Kathleen Sibelius (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Back in 2011, Kathleen Sibelius protested that her decision to block the over-the-counter sale of Plan B to girls 16 and younger, “[wasn't] about politics,” but that was before the election. Now that President Obama is safely re-elected, she has no reason to fight for something that she doesn’t really believe in. The Obama Administration’s priority has always been to promote expanded access to abortion almost from his first day in office, although the euphemism of choice these days is always about protecting “women’s health.” Who could oppose that?

In the first place, a 15 year-old girl is not a woman. Girls cannot drive a car without adult supervision, if at all. Girls cannot purchase liquor or tobacco. Girls cannot vote or serve in the military. In most states, girls cannot consent to marriage. Such restrictions are not like the misogynist Sharia laws in Iran and Saudi Arabia. In all of these things, we have rightly decided as a society that at 15 years of age, a girl is still not ready for these dangerous and

This episode brought to you by Plan B. She’s never too young to start learning about birth control. (CTW Photo)

consequential activities—and neither is a boy of the same age. Nobody at the age of 15 is ready to make life-altering decisions.

Secondly, it is not healthy to teach young girls that they are mere objects for sexual gratification. It is not healthy to provide a young girl with poison and tell her that she has the right to choose whether another person within her lives or dies. It is not healthy to tell girls that there are no consequences for a life of licentiousness and debauchery, and that if they “accidentally” get pregnant (as if having sex is an accident!) they can “take care of it” after the fact, no questions asked, and that Plan B is no more harmful than a packet of breath mints or a roll of toilet paper. No, this is not about women’s health.

“Women’s Health” is neither about women nor healthy. Discuss. (NBC Photo)

Feminists have been fighting this war for so long now that they have forgotten what they are even fighting for. In the early days of the feminist project, there was an attempt at serious reflection on our views concerning the proper role of women in society, but instead of finding some happy medium between the pit and the pedestal, we have cast women into the gutter and left them to fend for themselves. Women, and now even girls, are expected to fight on equal terms with men, and nowhere is this more true than in the bedroom. Young boys and girls are expected to have adventurous liasons with many partners from a young age while marriage is something to be postponed until later, if ever.

The normalization of adultery in our society has many consequences. Proponents of gay marriage argue of their sexual attraction, “It’s who I am.” In a bizarre sign of the times, girls in high school now aspire to star in pornographic films, justifying their decision by saying, “It’s my life.” In the four decades since Roe v. Wade was decided, more that 55 million babies have been killed by three little words, “It’s my body.” For all the self-regarding language though, when we define ourselves by our sexual predilections–by our attraction to the other, the external–we are in fact denying the self. The human body is not merely some biological receptacle, but each of us also has a unique soul that yearns to be reunited with our creator.

Christ and the Woman of Samaria by Giovanni Lanfranco, c. 1625-8

None of this is new though. In one of the most powerful passages in all of sacred scripture, Jesus tells the woman at the well, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst.” In this powerful story of salvation, Jesus describes our addiction to sin. In our sex-obsessed society which is really not so different from the decadent Romans in the time of Christ, we constantly thirst for more gratification of our carnal desires, be we can never be satisfied. It is only when we accept that procreation in the bonds of marriage is a sacred part of God’s divine plan that this thirst can finally be quenched.

The great miracle of the Samaritan woman is that she is so spectacularly unchaste and yet in her encounter with Christ, she is able to overcome these desires and finally obtain lasting peace. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus speaks often to women, offering them true health in both body and soul. Like the woman at the well, all of us are fallen creatures subject to many sinful desires, but the story of our salvation does not end there. Choosing to turn away from sin is only the beginning. Protecting the youngest and most innocent among us from the commoditization of human flesh that is promoted by the Obama Administration is as good a place as any to start.

Harvard, in their choice of faculty and through the scholarship those faculty produce, has indicated that it has next to no interest in advancing principles similar to those taught by the Catholic Church.

That being the case, I was astonished to read an op-ed on the pages of USA Today last month wherein a Harvard student forcefully argued against the views her classmates, and ostensibly her professors, have towards casual sex.

In her essay, Harvard sophomore Lisa J. Mogilanski explains why she’s “uncomfortable with the hookup culture” that dominates college life.

“Hookup culture seems like a perversion of what human relationships ought to be,” Mogilanski argues. “[It] seems, at best, preposterous and, at worst, in very poor taste…It’s even lauded as liberating for women.”

“But I’ve asked myself…whether enthusiastic sex positivity doesn’t come with its own host of negative pressures. For one, it isn’t the boys who need to be encouraged to have sex. It seems likely that hookup culture makes some girls do things they’d otherwise prefer not to.”

“I don’t mean to suggest that we had romance ‘right’ in the days of chastity belts and arranged marriages,” Mogilanksi continues. “But I feel as though we all sort of know how romance ought to play out. Hookup culture is an unnavigable mush of vague intentions and desires.”

Responses to Ms. Mogilanski’s accurate portrayal of the hookup culture have been vitriolic and, as expected, non-substantive. Nobody, it seems, wants to tolerate a dissenting opinion when it comes to childless-free sex.

Cursory research suggests Ms. Mogilanski is no arch-conservative either. Her columns for the Harvard Crimson scarcely mention politics and when I tried to find out more about her I had a tough time discovering anything else she has written. It seems as though she’s just a regular student who sees the danger associated with a culture that can’t resist the temptation of the flesh.

What Mogilanski says in her essay echoes what Catholic author Colleen Carroll Campbell told me in an interview several months ago. “The decline of courtship and rise of the hook-up culture certainly hasn’t benefited women,” Campbell remarked. “I don’t think it’s done favors for either sex, but women have particularly borne the brunt of the low expectations and fear of commitment it encourages.”

As spot-on as Ms. Mogilanski may be, just because one student at Harvard publically expresses her discomfort with her generation’s attitudes toward sex, doesn’t mean we’re on the cusp of a sea change in views towards marriage and respect for the unborn. Recall that Plan B “emergency contraception” was just approved for over-the-counter use and that over the past several years more and more school boards have been dolling out birth control pills to their teenage and elementary school students.

Ms. Mogilanski’s opinion is welcome news, and it may open some people’s eyes to the spiritual decay taking place among young adults, but the battle to instill a culture that respects women, not only on college campuses but in society writ large, is far from over.

Over the past few weeks, my “under-30” friends have been talking incessantly about the film. They’ve thrown grand 1920’s themed parties and dressed up like flappers before heading out to see the movie. Afterwards, they’ve raved about it.

Considering most of my friends over 30 couldn’t stand the film, that struck me as odd. Why the divide? Was this an instance of taste improving with age or was there something about this particular film that embodied the experience of Millennials, something that Generation X-ers and Baby Boomers missed?

After seeing the film, my answer is, “A little of both.”

A Review In Brief

First things first. The critics who panned the film weren’t entirely wrong. A masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” is not.

For starters, the narrative device used to frame the story—Nick Carraway writing a book about Gatsby from a mental home—was pedantic, heavy-handed, and way beyond Toby McGuire’s emotional range. “Exposition for idiots” was how I described it afterwards. And even that might not be giving enough credit to the idiots, whom I’m pretty sure didn’t need to be explicitly told that the 1920s were a time when life was fast and loose, given that the next two hours were devoted to demonstrating that fact.

Then, there was the acting. Imagine a Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy as rendered by P.G. Wodehouse and a decent college theatre department. Now say a prayer for poor F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose book deserved a much better cast than it got.

All that being said, I didn’t hate the movie. I actually enjoyed it. It was beautiful to watch, overwhelmingly faithful to the book, and the soundtrack, which fused 1920s Jazz with the stylings of Jay-Z, totally worked. Seriously. I can’t believe I’m saying that either. But it did.

In fact, it did more than work. Jay-Z’s music bridged a century, making audible the connections between the world of 1922 and the world of 2013, connections that so many twenty-somethings, wittingly or unwittingly, seem to see.

A Tale of Two Worlds

The film, like the book, shows a world powered by greed, electrified by sex, and running like hell from grief. That world doesn’t want to remember the trenches of Verdun or the shores of Gallipoli. It doesn’t want to ask why millions of young men had to die or what good came from their deaths. By 1922, all searches for meaning in the madness of World War I had come back empty. So people stopped searching. Instead they started grasping—at pleasure, at excitement, at anything that promised to distract them from the wounds they bore within them.

“The Great Gatsby” makes that world incarnate. It also makes incarnate an age of unprecedented wealth, of clothes and cars and cheap electricity. In 1922, almost everything could be had for a price. The age of the consumer had begun, and along with it, the growing belief among the middle class that luxury could be had without work.

At the center of that world, embodying it all, stands Gatsby, a romantic, a dreamer, a man who thinks himself “the son of God” and who believes his destiny is to climb as high as the stars, always moving upwards, capable of anything, even repeating the past.

How could that not speak to twenty-somethings?

Today’s under-30 crowd has grown up in an age of endless war—wars in deserts abroad and in the culture at home. Those wars have left many of them wounded, in soul if not body. Those same wars also have left Millennials cynical about politics and cynical about love. Irony is the spirit of the age.

With all those wounds and all that cynicism, the Millennials know, far too young, what it is to run from grief, drink away confusion, and settle for sex when real love can’t be found.  They’ve been to the parties and danced the dances. Or they’ve watched their friends dance them. They also know, in a way T.S. Eliot couldn’t have fathomed, what it means to be “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

Likewise, today’s twenty-somethings know excess. Forget the Lost Generation. No generation before the Millennials has had as much or had it so quickly. They have never known a world without Amazon One-Click or iTunes. They have lived the whole of their existence as consumers, swimming in a sea of stuff.

Last but not least, like Gatsby, Millennials want to shine. In fact, as a generation, they believe they were made to shine. No demographic in the world scores as high on the narcissism index (yes, that’s a real thing) as Millennials. What Gatsby came by naturally has been instilled in them through the instant fame promised by Reality TV, and two decades of “I am special” curricula in schools.

In sum, Gatsby’s world is our world…albeit with fewer smart phones and better clothes.

Accordingly, whether they’re wounded or witnesses to wounds, consumers or critics of consumerism, dreamers who believe in love or skeptics grown cynical from disappointed love, there’s something in “The Great Gatsby” to which just about every Millennial can relate. It’s the story of their generation, almost as much as it is the story of their great-great grandparents’ generation, albeit in a more elegant package (which itself is another reason for its appeal—most Millennials only regular encounter with elegance being a MacBook Pro).

The Witness of Gatsby

The connections between the two ages is a connection easily made. No question about that. There is a question, however, about what lesson Millennials are drawing from the movie.

Do they walk away believing as the narrator does, that Gatsby was a tragic hero, a true romantic, the most hopeful man in the world? Do they see greatness in his aspirations to shoot through life like a star ablaze? Do they aim to follow his path?

Or do they see the truth of it all?

The truth is that Gatsby wasn’t hopeful: He was delusional. He manufactured a life, and he manufactured a love, fabricating an identity for himself just as he fabricated an ideal woman from his memories of a real woman. He created a false picture of their love in his mind, then refused to see the reality before his eyes—the reality of her littleness and betrayal—because it wasn’t what he wanted to see.

Everything Gatsby’s age promised, everything Gatsby sought, disappointed in the end. Wealth, Power. Pleasure. Romance. All that burning and blazing came to nothing, a nothing encapsulated by the bullet which pierced Gatsby’s chest.

The reason for that end, as my friend Chris said to me afterwards, is this: “Pretentions to divinity always end in death.”

You see, we are called to greatness, each and every one of us. We are called to be sons and daughters of God. That instinct—in Gatsby, in Millennials, in anyone—isn’t wrong. But power, wealth, and fame don’t make a person great. Love does that—love for God and love for one another. Likewise, we’re not born sons and daughters of God. We’re made that way by baptism. It’s a gift, not a given.

If we assume the gift without realizing how gracious it is, and then pursue greatness by trying to blaze through the sky on an ever-upward trajectory, we will crash and burn. There will be no life. There will be only death.

If it’s life we want, then it’s love we need to pursue—not the type of self-seeking, self-satisfied love the world glorifies, not the type of love which looks to another human person for meaning and fulfillment—but love which denies itself for the sake of the other and which knows true fulfillment and meaning can be found in only one Person, Jesus Christ.

The way to that love is narrow, not wide. It’s easy to blaze through the sky. It’s difficult to lay oneself low, to be little and humble and meek, to seek to serve rather than be served, to affirm rather than be affirmed. There’s scant glamor in that way, but in the end, it’s the only way worth taking.

Gatsby never saw that. He was a fool. Fitzgerald saw some of it. He at least knew Gatsby was a fool. He knew the whole spirit of his age, a spirit in which he nevertheless fully imbibed, had it all wrong. But he didn’t know how to get it right.

We do. The Church has handed it to us on a platter. We just have to live it. And we have to help others live it too. For parents, for siblings and friends, as well as for those working in youth and young adult ministry, the popularity among Millennials of “The Great Gatsby”—the longing of so many young people for greatness and love, beauty and healing, poetry and transcendence—stands as a lesson in who the Millenial generation is, what they want, and what they need.

It’s also a reminder that the Millennial Generation hasn’t become another Lost Generation just yet.

A tale of two cities, Philadelphia and Cleveland dominated the news this week with the Kermit Gosnell abortion trial revelations and the decade long child abduction and recovery in Cleveland of 3 women and 1 child. While the ending in the Cleveland case is far more joyous with four live humans recovered literally from the chains of slavery, these cases share gruesome similarities and point to some tough lessons for our culture. The curtain which shrouded both these houses in mystery is now being pulled back and the gruesome details are on display for everyone to see.

The Gosnell trial recited countless examples of governmental inertia and incompetence on the part of Pennsylvania health department bureaucrats who failed to investigate complaints and conduct yearly facility health checkups. For 19 years, Gosnell’s abortion mill was never visited by a health inspector. Complaints were lodged against the clinic by women who had suffered severe complications and were admitted to the hospital as a result of Gosnell’s shoddy procedures and filthy conditions. Yet no one cared to act to protect the  victims at that clinic.

Think of the countless lives that could have been saved had just one government official charged with inspecting this clinic had done their job. The average public servant can make a difference in a life. No one did in Philadelphia when it came to Kermit Gosnell and his house of horror.

Although the details of the Cleveland dungeon are only beginning to leak out, some troubling behavior mirrors the Gosnell case. In 2004, law enforcement responded to a call about a woman screaming at the house on Sycamore St. No one answered the door so the police never returned to follow up on the complaint. We know now that all three teens were being held captive in that house in 2004. Had the police aggressively responded to the complaint, the girls might have been spared another 9 years in captivity. Neighbors claim that they called the police about other disturbances at the house to no avail, but law enforcement disputes these allegations.

Seemingly simple acts by government workers, responding to a 911 call, and investigating unsanitary condition in a health clinic have profound consequences.  Yet, lives were lost mired in governmental complacency.

Looking for missing children requires the active engagement and participation of the public. In fact, the public solves most missing children cases by providing tips and leads to police which result in the recovery of missing children. The public are the eyes and ears for clues to child abduction cases. Oddly enough, outright strangers, people unknown to the child anonymously call a hotline and report a sighting or lead of a missing child. These cases would never be solved without the public as a partner to law enforcement.

There is one major difference between the Gosnell case and the Cleveland case. Amanda Berry, the abducted teen, was able to escape and call 911. The babies born alive in Gosnell’s horror chamber couldn’t call for help.  Both sets of children need the public to care, to get involved, to save their lives. The chains and shackles on the three abducted children confined them to a living hell, and denied them a life. The scissors that severed the spines of the newborn babies denied them life.

Missing children flyers of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus were posted throughout Cleveland. Neighbors tied yellow ribbons around their trees in memory of the missing teens. Rallies, searches and candlelight vigils were held to encourage action to find these girls. However, the streets around the Gosnell clinic are empty and barren, all the children are missing from the clinic; all the children are dead. However, for the first time, we have seen their picture and they have been named, Baby A-G. Where are the yellow ribbons, rallies, candlelight vigils for them?

They have not died in vain. We have seen their face. We know that they are missing.

Sorry, I know that’s not the answer you want to hear. But that’s life in a fallen world. You can be the wisest, most loving, most faithful parent on the planet, and there’s still no guarantee your children won’t walk away from God.

And the temptation to walk away will come.

A few weeks back, Our Sunday Visitor asked me to take a look at the emerging trend of young atheists. Which I did.

On one level, what I found was disheartening. From the story:

“Nationwide, young people are leaving the Church and religion altogether at a record-breaking pace, with the Pew Forum’s most recent study on religious affiliation finding that 16 percent of young people now subscribe to atheism, agnosticism, or no organized religion at all, the highest percentage of any demographic group.”

So, that’s the depressing part.

There is, however, a not depressing part: Young people have an innate desire to believe in something greater than themselves, and if parents approach questions of belief rightly, there’s much they can do to channel that desire in the right direction.

Because of word count limitations (the bane of my existence), I didn’t have room in the OSV story to share all that I learned on that point. But that’s the glory of blogging—more room, no editors.

So, what do the experts say you, as parents, can do to strengthen your child’s spiritual immune system?

1.  Love Jesus.

That’s where it starts. If you know Jesus as your God and Savior, if he’s your greatest love and closest confident, it shows. It makes your witness more credible and your catechesis more effective. And if you don’t? Well, that shows too.

 2.  Know why the Church teaches what she does.

You can’t hand on what you don’t know, and you can’t answer the questions about God and Heaven, good and evil, truth and suffering that your children bring to you if you’ve never looked into those questions yourself. The Catholic Faith is suffused with mystery, mysteries that go beyond reasons. But those mysteries don’t go against reason. They don’t contradict it. There are good answers for why Catholics believe what we do, answers that have satisfied some of the greatest minds the world has known. Learn them now…before the questions start.

3.  Live the Faith in your home.

The Catholic Faith isn’t an ideology. It’s a way of life. It’s a way of seeing the world and living within it. It’s a way of being and loving, working and praying, eating and dressing, playing and dancing. It’s also a beautiful way. When done rightly, nothing else compares. So, strive to do it rightly. Bring the rhythms of your work life and your home life more and more into accord with the rhythms of the Church’s life. As a family, volunteer at a food pantry; pray outside an abortion clinic; say those rosaries; love your spouse; be open to life; invite the lonely and the suffering into your home; look for little ways you can serve one another daily. Truly be Catholic, every day in every way, and, odds are, your children will be too.

4.  Build a trusting relationship with your children.

Listen to them. Look at them. Be interested in who they are and what they think. Honor your promises and commitments to them. Be there when you say you will. Say you’re sorry when you fail. When they fail, be just but merciful. Be firm but gentle. Create a climate where they know they can bring any trouble, any struggle, any mistake to you and find help and forgiveness. Have a monthly Jubilee Day, where any confession of wrongdoing will be met with a hug and not a punishment. In essence, strive to model the Fatherhood of God as you experience it every time you go to Confession.

5.  Don’t dismiss their questions about the Faith.

Or condemn them. Doubt is a normal stage of adolescence. It’s often the first step in owning one’s faith as an adult. So, when the questions come, tell your child those are good questions that others of deep faith have also asked. Answer the questions if you can. If not, tell them you’ll find the answers. Then find them. Maybe suggest reading books that address those questions together, as a family. Whatever you do, just show your child that you take him and his opinions seriously.

6.  Don’t compromise on Sunday Mass.

If your child announced he no longer believed in good hygiene, you wouldn’t allow him to stop bathing. If he announced he no longer believed in education, you wouldn’t allow him to drop out of school. And if he announces he no longer believes in God or the Church, you shouldn’t allow him to stop going to Mass. A parents’ job is to lead and guide—calmly, wisely, firmly. So, for as long as they live under your roof, you need to lead and guide your children to Mass every Sunday. There is grace to be had there, grace that can’t be had any other way. Getting them to Mass doesn’t have to be a battle. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Some things in family life just aren’t optional, and when that’s made clear, kids know it and don’t fight it (much). Make sure Mass is one of those things.

7.  Don’t panic.

God loves your children far, far more than you ever will. He wants them for himself far, far more that you ever can. And he will spend every day of your children’s lives moving heaven and earth to accomplish that. Which is why so very many of those who wander from the faith of their childhood eventually return. Know that. Trust that. Have faith in that. Pray without ceasing for your children as they struggle and fall. But never panic. It’s not over until it’s over…for anyone.

Remember in 2011 when some media outlets intimated that the Occupy Wall Street movement was simply emulating Jesus?

Okay, well here’s the latest “Jesus meme.”

I know what you’re thinking: What new age, trendy evangelist put this out? Rob Bell? Shane Claiborne? The kid who rapped about how he hates religion but loves Jesus?

All three would be wrong. This ad is actually part of a marketing campaign of the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn, as you may or may not know, is home to a large concentration of skinny jeans-wearing, iPod-toting, RayBan-clad Bohemians, many of whom are not Catholic. Seeing how there’s no silver bullet that will make young adults attracted to the Catholic faith (other than prayer) some will say that this is exactly the type of marketing that is needed in the Catholic Church. I see where they’re coming from, but for me it’s too gimmicky and irreverent for my liking.

I grew up Catholic and, like many of the college-age persons this ad is targeting, I fell away from the Church when I moved out of my parent’s house. By the grace of God, I came back to the Catholic Church. But I didn’t revert to Catholicism because of a chic marketing campaign or a feeling that Jesus was a “cool guy” I could talk about corporate greed with over coffee at three in the morning in DUMBO (an acronym for a neighborhood in Brooklyn notorious for being home to hipsters).

Of course, I am but one of the 1.2 billion Catholics on this planet. My reversion story is different than others. Some people might like this type of ad. Others won’t, and will likely see it as offensive. So what do you think? Do you think this ad is effective? Is it appropriate? Do you think Jesus was a hipster? Let’s hear what you have to say.

The Post reports:

One video features a D.C. doctor, Cesare Santangelo, who said that in the unlikely event that an abortion resulted in a live birth, “we would not help it.” Santangelo was answering repeated questions from an undercover operative about what would happen, hypothetically, if she gave birth after an unsuccessful abortion.

“I mean, technically, you know, legally, we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive, but . . . it probably wouldn’t,” Santangelo is shown telling the woman, who was 24 weeks pregnant. “It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.”

Santangelo stands by his position.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Santangelo said he was trying to reassure the woman, who turned out to be an undercover operative of the group, Live Action. In reality, he said, he would call 9-1-1. But he said he stands by what he said on tape.

“What I said is, basically I wouldn’t do anything extraordinary,” he said Saturday. “We would call EMS. We would call 9-1-1. But I wouldn’t do intubation or anything. . . . You let nature take its course.”

Let nature take its course? What is abortion if not a lethal intervention precisely intended to prevent nature from “taking its course,” the natural course being the sustaining of life?

Still, when it comes to the rights of a newborn, Santangelo is more sanguine than our President.

“Once the baby is born, it’s out of everybody’s hands, and the baby has rights, too,” [Santangelo] said. “I understand that and I support that.”

Having to save the life of a baby who has just survived an abortion doesn’t just reveal the profound moral contradiction of our abortion regime in the starkest possible terms. On a more immediate level, such life-saving treatment defeats the entire purpose of abortion. Abortion advocates talk of “terminating a pregnancy,” yet even Santangelo would never confuse an abortion and, say, a caesarean section—both of which are medical interventions meant to bring pregnancy to a conclusion. The essential difference, then, is that an abortion “procedure” is only deemed “successful” if it ends a life. Under the current abortion regime, the “right to choose” entails not only the right to choose whether or not to be pregnant; it entails the right to a dead baby. Being left with a living baby is an affront to “human rights” enshrined in the abortion license.

As for Live Action, their non-violent efforts to defend the least among us by shining a light on the abortion industry’s moral obtuseness have earned Santangelo’s special contempt:

He said he has not watched the video because “I don’t like to feed into these people. I really consider them terrorists.”

Woods, meanwhile, finished tied for fourth.

Although his failure to win doesn’t make him any less of a person, when one sees a Nike ad like this one celebrating Woods’ world number one ranking, a title he last held two-and-a-half-year ago, one has to wonder…if winning takes care of everything, what does losing do?

We live in a culture where athletes are treated like demigods, where sports teams have cult followings and where you’re considered abnormal if you don’t play high school football.

To be sure, sports can do a lot of good. They can inspire us. They can teach us teamwork and discipline. They can teach us the importance of being healthy. And they can teach us how to overcome adversity.

But too many Americans make sports their number one priority. Indeed, too many Americans spend their Friday nights binge drinking at the local watering hole while watching the big game instead of spending time with their family. Too many Americans spend Saturday morning tailgating and eating inordinate amounts of food instead of treating their bodies like temples of the Holy Spirit. And too many Americans spend their Sunday evenings watching NFL triple-headers and indulging on pizza and beer instead of relaxing with their kids and keeping the Sabbath holy.

Now, I am a huge fan of Notre Dame football and Detroit Tigers baseball, but I don’t let sports run my life. When we spend too much time focusing only on sports, we move God from the center of our life to the sideline of our life. As Blessed John Paul II said in 1987, sports are important for “guaranteeing the balance and total well-being of the person,” but “if sport is reduced to the cult of the human body” it “would lose its true significance” and could become “harmful” to our “full growth as human persons.”

Although Nike received a tidal wave of criticism for its ad, Woods stood by it, declaring in a press conference that the slogan “winning takes care of everything” is “something I’ve always said since I first turned pro.”

To be sure, winning might repair Woods’ image with fans longing to see his theatrics on the golf course. And winning might compel corporations to ask him to sponsor their products once again. But winning won’t take care of his relationship with his former wife, who divorced him in 2010 after learning Woods had been cheating on her throughout their six-year marriage. Winning won’t repair the emotional scarring his infidelity inflicted on his two young children. And winning won’t undue the pain and humiliation his affairs put his extended family and close friends through.

Winning might take care of some things, but it doesn’t take care of the things that truly matter. We as a nation need to realize that. We as a nation need to understand sports can only do so much. We as a nation need to put God back at the center of our lives. Because only God can take care of everything.

More evidence of this is a means to prayer that the Holy Father authored when he was still the Archbishop in Argentina. It is a lovely way to pray, and it showcases Pope Francis’ sense of simplicity, his priority for family, his love for the poor and also his recognition that prayer is powerful.

Readers may already know the prayer. It has been around for a while, but several sources are saying that it was written by Cardinal Bergoglio. I should note as well that it was attributed to him well before he became Pope Francis.

So here it is: Pope Francis’ five finger prayer guide. (Go here for the Spanish)

1. The thumb is the closest finger to you. So start praying for those who are closest to you. They are the persons easiest to remember. To pray for our dear ones is a “sweet obligation.”

2. The next finger is the index. Pray for those who teach you, instruct you and heal you. They need the support and wisdom to show direction to others. Always keep them in your prayers.

3. The following finger is the tallest. It reminds us of our leaders, the governors and those who have authority. They need God’s guidance.

4. The fourth finger is the ring finger. Even that it may surprise you, it is our weakest finger. It should remind us to pray for the weakest, the sick or those plagued by problems. They need your prayers.

5. And finally we have our smallest finger, the smallest of all. Your pinkie should remind you to pray for yourself. When you are done praying for the other four groups, you will be able to see your own needs but in the proper perspective, and also you will be able to pray for your own needs in a better way.

This is a simple way to prayer that even kids can get. And it gives a whole new meaning to giving our political leaders your middle finger. (Sorry…couldn’t resist.) But it is eminently practical, and it is certainly grounded in the Catholic tradition. Indeed, what I like most about it is the end. By praying for others we can begin to see our own needs in greater perspective. It is an important lesson, one that pops up in Catholic Social Teaching quite often.

We read this in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church for instance,

“390. …The sphere of friendship, on the other hand, is that selflessness, detachment from material goods, giving freely and inner acceptance of the needs of others. Civil friendship understood in this way is the most genuine actualization of the principle of fraternity, which is inseparable from that of freedom and equality. In large part, this principle has not been put into practice in the concrete circumstances of modern political society, above all because of the influence of individualistic and collectivistic ideologies.”

The just society starts with a focus on the needs of others. Thanks Papa Francis.

Squeaky clean, wholesome goodness. For almost a century, that’s been Disney’s brand. But the young girls working for the Mouse have the most terrible habit of not getting the memo.

Case in point? Miley Cyrus (aka “Hannah Montana”), who went from teenage cutie to dominatrix sex kitten in little more than a calendar year.

There’s also Demi Lovato, who backed out of her hit Disney show after provocative photos surfaced online of her kissing another girl.

And now Selena Gomez has gotten in the game, with her newest flick, Spring Breakers, featuring The Wizards of Waverly star doing both drugs and engaging in threesomes with her female co-stars.

It’s not just Disney starlets that are the problem, though. The annals of Hollywood are filled with similarly cautionary tales. Not coincidentally, so too are homes across America, where girls from 5 to 15 and beyond are imitating the starlets they idolize, dressing, talking, and acting in ways that, in the not too distant past, would have made a sailor blush.

Setting aside the soul-destroying consequences of living life as a sexual object, from even the most secular vantage point the sexualization of young girls—Disney stars or otherwise—is bad news. Defining your worth by your sexual desirability causes grades to drop and athletic performance to suffer. It induces depression and triggers eating disorders. It leads to high-risk behaviors, sexually transmitted diseases, and situations where no amount of saying “no” can help.

On Sunday, two young football players in the town where I live, Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of raping an underage girl. That ruling has generated all sorts of chatter in the media about the lessons parents need to teach their boys.

And boys in this culture do need to learn some serious lessons. Parents need to teach their sons how to love, honor, and respect women, to see them as human beings to value, not bodies to use.

But as a cursory glance at either the Disney bullpen or the local junior high will tell you, our girls need to learn a few lessons too, lessons that are foundational to protecting their bodies, their souls, and their futures.

Lessons like…

1. Growing up is about much more than sex.

Today, whenever a young singer or actress decides to leave their child star days behind, they signal that decision to producers, directors, and the culture at large by sexing up their image (a la Selena Gomez). In that, they also signal to their tween followers that overt sexuality is the mark of maturity.

Sex, however, doesn’t make the man (or the woman). Adulthood, real adulthood, is about making the hard choices. It’s about responsibility and hard work, generosity and wisdom. Adults put others needs before our own, sacrifice and suffer for those we love, and control our desires, sexual or otherwise, for the sake of a greater good.

Which is to say, our ability to say “no” to the wrong kind of sex with the wrong kinds of people in the wrong kinds of ways is far more the measure of maturity than our ability to say “yes” to the same.

2. Sexiness won’t win friends.

Not real friends, that is. Short shorts and shiny locks will attract some people in the short-term. But in the long-term, the way to find friends who will stand by your side in good times and bad, supporting you, challenging you, and loving you, quirks and all, isn’t to dress or act provocatively.

Rather, it’s to love. It’s to be kind and loyal, encouraging and generous, smart and funny, patient and forgiving. It’s to see what’s unique and beautiful about every person God sends your way, and celebrate that. It’s also to pursue what interests you—Shakespeare, show tunes, the Australian Peacock Spider—and enrich the lives of those you love through those pursuits.

Beauty fades. Age advances. But a loving heart, joyful spirit, and lively mind? They endure. And so do the friendships forged because of them.

3. Smiling faces lie.

Not all smiling faces. But the smiling faces of starlets who hop from one boyfriend to another and one bed to another? They lie. Oh boy, do they lie. A quick listen to a Taylor Swift album should tell you that much.

Here’s the thing: Being used doesn’t make any girl happy. Being treated as an object, not a subject, breaks every girl’s heart. The smiles in the tabloids are meant to deceive, and sex without consequences is a fictional plotline.

In the real world, as opposed to glossy magazines, the way to happiness is the way of commitment. It’s giving yourself, body and soul, to one person (or to God or his Church if that’s your vocation), and choosing to love that person every day of your life. It’s seeing the good in him and rejoicing in it. It’s seeing the bad, and believing he can do better. It’s bringing new life into the world together and holding hands as your days on earth grow fewer. That’s real happiness. That’s lasting happiness. The rest is just airbrushed misery.

4. Beauty is more than the sum of one’s parts.

What makes a woman beautiful isn’t just the shape of her face or the length of her legs. It’s the smile on her face and the twinkle in her eyes. It’s a voice that speaks with intelligence and a body that moves with grace. It’s a humble spirit and a prayerful soul.

When people (real people, not reality stars on Jersey Shore) look at us, that’s what they see. They don’t see a one-dimensonal photo-shopped picture. They see a person, a whole person, and they respond to that person. They’re attracted to gentleness and wit as much as they’re repulsed by vanity and vulgarity.

No matter what Cosmo says, whatever is on the inside eventually shows up on the outside. If what’s on the inside is beautiful, people will see beautiful. If what’s on the inside is ugly, people will see ugly. Maybe not right away. But the body expresses the person. One way or another, one day or another, the face will tell. What’s hidden is always revealed. Which means obsessing over our bodies, while neglecting our souls is the most foolish beauty regimen of all.

5. Modesty doesn’t deny feminine beauty. It affirms feminine beauty.

Modesty is temperance, prudence, and love in action. It’s tempering our desire to be desired, so that a person can see the beauty of our soul, not just the beauty of our breasts. It’s prudently dressing and acting in a way that will help others treat us like subjects, not objects. And it’s loving others by not making it easy for them to think of us in a way that violates their dignity and ours.

Modesty involves the way we dress—not by mandating that women don burkas, but simply by asking us to take a pass on clothing that’s aggressively or inappropriately sexual. Modesty also involves the way we act—what we do with our phones or allow others to do with their phones, how we relate to men, how we relate to women, how we speak, and what we speak about.

Modesty isn’t about being a prude. It’s about being discreet, elegant, and a touch mysterious. It’s also about being smart, remembering that thanks to social media, momentary indiscretions have lasting consequences. It is, ultimately, an affirmation of the great power inherent in feminine sexuality and a concerted decision to use that power for good and not for ill.

Handing on that lesson, like every other lesson mentioned here, isn’t easy. But if we want the girls we love to grow up to be healthy, strong, smart, confident, and joyful women, hand them on we must.

And if we don’t? Well, the Disney starlets seem more than happy to stand in the breach.