A Cultural Invasion

Here is, verbatim, an announcement lifted from a church bulletin published last week:

“Confirmation Classes on Feb. 7: These classes are cancelled in order for families to gather together and support their favorite Super Bowl team. The parent meeting scheduled for that night will also be rescheduled.”

Bang. The secular culture has injected itself right into the core of the parish. Bang. The secular culture has scored a big victory over the Catholic culture, striking a blow right at its heart, the children.

The question must be asked: Is the Super Bowl really more important than studying for confirmation? Other questions naturally follow.

What kind of message does this convey to the children who have been attending confirmation classes up to this weekend?

What kind of message does this convey to the children who may have been looking forward to attending the class next Sunday?

Is the Super Bowl a more spiritual, meaningful event than confirmation class? Must be. The cancellation came so that “families [can] gather together and support their favorite Super Bowl team.” How charming. How special. Gives me the warm fuzzies.

Aww, the Super Bowl is such an important event that the whole family ought to be involved as spectators, right? Supporting their favorite team! It is obviously much better to be a lumpy spectator than a participant in anything. It’s preferable to watch rather than to do.

It’s good for children to watch the Super Bowl. It’s such wholesome entertainment for them.

Look! That 400-pound guy just jumped on that 300-pound guy and broke his leg and knocked him unconscious! What great fun to watch!

People are cheering while the EMTs haul the damaged gladiator off in an ambulance. Children need to see this! There might even be bloodshed! How edifying.

This is a valuable experience for children who will remember it all their lives. We can only hope the damaged gladiator isn’t one of their favorite team’s guys. That would cause sadness, and we wouldn’t want sadness on Super Bowl Sunday.

Oh good, here comes the halftime show! Wow. With any luck, a fading female entertainer will dance around on a stage and contrive to bare her surgically augmented breasts!

Children need this. Seeing naked breasts during the Super Bowl is good for children. Much better than a boring old confirmation class.

And the commercials! Maybe the family which isn’t benefitting from a confirmation class, or even a confirmation parent meeting, will get “a lot more out of it” by studying what Budweiser has come up with this year in the way of creative, entertaining, spiritual advertising.

Oh yes it’s definitely good for children to watch beer commercials. It’s a formation exercise. They need to form their lifelong brand preferences. Brand preferences obviously have a much higher priority than studying scriptures, or Church history, or learning to make an examination of conscience.

Will you drink Bud – or Bud Lite – when you grow up? It’s essential for children to get this exposure, so that they won’t be embarrassingly indecisive about beer brands when they are old enough to drink it.

The drive to become confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church certainly must take a back seat to this. Well hey, it is after all the Super Bowl, which has somehow become the new end-all, be-all.

And cheerleaders! Any luck at all, we’ll get to see their colorful panties when they kick way up high and cheer for their favorite team. Looking at cheerleader panties is good for children! So enlightening.

What a warm family scene, snuggled together in the living room in the comforting glow of the television set’s flicker, far away from that sterile old church classroom. Way better, looking at panties and bare imitation breasts than at stale old textbooks.

Perhaps, in the future, we’ll be able to watch a Super Bowl game EVERY Sunday, and we can dispense with confirmation classes altogether.

After all, beer, sex and a game of graphic violence are so much more wholesome than religious education, especially as presented on the big flat colorful screen.

And the outcome of the game (their favorite team, remember) will be so much more meaningful over a lifetime than anything any kid could learn in a stuffy old church classroom.

I don’t understand

One time a relative of mine admonished: “Don’t even call us on Sunday. We’ll be watching the Super Bowl.”

I don’t get it. What is so important about this annual orgy that it supersedes church classes – and even bowling leagues? Why is it more important than a phone call from a family member?

If this means I am “out of the loop” then I am thankful for being out of the loop.

Bowling league play is actually cancelled for the big game. Even this makes more sense than cancelling confirmation class. It would be hard for me to concentrate on my bowling game while I knew I was missing the Big Game.

Last year, one of our neighbors disturbed the peace in our otherwise quiet neighborhood. The instant the big game was over, he came screaming out of his apartment.

The poor man. He lacked any sense of embarrassment as he ran wildly around outside the apartment complex, screaming at the top of his lungs, waving his hat, leaping repeatedly into the air.

We had been reading, about to go to bed, when his outburst began, and it took a little while to figure out what all the ruckus was about. We had forgotten the big game was on that night. Ten minutes of insane noise, and he had finally spent his excitement quotient.

Wonder what he’ll do this year? Something tells me it won’t have anything to do with confirmation class or a parent meeting. More like beer and bosoms and cheerleaders and violence. Yay!

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Word of the Week: Xylophone. It’s from the Greek, xylon, or wood, and phone, originally meaning a voice. A xylophone is a musical percussion instrument consisting of a series of wooden bars graduated in length so as to sound the notes of the scale when struck with small wooden hammers.

Next week’s word: Amen.