MATERNAL INSTINCTS

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success. Sigmund Freud

The rector’s February MHT Newsletter is a veritable downhill race of Freudian slips. He begins with a recent sighting of a miniature, remote-controlled helicopter photographing his pesthouse. We’ll wager that scene occasioned something like an acid flashback! Certainly he must have recalled the anxious reports he heard of that day in Michigan when the stuttering, resonant drone of slashing rotor blades announced a plague of media whirlybirds swarming like angry, metallic locusts over his Mary Help of Christians Academy. On that day long ago, an eager press corps had come looking for answers to hard questions. This time, in the swampland, a robot mechanically captured stark images of the sepulchral, white outlines of a dying enterprise.

Rattled (or addled) by those haunting memories, the rector next launches an attack against Catholic mothers and young men “excessively attached to their mothers.” According to his half-baked historico-sociological analysis, today’s moms don’t encourage their sons to live independently. They mollycoddle them; they smother them with their suffocating motherly attentions. As a result of the mommies’ refusal to let their pampered sons face life like men, the boys, in the rector’s amateur opinion, are nest-bound, ineffectual, emotionally stunted, unconfident, and indecisive. All these tight apron strings, so muses the rector, are obstacles that mothers put in their male offspring’s way to the priesthood.

Well... from our experience, the rector’s description of today’s youth sounds a lot like the feckless, undereducated, timid, unsure, crybaby, wimpy completers of Most Holy Trinity Clerical Vocational Program. When a real man from a loving family enters MHT—that is, someone with genuine schooling, a decent and normal background, informed courage, a healthy psyche, and a sense of independence—he usually faces expulsion!

History and personal experience confirm that a man’s success in life is very often the result of a nurturing mother, because, as we’ve said on these pages before: no one ever makes it alone. The Reader knows several devout Catholic mothers who love their sons so much that they would no sooner allow them to enter MHT than they would permit them to travel in a cholera-ravaged, third-world country in the midst of a bloody civil war. Each of us owes his or her life to a mother’s uncanny intuition when danger loomed; we are all now profoundly grateful for Mom's proactive intervention in behalf of our body and soul.

The truth is, MHT is disfigured by its notorious reputation. No mother wants to dissipate the family treasure or imperil her son’s future by paying tuition to a third-rate institution that mistreats young men to whom God may have given a priestly vocation. A mother’s resistance to MHT is not over protectiveness. It’s just Mom’s sound prudence. She doesn’t want her son bullied and harassed in an environment inimical to spiritual growth. She doesn’t want her boy to become one of those priests who fail to consecrate or can’t conduct easy ceremonies. She doesn’t want her son associating with all those comatose MHT underachievers and the program's inept faculty. Above all, she doesn’t want her son working for the likes of “One-Hand” Dan Dolan and blundering Tony Cekada.

Mothers, in the end, have but two wishes: (1) they want their sons to be successful in life and (2) they want to be proud of their sons as men. Any mother’s sixth sense screams that MHT will deny her both fundamental hopes.

The rector’s heartless savaging of Catholic motherhood perplexes us. Those of you who know his history are aware that he himself hasn’t snipped any apron strings. If nothing else, the rector is a model of filial piety – just ask the priest who had to vacate his quarters at MHT. We’re impressed. It’s obvious that maternal devotion didn’t stand in his way to an assertive, independent life. We ask, then: Why can’t other Catholic men be devoted to their mothers without suffering the rector’s vilification? Even more germane: Why can’t other Catholic mothers love their sons and want the best for them without being pilloried for thwarting a good?

Edna Ferber got it right when she titled a story “Mother Knows Best”: Mom knows that MHT is not a fit place for a son to become a holy priest – or a good man.