“The Poor Have Shamed Us”

I spoke the other day with my daughter Shannon, who is a month into her freshman year of college. I expected her to tell me about her first taste of big-time Deep South college football—all about Ole Miss’ huge victory over its rival, LSU.

Instead, she told me her university was on lockdown. Two freshmen from the dorm across the street had died the night before.

Authorities are investigating the possibility that the new students had taken kratom—another of those horrid but legal gas-station drugs that gives its usually youngish user an inexpensive opioid-like high. 

These are dead children, I thought as I spoke with Shannon. They had just danced at their high school prom; I could have brushed up against one of them while unloading the pickup and helping Shannon move in last month.

“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Christ deliberately chose the child as the model for our salvation; His well-known simile in the Gospel of Matthew has always made sense to us, but it is mostly a dead letter now. It is difficult to recognize the type of child Jesus had in mind. This should horrify us.

He knew even then the lengths to which parents would go to blacken the souls of their children. For years, we have whisked them into addiction to the swallowing chorus of glowing screens. He knew then that one day we would even turn to our littlest ones—our infants and toddlers—and do the same to them.

Over the summer, I walked past a dozen or so mothers pushing strollers, where their infants stared into screens, their tiny fingers holding the device inches from their face. Fresh from the warmth of her own womb, these mothers (and fathers who do not control it) have set the tone: Tech is your world.

We are Frankensteining our smallest children. Before they are able to speak, they consume. Before they walk, they tap and swipe. Before they wonder, they become anxious. Before they live, their pint-sized souls begin to die.

From the crib, the second birth begins: the zombie-eyed stare. Thereafter, our wee ones soon begin to whine for a device rather than for pacifiers, embraces, or mom’s breast. When the child can walk, he or she quickly grows weary of dad’s steady hand at the playground. The 3-year-old sees that screens aren’t attached to swing sets.

So, back at home, the small child gets strapped back into the Titillation Tilt-a-Whirl, where he or she is thrust deeper into annihilation from wonder, addiction to arousal, nonlinear thinking, and deadened intellectual growth.

This carnival ride has no end; it is one seemingly imagined, orchestrated, and dispatched from the underworld. In this Big Tent amusement park, Satan has ripped Christ’s tender words from the pages of Scripture and rewritten them for himself—“Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of hell belongs to such as these.”

My Own Betrayal

Twelve years ago, my eldest daughter and son were, according to them, the last children in their classes without smartphones. I listened to them, their periodic rationalizations about how a phone could prove “useful” and how they would oblige each restriction I imposed. I rejected each of their pleas. When they entered high school, I caved.

I have sinned thousands of times in my 58 years. I’ve disappointed friends and hurt those I love. I’ve failed my wife. But perhaps my greatest regret is betraying my 14-year-old children by giving them smartphones—three or so years before they were mature enough to have one. I put a demon in their pocket.

I am another of the countless American parents who, without grasping what I was doing, became like the sleazy gas-station kratom dealer. But, of course, it is worse than that; the smartphone is a far deadlier gateway drug. Kratom manages to pick off just a few youngsters; the smartphone introduces into millions of children each year a teeming jungle and entire ecosystem of soul-deadening behaviors.

Despite me, praise God, my two oldest children have survived my betrayal. Both seem to be thriving. One is now a happy, newly married woman. I spent a few hours last night with my good-hearted son, who has devoted himself, at least for now, to entering each workday into the far-flung souls of severely autistic children. Neither, as far as I can tell, is a slave to their phone.

Around 2018, when I finally recognized the smartphone for what it was, I acted accordingly with Shannon. I refused her periodic requests until she stopped asking. Eventually, when I believed she was mature enough, I relented. I allowed her a phone at 16, with tight restrictions.

And I failed again. She wasn’t mature enough to handle a smartphone. Few 16-year-olds are.

But that will not stop the many hundreds of American moms and dads today who will enter an Apple Store, purchase a phone, and begin to slowly help ruin their child’s life as the child begins to bow his or her head to the incessant glow.

Memorializing the Hard Lesson as a Warning

In my book Coached by the Cure’: Lessons in Shepherding With St. John Vianney, I imagined what the French saint would write to parents from Heaven and then drop it like a postcard into American homes.

Parents, God has asked that I coach, and not frighten, you, but at this point in my letter, you no longer need to be gently fed with milk. It is impossible to be gentle about the consequences of what the widening crisis of malformed or ignored consciences has done to parents in America, and the manner in which the erosion of reason has unraveled the fabric of the West.

Perhaps an intimate look might help you to see the devastation at the rise of the moon each night in these spiritually bereft, haunted houses. Allow me to pull back the heavy drapes and escort you through the front door of a single American home. I reveal it so that it might scare you straight.

A chilling symphony streams toward heaven each night, a discordant chorus of hideous laughter and groans that alerts the heavenly court to the harrowing scene set to unfold. A pure soul—a small child, adolescent, or teenager—is behind a locked bedroom door scrolling on a phone. A demon lies in wait. Aware of his malevolence, an angel pleads for the child he’s been tasked to guard, but the demon’s wiles are too honed.

In time, it comes—an image of carnality that bursts onto the screen in a rush of sensory overload that shocks the helpless child’s system. The child has never before imagined such an image. With emotions stirred and riotous—and with his or her conscience still unformed—the demon goads the child more intensely to the image, where he or she becomes trapped like an eel in a barrel. The spiraling begins. The innocent child is now in the demon’s lair, where—horrifically—he or she will often, much later in life, become a slave to addiction and sin.

Because the demon has endless cabinets of wiles, he will occasionally harass the child through a classmate’s text-message bullying, or rely on an invitation from a trafficker to induce the child to meet at the mall food court over the weekend. Other times, he’ll slow-walk a boy or girl into an addiction to TikTok, Snapchat, or another site that works to numb a pure soul that months earlier was an image of bright-eyed wonder and joy.

But dear reader, permit me to draw back the drapery even further. This diabolic crushing of purity unfolds with dads and moms often down the hallway, where they, too, are often scrolling. As Satan presses deeper into the young one’s mind, parents are often melding with “friends” on social media streams. On any given night—for example—paradise might see a mother choosing to pick a fight against a political or religious opponent, or flexing her maternity by fighting for Mother Earth, a hunted lion on the Ivory Coast, or wholesale acceptance of a woman’s choice to do anything and everything to which she’s inclined. Although it is mostly like-minded friends who view her posts, the rarely-if-ever-to-be-seen-in-person “friends” tap out quick “attagirls” and push red hearts and thumbs-up emojis that energizes the mother with a dose of dopamine. While savoring the approval of her activism, she forgets about her husband in the next room who is scrolling through sites that granularly break down statistics of players on his favorite football team. Or perhaps he is leisurely scrolling through pornographic images while listening to a favorite podcast host who always “gets it right.” This home is eerily quiet; there is only the background drone of the television.

The only sounds heard are from the voice inside their cell phones that subliminally whispers: Stay with me, just a bit longer.

The voice is why so many Catholics no longer bother with the voice of their conscience—the aboriginal Vicar of Christ. They’ve allowed it to be annihilated, drowned out by the embrace of their self-tailored technological choruses of demons.

This is the Western anti-fairy tale heaven sees. The details, of course, vary from home to home, but these images are not apocryphal. Entire homes become commandeered by the Beast, who has hardly had to move a talon. These overtakings move each night like World War I chlorine gases into unguarded souls, unseen, with hardly a word, movement, or objection from a parent or guardian.

It is the crisis of your times.

Dear parents, is it a wonder why there is disorder in your world?

A Sacred, Rare, and Ordered Place

The day before my daughter told me about the student deaths, a New Jersey bishop, a priest from Arizona, a priest from Maryland, and 80 Americans from 16 states waited for the iron gates to swing open at Villa de las Niñas in Chalco, Mexico, uncomprehending of what would unfold when the buses passed through.

We each became an audience to something we had forgotten and perhaps believed no longer existed. Americans beheld 3,400 cheery-faced teenage girls who seemed to live in Heaven. These Cindy-Lou-Who-sized souls stood before us as torchlight—seeming whirling flares meant to pull us to see the unspoken message in their eyes: We are the ones Jesus spoke of when he commanded you to become like children. Look at us, and we will help you get to Heaven.

Many cried on the spot, overwhelmed by these thousands of portraits of innocent children, an image that has mostly escaped our world. The visitors were looking into America’s black-and-white past: the once-ordered world that existed before it was overtaken by the glowing rectangle, when children still were children.

Because the women who rescued these once-poverty-stricken girls and mothered them back to life—the Sisters of Mary—know that healing cannot take place with a smartphone, none exist at the five-year boarding school. No one’s ears are plugged up with ear buds. No teen browses social media or plays video games. No television is tuned into the West’s shacking-up young-adult culture. These faces glow not, of course, from the reflections of a smartphone screen but from the radiant light of knowing they have been saved, that God did not forget them.

Miracle Upon Miracle

We attended Sunday Mass alongside them, then we watched as they whiled away a sun-splashed afternoon. Each seemed very happy, preoccupied with the things teenage girls do—or, at least, once did. They shyly reached for our hands and invited us into their soccer, basketball, and volleyball games. They hand-led us to their living quarters, bakery, dress-making shops, chapels, classrooms, and on and on.

“They are miracles,” a pilgrim said. “And they give us the solution to what pains us.”

The visitors, on a pilgrimage arranged by World Villages for Children, saw hundreds of girls sitting in wide circles, cracking each other up and crunching on cheese puffs. Behind them, dozens of teens walked hand in hand around an oval track, seeming to whisper the secret things of their souls to trusted friends. Hundreds of others cheerfully went about their chores while a few hundred more were gathered, shoulder to shoulder, beneath a canopy of shade trees, praying the Rosary.

“The Poor Have Shamed Us”

It was a saving ground the Americans saw, a vast 89-acre field of goodwill, joy, and rebirth. More than a dozen of the pilgrims said the authentically Catholic Girlstown community offered the solution to the West’s greatest plight: the piecemeal reengineering of our own children through technology and distraction.

On my first visit there, in 2020, it took me a while to figure out why the teenagers addressed each of the Sisters of Mary as madre not hermana. After a week, I knew. These faithful women educate, nourish, counsel, catechize, jog with, play sports with, and pray with the students; they never stop trying to pull them from the nightmares of their pasts, where they lived in the violence of poverty. The eloquence of their maternal love—given ever so slowly, so tenderly—pulls away layer after layer of wounds too graphic for this writing. Their blood loyalty has a singular aim, to give Christ—not smartphones—to these healing children.

What do these masterpieces of resurrection resemble, on a random September day without wonder-killing handheld distractions?

Hundreds of girls formed a line before an abashed Bishop Kevin Sweeney from Paterson, New Jersey, to kiss his ring or request a special blessing. They swarmed him throughout the day, as if God had sent the bishop to them like Santa down the chimney.

“I told one girl that in my years of working with youth, I was almost never asked to give my blessing,” a visiting clergy member said. “She looked at me with confusion; she didn’t understand how this could happen…. Then she told me, ‘Well, I am happy that you are blessing me.’”

At the altar after Mass, I was given a microphone, where I told the girls that a friend had requested their prayers for his wife, the mother of young children, who had just been told she had perhaps a week or two left to live. I asked each of them to pray for a miracle.

Thirty minutes later, I saw three or four hundred girls kneeling together on the ground. One saw me and raced toward me, took my hand, and began to lead me into their prayer circle beneath a cluster of trees. On the way, she whispered:

“We are asking Mary for a miracle for your friend.”

A visitor from Ohio, a former minor-league baseball player, cried throughout Sunday’s Mass. He was beholding, he said, the intimate union between God and his daughters. “I was surrounded by angels,” he told me. “And when you feel this type of presence on earth, tears do not stop.”

As we spread out to play games, do chores, pray, and speak with the girls, a bus pulled in to unload the handball team. The girls had just returned from dominating another high school opponent. Chalco’s handball team is regarded as one of Mexico’s strongest, having won national titles.

Its orchestra has earned national recognition.

On graduation day, line after line of hiring representatives from Mexican businesses arrive on campus, hoping to hire the young women.

Why?

Partly for the same reason the place produces gifted and even brilliant students—and future Sisters of Mary nuns: they have no cell phones to distract them from God reaching their little hearts to reveal His will for them.

Because this piece is already long, I will borrow from the Gospel of John: There are many other miracles at Villa de las Niñas, and at the Sisters of Mary’s 14 other Boystowns and Girlstowns throughout the world. But I do not think the whole world could contain the books that would be written about what a teenager’s world can become without a smartphone.

Early Monday morning, before we boarded our flights home, we attended Mass at our hotel. The homilist, Father Ian Wintering, proclaimed what perhaps many of us had been feeling but few could have articulated as well: “The poor have shamed us.”

Note: World Villages for Children (worldvillages.org) is a nonprofit organization that financially supports the Sisters of Mary as they help 21,000 children in Boystowns and Girlstowns in six different countries to break free from a life of poverty and trafficking. The Sisters lead the children to Christ and freedom through authentic Catholic education and catechesis, where they provide food, shelter, clothing, help with medical expenses, and vocational training to children around the world. To donate to the Sisters of Mary’s work, go to www.worldvillages.org/poverty.