention of the young, any more than the priority of duty over pleasure, the respect of parents over independence, the priority of sacrifice over abdication.

Why all this internal upheaval of the elementary laws of the nature of man? Why destroy the man by instructing the child? Why is the child closed off to what goes beyond physics, chemistry, and mathematics? Why these mothers who weep over children who laugh? Inventions, we are swimming in them, but civilized men?

Spontaneously, I turn toward you, the parents, to suggest the following:

Do not deny modern progress, but give to your children something better than progress, by understanding that to perfect a being is above all to establish him in his interiority as a man, in that secret world in which the child elaborates that with which he will approach progress in order to judge it, govern it, measure it, discipline it. Develop his reflection beyond the visible. Stimulate his character beyond ease and easiness.

Awaken his conscience beyond egoism. The laws of being are in the nature of the child much more and much better than in a program of studies. And the duty of parents is to aim at molding a complete adult, according to his nature and according to grace, according to the divine life, before aiming at a graduate and a scholar. Our intelligent robots prove to what extent modern life has succeeded in destroying man by the instruction of man. This explains the number of educated men powerless to resolve the Christian problem of man. Too many of us abandon to others the care of calling the shots according to God. To do so is already to redefine ourselves outside the word civilization: companions of others. We forget, in this domain, that there exist in each one of us incommunicable values whose intimate development determines our civilizing role. Incumbent upon each one is the formidable duty to resolve his mystery by living in himself the mystery of God, expressed in the natural and redemptive law, in order to distribute civilizing effects all around him. The primary social action takes form between the two inseparables which are God and man.

The child is submerged, drowned, in the phantasmagoria of fleeting images and material progress which unfolds before his impressionable imagination and distracts him from the only worthwhile problem: becoming a complete man.

The Swiss have engraved on their coins: "Dominus providebit–The Lord will provide." Such is the balanced recipe for a Christian education: First, God and His commandments. First, the natural law of honor and duty. First, conscience and sacrifice. First, respect and politeness. First, the complete man.

The rest is all secondary. God will provide for it directly, providentially, by the parents, by merited recompenses. Worry about the complete man; as for the rest, God will see to it. Your first happiness is the complete man. Without that, the other happinesses are all adulterated.  Your first value is the complete man. As for success, God will provide in the measure of your essential value.

You tell me: "First you have to live." I object: "First you have to be complete in order to live as a man." You must not set your heart on having, you must set your heart on being, to be a Christian in a given age that comes to you with materialist theories, divinized by the scientific mind into the be all and end all of human value. Contaminated as we all are with situating the Faith behind science, with placing morality behind progress, we form a strange procession, more or less cacophonous, and we dare call it a civilization.

Whoever would see civilization rise out of the ruins of a brilliant decadence–whoever would properly esteem it, with its spiritual effects softening instincts, polishing manners, imposing honesty in work, inspiring pity for the poor, and the teaching of truth for children–has only to glance through the pages of history where the great holy bishops introduced the Spirit of God into human activity. St. Martin alone still dazzles the history of France with his brightness. The most beautiful answer we can give in favor of the Church is to see her leaders, endowed with a strictly spiritual power, civilizing the temporal by an education which alone it cannot provide.

We will therefore have to recover the rights of the Faith if we want to save civilization, for she alone disposes of that intelligent and strong authority over progress which releases man from materialistic subjections ironically decreed to be the expression of independence from moral exigencies cleverly identified as servitudes.

For this reason Communism will never be a civilization because it suppresses the independence of the soul, the conscience and the spirit, by absorbing it into the dominant of a strictly material progress. To play the communist card in the education of children when one is a Christian, baptized and perhaps consecrated, is ineluctably to thwart the views of God on the soul of the children and proclaim the death of civilization by deifying progress.

From the moment a man no longer reacts according to natural and supernatural laws but only acts under the surveillance of positive and police laws, he confronts civilization to destroy it, all in pretending to construct it.

In face of modern life, which is what it is–marvelous and mechanical, fairly miserable in humanity, insufficient in civilization–we must offer the child more and better than what he sees. We must make him understand, by an education at his level, by an education of his insatiable heart giving him the thirst for inexhaustible realities, by activities liberating from materialistic and merely temporal shackles, by a knowledge of national and religious history confirming for him, in the eras of nobility and valor, the validity of the laws of the spirit taking precedence over the scientistic conditions of materialistic progress.

It is a question of the state of soul of the parents and of the atmosphere of the home more than the rigid enumeration of an unbending program; a question of familial conversations, as well, maintaining a certain tenor of civilization in one's thought. The child listens a great deal and breathes in ideas the way his lungs breathe in the atmosphere. He decides right away whether Mama and Daddy react according to the Catechism or according to the newspaper. He guesses very quickly whether Mama organizes the home in view of a purely materialistic success or according to guidelines in which a spirit of Christian civilization has something to say. He senses whether the suffering of the parents draws them to ascend with nobility into attitudes of moral grandeur, or to bury themselves in materialistic diversions demoralizing for his aspirations as a child. The child, not yet able to be a man, possesses the logic of what he sees, of what he hears. The home is for him the very first civilized or non-civilized region. We can tell by his selfishness or by his spirit of generosity towards his first companions: parents, brothers and sisters, whom God has given to him to earn his first spurs as a civilized person. It is in the home that parents determine the victory or the defeat of the child when his emotions first stare into the face of that progress of a hundred faces, of which even one is able to dizzy his heart or inflict on it irremediable damage.

It is for parents to lead him to his role as a civilized man, loving the superior life–spiritual, intellectual, supernatural–happy to concretize it by respect, politeness, tact, generosity, revealing the civilized man and the Christian.

It is a long, slow work, like all that is definitive and great: for 33 years, He prepared the Redemption with a marvelous divine authority, oscillating between the utter poverty of the manger and that of the cross to better affirm the radiance of the spirit–manifested to its ultimate degree at the Resurrection. Parents dispose of the first 21 years of the child to provide him his chances for civilizing affirmations of his being. It is well worth the tears and the sacrifices, the patience and the prayers of a Mama and a Daddy, to bestow on their age, as their direct successor, a man or a woman infinitely superior to progress and magnificently situated in the Christian civilization of his country.

Modern life disposes of a profusion of materialistic propositions touching every sector of social life, every type of technology, which means that we are all turned aside from what I call the "internity" of man: his personal and spiritual life. For the little that the child notices the extent to which Mama and Daddy are corrupted by this temporal gangrene at the expense of the major essential, very quickly he dodges his duty as a complete man, modeling his attitude on that of his parents.

The most subtle danger consists in communicating to technology, to the economy, a sort of consecration by the importance we give to it. Without knowing it, without saying it and without meaning to, we have returned to the worship of idols, the religion of things.

I remember listening to two young men, snobs and philistines, in an endless discussion about the most worthy signs of their social rank and their role. I heard an authentic sermon of materialism, a temporal homily, and, to myself, I thought of the warnings of Jesus favorable to the free entry of grace in the free will of man: "Blessed are the poor in spirit...," and I prayed for those two young men so deprived of spiritual life that they were, without knowing it, inapt to reveal themselves civilized.

"Durissima verba–These words are too hard," you may think. We have so watered down the importance of the major realities by affective intellectualism, anxious to please everyone, without denying or affirming anything, that everything seems hard to us rather than appearing solid like a rock and comforting like an island in the middle of the ocean, toward which it feels good to row with energy. Nothing is hard for him who wants to love the words of God. They belong to no specific civilization but they determine the degree of every civilization, and it is towards them that we are bound to orient our heart to spare it the hardness of social catastrophes within the phantasmagoria of progress.

Like the word of Jesus, the word of the priest is, above all, eternal. It should not be up to date at the expense of the eternal. But its eternal riches are always up to date for the age in which they are expressed.

To make children appreciate the eternal in the teaching given is to guarantee them a real civilizing power over their age so turned aside from the eternal, whether formally by secularism or ideologically by the priority of the temporal over the spiritual. God is Spirit and Truth, said Jesus to that poor ultra-temporal lady, the Samaritan woman.

What are you worried about? said Jesus to the dear Apostles too anxious for the place of honor and for success. The Savior never ceased to proclaim the two great preferences of His Redemption: the major goods that are not of this earth, and the diverse and spiritual treasures hidden in the hearts of little children and in those who resemble them.

I challenge you, parents, to esteem these treasures in the measure of your faith and in the measure of your Christian affection for the little children, your children.


Originally published in Carnets Spirituels: L'Éducation, No. 7, January 2006, pp. 24-33, entitled "L'Enfant devant la Civilisation Moderne."

Translated exclusively into English for Angelus Press. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.

1    Ernest Psichari (1883-1914), a grandson of French rationalist and rabid anti-clerical Ernest Renan (Life of Christ), converted to Catholicism during his military service in the Sahara; he wrote A Soldier's Pilgrimage recounting his conversion. He hoped to enter the Dominican Order but died in the first battles of World War I. Charles Péguy (1873-1914), French poet and essayist, left the Church in his youth to become a socialist but returned to the Faith in early middle age. His poems are profound but simple meditations on Catholic truth, particularly the reality of the Incarnation. He, too, died in the first days of the war. Paul Claudel (1868-1955), French author and playwright, was likewise a prominent adult convert to Catholicism, placing his genius at the service of the Faith. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), best known for his deceptively simple "children's" book, The Little Prince, never became a Catholic but wrote novels and autobiographical pieces exploring the human condition. His reconnaissance plane was shot down during World War II. Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), recently beatified by the Church, was an aristocrat, soldier, adventurer, and finally a priest and desert hermit.  He penetrated the forbidden kingdom of Morocco on a reconnaissance mission for the French military and produced the first modern European maps of the region. He led such a scandalous life as a soldier in North Africa that he was expelled from the army. Ultimately disgusted with his riotous but empty existence, he converted to Catholicism, joined the Trappists for a time, and ended his days a lone priest-apostle to the Touareg of the Sahara, where he was murdered by mercenary Arabs during World War I for his loyalty to the French government.
2     "Auprès de Ma Blonde," translated above by the title of Elvis Presley's 1966 rendition, is an old French military song with rather bawdy lyrics–literally, "It feels good to sleep next to my blond girl."