More on Contented Worldliness
I had the good fortune to visit the Schoenstaat Center in Waukesha, Wisconsin over Christmas. I became aware of it through an article I read about Fr. Kentenich, its founder. The article is entitled "The Mass Man and the Free Personality in the Pedagogical Thinking and Practice of Josef Kentenich," by Sr. Doria Schlickmann. (I can email you a copy if you have an interest.)

Fr. Kentenich experienced first hand the tyranny of Naziism, having fallen into the hands of the Gestapo, and spending 4 years in Dachau. Fr. Kentenich reflected on the National Socialist experience and saw in it the elaboration of a symptom he observed in the culture at large. As he saw it, in the modern, pluralistic-democratic forms of society, there is an increasing agglomeration of people, who are more and more subject to stimulation and even manipulation and control from the outside through advertising, entertainment, and the whole world of "opinion-shaping" media. In conjunction with these modes of "external control," he perceived that people were too often "too little interiorly seized by God, as if the baptismal water does not penetrate the interior of the person." He saw a mere aping of religious exercises. He described this type of person as "mass man, one who does and thinks what the others do and think because the others do and think it."

The experience of National Socialism, to Fr. Kentenich, was an extreme example of this mass passivity and control, which he even called a "mass demonic possession." He stated, "If Christ wants to elevate his members to the full awareness of their dignity, to the nobility of the children of God, then the intentions of Satan tend toward the depersonalization of his followers and their dissolution in the masses." Fr. Kentenich continued (this was said in 1950), "The man who does not live according to [God's] order of being, will sink to brutality and bestiality . . . There you have the situation of the person today, as we experienced it in the concentration camps and as we will experience it even more drastically in the forseeable future . . . The homo sapiens becomes homo faber; the homo faber becomes the homo lupus; the homo lupus becomes the homo diabolicus . . ."

(Certainly this is the basic approach of Screwtape and Wormwood, don't you agree? To give just one example, in Ch., XII, Screwtape says, ". . . even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far . . . You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favor of the 'best' people, the 'right' food, the 'important' books.")

Fr. Kentenich saw his primary work as strengthening the individual to resist the blind drive to imitate, and to gain an inner stability to compete with the external undertow of modern culture. What I thought very interesting was that he asserted the need, the primacy, of self-education to accomplish this.

As Sr. Doria puts in, "The free personality develops only where the individual -- even under pressure from manifold external controls -- finds a possibility for independent growth and maturity. Self-education, that is, work on oneself in an ethical and religious sense, should begin as early as possible. . . Kentenich said, 'All education has only the one purpose, to set the self-education (of the educand) in motion.' The educator will become an effective example only insofar as he gives self-education the absolute primacy also in his own self. All education begins with self-education -- and that means the self-education of the educator."

Self-education is not a piling up of abstract, learned facts, or the development of technical prowess. Nor is it thoughtless imitation, which generates division (envy, jealousy, rivalry, and anger). Rather, it is a process that leads the educand to value himself or herself as a unique, original person, loved by God, and willed by God to love. Fr. Kentenich stressed God is not the judging, wrathful God and Ruler of the world that hungers for reparation, but the loving Father God, who loves his children not because they are good, but because He is good. Fr. Kentenich said, "We must imitate the pedegogy of God! This is a pedagogy of love and freedom."

I am reminded of what Gil Bailie said about Christ, "He was the perfect embodiment of obedience, freedom and authority." This is road we are called to walk, in His footsteps. Satan, on the other hand, cannot understand this love and freedom. As Lewis relates in Ch. XIX, Satan just doesn't "get" love, can't understand how someone can love. For him, "to be" human means to be in competition. And devils can only "consume" others, not love them.

If our culture is to be healed, we must take up our responsibility for self-education. As Sr. Doria said, only when we educate ourselves can we ed-ucate our loved ones, that is, lead them out, in an exodus, from a land of external control and mass mindedness, which is slavery, to the love and freedom of the land God promises to those who know the truth.

Quite some time ago I came across the following cartoon. It speaks to me about how important it is for each of us to try to get to the truth of things. As the picture shows, you become what you see. How do you see things? The gift and challenge of being human is, only you can answer that question!