It is so sad for me to write about neocatechumenal children, because when I started the Way with only 13 years I could never imagine how much the Way was going to mark my life forever. I was just in the age it was allowed to do the Initial Catechesis for "adults". I do not consider I was an adult at all, but it is the Neocatechumenal Way which consideres that any person with 13 or 14 years old is enough mature to start the belonging to that reality. I do not know the reason for that decision.
From a psychological point of view, I look back and if I were my parents, if that girl -me-of only 13 was my daughter, of course I will never had given my permision for her to join the NCW. I will not enter in great theories of development, I just want to offer some sense common elements to value it.
When you are a child in the NCW, the first objetive fact to consider is your parents or at least one of them are in the NCW. Maybe you have been born in a previously neocatechumenalized family, maybe your parents have just made the Initial Catechesis a few long ago.
In both cases, they are obliged to educate their children in the NCW's own rigid precepts, which are different than those which guide any other catholic family in the world since the moment the NCW is a fundamentalistic group within the Church. It means the NCW goes much further than many other catholics in some questions.
For example, meanwhile a common catholic family do assist Sunday mass with their little and young children, in the Neocatechumenal Way only those who have made First Communion have to participate in the neocatechumenal eucharist. None of them are allowed to stay in the rest of neo celebrations (weekly Word or similar). It means they are not allowed to be where their parents have to stay for long hours.
Then, children under First Communion's age are obliged to stay in a different room and to the care of "baby sitters" who are paid by hours. Those "baby sitters" are chosen because "somebody knows somebody". For example: a member of the community knows a friend of the cousin of a neighbour. Just it. If you are lucky, you can find a trusted person. But, anyway, the need of the service is more urgent than the quality. The more you can do is to pray for that person to be a good person.
Sometimes you will need a babysitter who cares for your "non-allowed" children at home while you are at a neocatechumenal celebration. And the same argument: just pray and trust. It does not matter if your little baby is ill, there is no excuse for you to stay at home with your children when you have a neocatechumenal celebration.
You will hear a lot of times that your children are not yours, they are of God. You are obliged to assist your communitarian celebrations over all. And if God has sent your children for you, it means your children can not be an excuse to miss the celebration. NEVER. If God cares of your children while you are not at home with them, then nothing unexpected by God could happen. Then, if something bad happens, it was God's will. So simple.
What about if there is a fire and your home is burnt while you were in the parish? God's will. And what about if your baby got sufocated by asthma and the babysitter did not know what to do and your baby dies? God's will. For the neocatechumenals, there is NOTHING to excuse you miss the celebration. Nothing means nothing. Even if your baby is at hospital, you have to assist the communitarian celebration, then find somebody who stay with him at hospital meanwhile.
I have told you in some past post how the catechists use to resolve any situation of conflict between parents and children: mother's hysteria. If your baby is asthmatic, it is due to your hysteria. "Hysterical mothers have asthmatic children" is one of the best advices given by a catechist, of course given by Kiko and Carmen as the top catechists. It is very interesting how easily they assumed the presuppositions of psychoanalysis being against it.
Of course, not being a hysterical mother is one of the conversion signs for catechists about the degree of faith developed by any neocatechumenal mother. If you show the smallest concern about the safety of your kids, automatically it will be a symthom of lack of faith. It means the more unconcern, the more faith. That is why people who are not in the Way tend to think about the neocatechumenal mothers they are "mothers-rabbit". They just procreate once a year and throw the puppy to the world to survive on its own.
And that is why neocatechumenal kids do develop with no sense of normal atachment. They have to understand very quickly their parents are God's workers and they have to stay far from them many times. Of course, the NCW ideology is more prone to 'non working out of home' woman. The best neocatechumenal image of feminity is a woman who renounces to her professional future to stay at home giving birth a new baby year by year and taking care of the house and the numerous children. The new Eve.
Then it is strange to understand why for them the most ideal woman was Carmen. She was not married, she never cleaned up Kiko's underpants, she never changed four diapers at the same time she was cooking. Maybe the idea was presenting her as a woman who renounced to be what she most wanted to be: a nun in India, but it does not mean she loved to do the things which a neocatechumenal wife and mother has to do to obey exactly all Kiko and Carmen's preached. I think for sure Carmen was allergic to children's snot.
We get to the heart of the matter: for me, one of hardest role in the NCW is being a non-atached mother. A mother who knows there are rats running around babies in a room full of dirt and grime but she understands God allows it and wants it for her conversion and her babies' fortification. A mother who prefers to trust on the first person she finds on the street for taking care of her children before she misses the fourth neo-celebration in a same week (as it happens during the last part of the itinerary).
Not to talk about other serious situations around children, like for example exposing them to physical and/or psychological abuse. As Janet from Australia commented here, what if a sexual predator is a priest in the NCW or if an abuser is the babysitter who cares of your community's children? What can their parents do with it? I tell you the answer: NOTHING AT ALL. If your children are abused while you are with your neo-community in a celebration, then it means God allows it for their and your salvation.
Just think on poor Kiko, who suffers so much because the altittude sickness in Colorado Mountains and cries a lot to get consideration of his great sacrifice, but he preaches you to leave your children on any abuser's hand as a sign of faith. What a shameless of false prophet who preaches against the teachings of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church says parents are guarantors of their children. It means they have the debt of their protection and care in all orders: physic, moral, economic, etc. They have not the right but the debt.
In the Neocatechumenal Way you have to learn the opposite: if something bad happens to your children, it is God's will. If your baby is hit by the babysitter, God wills. If your son is abused by the priest of the community, God wills. If your kid drowned in the pool, God's will. In the Neocatechumenal Way you are expected to not bringing protection of your children because then you will go against God's will.
In the NCW, God even wants evil, God sends evil as a way for something. Neocatechumenals do believe evil is a need for your conversion. And pedophilia, for example, is a way through which God speakes to the abused to look for conversion. A man who hits his baby is showing: 1) he is unable to love him, 2) the baby also is unable to love his father, 3) both of them need conversion, 4) they need God. The neocatechumenal ideology only values the 3) and 4) facts, then everything is allowed if leads irreparably to 3) and 4). You can change "father" and "baby" by anyone else.
By the way, parents in the Way are told not to allow their children to play with pagans at school. Not to go with pagan friends to parties, not to accept any invitation to visit a pagan home for a birthday celebration (imagine if your son's pagan friend lives with his divorced mother or if he has a homosexual brother! ANATHEMA!). Not to allow your son playing football because he has to stay at home during Sunday morning to pray Lauds with family. And so a extralarge relation of new precepts I wish the Pope would know it...He would be scandalized!
I have read somewhere the only non neocatechumenals whom neocatechumenal children were allowed to talk with in the school were other children from Opus Dei. Can you imagine how this little minds have assumed they belong to a ghetto? A blessed ghetto, of course, a loved ghetto built by their God. Terrible.
We find these neocatechumenal children are not allowed to share their time or space with anybody while they are at school among non belivers, pagans, non pure but contaminated people, and in the other extreme their parents are 'obliged' to trust their care in the first abuser who offers to take care of them while they are in a weekend convivence. It is horrible. What kind of mad people they are? I am afraid someday we'll see the consecuences of all such disclaimer and all this abdication of responsability.
I am afraid the NCW's catechesis for parents to abdicate of their truly obligations and duties in front of God will result in a generation of very damaged people. Because paterhood and motherhood are sacred. What could you think about a mother who relinquish to her attachment bond with her baby in the name of God? What could you think of a father who justifies the abuses suffered by his son in the name of God? It is extremely serious.
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