Fraternity-Testvériség, 1964 (42. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1964-03-01 / 3. szám

FRATERNITY 5 sober man that the patterns of the American home life changed for the worse during the last few decades. Life in the big city flats is a far cry from the atmosphere of the good old country home. But the migration from the farm to the factory is still a continuing trend and the big city apartments so often located in the slum areas are hardly suitable for Christian rearage of the youngsters. A mere glance at the statistics showing ever increasing number of broken homes, ju­venile delinquency and illegitimacies of every kind painfully proves the correctness of the sorrowful statement. Since religious exercises are virtually banished from the public schools, and in our highly complex society the parental guidance is in many cases questionable, if not completely lacking, the different congregations carry an enormous responsibility in religious and moral education of the American youth. Unfor­tunately, millions of American children are not affiliated with any CHURCH, and mostly those young people whose parents are least fit to set an example or give moral guidance to anyone. Religious education in the congregations vary concerning the quality and the duration of the instructions. Statistics show that Roman Catholics spend twice and Jewish people four times as much time with their young folks than we Protestants do, on the average basis. This apparent disparity is probably due to the fact that Protestant spiritual leaders were the strongest advocates of the public school system and the separation of the Church from the State. These differences, however, carry little weight as long as young people of the various faiths convene once a week with the sole purpose to get acquainted with the principals and rituals of their own religion, but their regular daily education is not woven through with frequent moral and ethical instructions. Even such a short analysis of our moral education makes obvious that the Russian concept of daily consistent indoctrination of their youth at every possible place and by all available means must produce better results than our system., whereby a con­siderable large sector of our young people is shot out of ade­quate training to meet properly prepared their often fanaticized adversaries. The big contest between two ideologies is expanding and getting more intensive every day. The moral rearmament of our ill-prepared younger generation, future defenders of our philos-

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