Ideas on a "concentration camp" to attack problems of modern youth

March 1, 1997

Alright, your Excellency, if you are so smart at diagnosing the world's problems and the problems of modern youth, what do you propose to do about it?

Dear Friends and Benefactors,

I have a wild idea. An idea for a camp to help young men to concentrate. In other words, a concentration camp. Here it is.

Next to the Seminary building is a convent building originally put up by the Dominicans for Sisters who would help look after the material needs of the Dominican priests and novices. It has eight cells upstairs and all rooms needed for independent living downstairs. On an experimental basis for one school year, either autumn '97 to summer '98 or autumn '98 to summer '99, I am thinking of inviting eight or ten selected young men to spend a school-year in the convent learning English grammar and literature, music, history, Euclidean geometry and Latin.

The young men would be around 18-20 years of age. They would be chosen for their capacity and readiness to learn the best things which an old-fashioned Catholic education used to teach, but which almost no education teaches any longer. Therefore they would have no interest in accreditation or the modern world, or degrees, whether on pieces of paper rectangular or shaped like a frisbee (frisbees are circular pieces of plastic, the throwing of which through the air constitutes one of the major occupations of students at most higher institutes of learning in the U.S.A. today).

These young men would begin the day by attending Mass. Lessons would follow until mid-day. After lunch, there would be two hours of manual labour, preferably in the Seminary fields. Late afternoon another lesson. Evening, supervised study. The young men would be essentially self-motivated and self-disciplined. They would keep elementary house-rules, e.g. no smoking, no television. At the end of each month they would be entirely free to leave the whole thing behind them, but if they chose to stay, they would have to submit to the demands made upon them for the next month.

At year's end they could apply to enter the Seminary if they wished, but there would be no obligation or pressure whatsoever in that direction. Nobody can unwillingly serve God. On the other hand the Seminary would undertake to cover all costs of board and tuition (unless that attracted the wrong young men), because our world will more and more desperately need humanly oriented human beings. The Seminary would calculate that to put even only half a dozen young men into circulation with their heads set for one school-year straight on their shoulders, would be a worthwhile investment. Mother Church is generous. Money would not be wasted, but nor would it be the problem.

"With their heads set straight on their shoulders..." Much could be said about the six subjects chosen above for the concentration camp's curriculum...

Firstly, to learn the grammar of one's native language is the very beginning of learning how to think. Since the New World Order's secret masters want nobody to think but themselves, wisely for their purposes they have eliminated the learning of grammar from all school systems they have taken care to control. Let Our Lord's servants learn this much natural wisdom from His enemies by giving high priority in schools to the mastery of grammar in the native language. Catholics must think.

Close after English grammar comes Latin, the staple diet of boys' schooling yesterday, but despised today when boys are not meant to become human or to think. As to the thinking, Latin is a language of which the venerable age and the complicated but logical structure exercise the mind rather more than do modern languages. So it requires from pupils a higher proportion of thinking to memory work, and from teachers - extra advantage - proportionally less correction work.

However, with Latin the thinking is always linguistic and so human thinking, as opposed to the inhuman thinking called for by the sciences, mathematics or computers. These work in quantity, which militates against quality. Computer education is a contradiction in terms. But Latin at the outset forces a boy to discern for instance subject and predicate, which is a distinction flowing from the very structure of the human mind. Also Latin always works in human terms, e.g. "the slave killed the queen" (pure opera soapae), as opposed to "H2+O = H2O". Then again these human terms work towards access to all-time classics of humankind : Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, etc.. Finally these Latin classics are at the root of Western civilization. By divine Providence, pagan Rome provided the central launching pad of the Catholic Church. Pagan Romans were the raw material of the first Roman Catholics. So the study of Latin gives access, as no other study can do, to the natural life-blood of our supernatural Faith. Only three languages were nailed to the head of Our Lord’s Cross. Latin was one of them.

The mention of literature brings us to the third component of the projected concentration camp's curriculum: English literature. Once more, the world around us has it all wrong. "Eng. Lit." as it is called in modern universities has become there a monster like the rest of the so-called "humanities", engendering students who chant "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go". This is understandable, because they are being given no serious reason to value that culture, because the Catholic Faith from which over centuries it came, and the one true God of whose creation it tells, are being rejected by the students' so-called teachers in favour of an all-embracing fantasy coming from hell and leading back to hell via the Antichrist. That is why Catholic parents must be extra careful today in committing their children to "humanities" in modern "universities".

On the contrary in our concentration camp, the centuries of "Western culture" would come flooding back into their own. The history, music and literature of those centuries show to youngsters, as nothing else can, how the Gospel fits in concrete life, because that "culture", for centuries taken for granted, gave in stories, pictures and music all kinds of models for thinking and living in accordance with our God-given nature, which was a good start towards being able to live in His grace.

Now that culture is being taken from us by the masters of the New World Order pushing upon us their substitute stories, pictures and music to seize our imaginations, minds, and souls : cinema, television, newspaper, advertising, MTV, Rock. Human nature cannot do without stories, pictures and music. He who controls the stories, pictures and music controls the men. That is why the concentration camp would be full of Catholic history, Shakespeare and Mozart.

Note, Catholic history, because non-Catholic history deserved to be dismissed as "bunk" by Henry Ford, just as the desiccated horror of deconstructed "Eng. Lit." deserves to be thrown out of all schools. History has been deconstructed by the will to rule out of it Jesus Christ. It has been written back to front to get rid of Him. On the contrary the five-volume "Puritans' Progress" recently published by the Angelus Press is a valiant initiative to re-write American history front to back. "Historia magistra vitae", said the Latins. History rules life. He who writes the history-books writes the future.

As for the importance of music, does any reader of this letter still need persuading? Ideally, concentration camp inmates would perform music rather than just listen to the wealth of good music available on tape and disc, because, again, live music is human whereas tape and disc are mechanical. So inmates would surely be obliged to sing as well as to listen to the great instrumental composers.

Finally Euclidean geometry would teach the young men to think logically. Euclid is almost pure logic, without the technicalities of Major, Minor and Conclusion, but with all the substance, and with clear diagrams as the working matter. Today's schools have succeeded in disconnecting even mathematics and geometry from reality! Whole systems are constructed upon the fantasy that parallel lines meet, or that minus numbers have square roots! Heaven help us!

And so at the end of such a year, the young men might seem unfitted for today's world, but they would be that much better fitted for reality. It is all very well to say that education must go with the times and fit the computer model. Reality says that these times and that model do not fit human beings, so will not work. Human beings are not machines. The world is till run today by men who understand human nature, however horribly they misuse that understanding. Witness that little book of 100 years ago which was a veritable blueprint for our century's horrors, including the disabling of the Catholic Church. The concentration camp would help restore the Church by putting the start of some real Catholics back into circulation.

However, there is a major difficulty. Where do we find a master for the camp? As a colleague said, he must be a combination of Socrates, General Patton and Michael Jackson! Socrates for the ancient wisdom, General Patton for the camp discipline and leadership, Michael Jackson for the ability to get through to young men of today, who can be something of a breed apart. Does anybody know of such a man? In my imagination he is a Catholic widower, ex-military, presently side-lined, withering from frustration at being unable to do any real teaching, who would love to have access to a mini-dozen red-blooded Americans to teach them for the love of Christ a dose of reality, regardless of what he or they would do the year after. To heaven with career, resumes or, since I have Scottish blood, salary!

Can anybody think of such a man for one experimental year? If the Lord God wishes the experiment to take place, a man will be found. If not, the Seminary goes quietly on its way, and relies on others to restore "opera soapae". Man proposes, God disposes.

May He have mercy upon us all, may He protect and guide us, and may His Mother keep us all safe under her mantle.

Sincerely yours in Christ,