Part III of Fr. John Fullerton’s insightful series on parenting:

As rational animals, we learn a great deal by trial and error, especially when we are young. Parents must understand that in order to promote responsibility they should allow this process of trial and error to take its course by not solving problems for their children that they are perfectly capable of solving themselves. This will require proper supervision, neither too much nor too little. The job of parents is not to prevent their children from making errors but to ensure that errors are contained and that they convey important lessons that will help their children learn to take responsible control of their lives.

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Part II of Fr. John Fullerton’s insightful series on parenting:

Pope Pius XII in his document Guiding Christ’s Little Ones says:

Train the character of your children. Correct their faults, encourage and cultivate their good qualities and coordinate them with that stability which will make for resolution in after life. Your children, conscious, as they grow up and as they begin to will and think, that they are guided by a good parental will, constant and strong, free from violence and anger, not subject to weakness or inconsistency, will learn in time to see therein the interpreter of another higher will, the will of God, and so you will plant in their souls the seeds of those early moral habits which fashion and sustain a character, train it to self-control in moments of crisis and to courage in the face of conflict or sacrifice, and imbue it with a deep sense of Christian duty.

Another word for this “sense of Christian duty” is responsibility, which is defined as the moral accountability of a person for his voluntary acts. Responsibility is also, in our consideration of the past few months, the second of the essential Rs [Respect, Responsibility and Resourcefulness] that parents must instill in their children, the lack of which has affected today’s social life and added to the acceleration of our nation’s moral degradation.

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Tonight, I took my mother and wife (both opera lovers) to see Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) (1791) at the Metropolitan Opera, in New York City. I really enjoyed Julie Taymor’s artistic direction… but none of us particularly enjoyed the opera, overall. I think Mozart and librettist Schikaneder — both Freemasons — were smoking a bit too much cheeba when they created this work: The fairytale is weakly constructed. Other than a few movements by the Queen of the Night (superbly sung by Cornelia Götz), there are no really memorable melodies and no soaring arias. The plot is thin. The ending comes abruptly without answering the numerous questions that remain for the audience. And Masonic symbols abound.

While we three didn’t enjoy it very much, this remains, nonetheless, the 369th performance of The Magic Flute by the Metropolitan Opera since its first in 1900 — so apparently, we’re in the minority.