By DONALD DeMARCO
Wendy Ashby, when asked why she was running for a position with the Waterloo Catholic School District Board, responded by stating: “Nothing is more important than our children and their future. Their success is secured through a world-class education system supported through equal opportunity.” She spoke of “inclusive programming that addresses the diverse mental health needs of every child.”
Now that she has secured that position, her true colors have emerged. “The most dangerous creature on the planet,” she contends, “is the White Christian Male. They’re [sic] a threat to anyone that is not them.” She spares women such a horrific categorization. However, she does paint “white women” as “obedient soldiers for the Christo-fascist patriarchy.” Neither sex is left untarred.
Her words, as expected have caused a public outcry and a demand for her immediate resignation.
Perhaps the shortest of all definitions of prejudice is “thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant.” Ashby’s prejudice is a sweeping denunciation of all white Christians. One wonders how she can exempt herself from such a libel. This gives her little room whatsoever to ply her trade as being an educator since she finds the victims of her prejudice to be beyond reform.
It is unnecessary to point out that Wendy Ashby’s comments are prejudicial, vile, and extreme without reprieve. They leap out at you. What is interesting, however, is how she was elected and what is she doing as a trustee for the Waterloo District Catholic School Board? She should be in therapy. Or is it that she has been possessed by the zeitgeist and is merely mimicking what is currently considered to be on the “cutting edge” of a liberal society. She is boldly announcing that the “old fogies” will never catch up to the new elite.
In his landmark study, The Nature of Prejudice, sociologist Gordon Allport states: “There is one law — universal in all human societies — that assists us in making an important prediction. In every society on Earth the child is regarded as a member of his parents’ groups…and if the parent because of his group-membership is an object of prejudice, the child too is automatically victimized.” When Ashby makes all white Christian men and women victims of her prejudice, she is, predictably, at the same time victimizing their children. Yet, after having the poor judgment to victimize them, she purports to lead them to a better future.
People who are paying the slightest attention to life in North America agree that its citizens are divided on moral issues as never before. Dialogue is no longer possible. Violence, prejudice, and murder have replaced logic, reason, and cool-headedness. What is to be done? No doubt the solution must be radical. The past is responsible for the present calamity. Therefore, the past must be overturned, and a bright new page must be written for the new generation. Nothing less than a complete moral revolution is needed. Of course, such thinking is not only Utopian, but mad.
Taking a page from the brave new world, the purported revolutionists say that we must overcome prejudice by being “inclusive,” make room for “diversity,” establish a more daring form of “social justice,” free ourselves from the “patriarchy” of the past, and rid ourselves of any hint of “white supremacy.” In other words, we must fight against illusions while ignoring the real problems that plague our world. We are to be become the new Don Quixote, attacking windmills while never losing sight of ideals that are no more substantial than pie in the sky.
What Wendy Ashby is doing is bringing into a Catholic setting what the world believes to be a panacea for our ills: the holy trinity of “diversity, inclusivity, and equity.” It is only too evident, that this triumvirate is an unworkable piece of fiction. Is it a form of social justice to vilify the innocent, exclude the competent, and limit society to the madness of the new order?
Society has rejected Christianity, which stands for truth, love, peace, and civilization. What is now moving into the picture, and Wendy Ashby is one of its disciples, is illusion, animosity, mayhem, and social disorder. If Ashby is providing a service for Catholics, it is in helping them to realize how indispensable Catholicism is and how destructive a purely secular approach can be
Christ said, “For the world I do not pray” (John 17:9). In Greek, there are two distinct words for the word “world: gaia which refers to the world that God created, and aion which refers to the era or age. The world for which Christ would not pray is aion. In Peter Kreeft’s Summa of the Summa, he points out that “Satan is not the god of God’s good, green earth, but the god of the era begun by man’s fall into sin” (p. 220).
The era or age that presumes to speak for all times by being “up to date” has lost sight of enduring, eternal principles. As. C.S. Lewis remarked, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” Scripture refers to those who are possessed by the era as being unwise (Wisdom 14:11).
Thus, as St. Thomas Aquinas states, Creatures are turned into a snare to the feet of the universe (ST I, 65, 1). One of the most curious spectacles the present era provides, Jacques Maritain states in The Peasant of the Garonne, “is a kind of kneeling before the world” (p. 53).
The true Catholic kneels before God, and not before the world. Enough said.
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