Children & Holy Communion

When I went to Ecuador a couple of years ago our bishop baptized his sons. He asked me to be the sponsor for little Christopher. The Archbishop and my assistant are going to Ecuador in August but I can't make the trip this time. I do keep up with Christopher though. His mother went into the broaster chicken business so I'm sure she'll provide my colleagues with a delicious chicken dinner at some point. We ate so many chicken dinners and potatoes last time we were in Ecuador I didn't eat a potato for a month after I returned home.

 

In our Anglican Catholic Parish, some women, young and old, wear their veil for the service and for Holy Communion. One of those that is fervent in her veil wear is our priest's daughter. Our priest was raised as a Baptist, so it is not in his heritage. We do have infant-baptism in our parish, if requested by the parents. Our parish is a mission-parish, so it is small. Child-communion comes only after confirmation. Adult-communion is between parishioner and priest.

 

Infant baptism is the norm and expected

 

This is where it's at in America at the present moment, and what is the NRA and gun ownership lobby doing about it? Actually OPPOSING ANYTHING being done about it.

If your 6 year old kids are old enough to be taught these ways to preserve their lives in school because they have become necessary in your gun laden society, what is stopping your children being taught the Christian faith to preserve their souls, to a degree of understanding sufficient to receive communion, at a similar age?
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Tiffy, this "wild wild West" view you have of America is wildly wrong. Understandably, I guess -- the mass media is very prone to mis-stating how prevalent gun violence is in America. Do you know that the city of London has a higher violent-crime rate than New York city does, per capita? If you didn't know that, you should ask yourself why not. Why doesn't the media focus on global crime rates in the same way as they do American crime rates?

Americans have had guns for centuries now, and we will continue to have them. They are not magical evil totems. They are machines, inert lumps of metal designed for a specific purpose. If you want to address the causes of evil in the world, focus on the hearts of wicked and crazy people, not on the machines. The American problem now is not guns; it is fatherlessness, an endemic drug-abuse problem, homelessness, untreated mental illness, and a runaway amorality in the overculture. If governments were serious about addressing the causes of crime, they'd focus on those things.

 

27 school shootings have taken place in the USA, SO FAR this year. The USA has surpassed 200 mass shootings this year alone so far in which more than 2 people were casualties per incident. 119 school shootings since 2018, and you don't think the USA has a problem compared to crime in London? Can you please tell me, (since I am apparently so ill informed about UK crime figures), how many mass shootings we have endured in the UK in the last TWENTYSIX years.

We haven't had ONE since 1996.

So what do you put down the difference to? Just that you have so many more lunatics among your greater USA population or that you have legally so many more guns per lunatic in your much greater population?
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Is it your opinion that shootings are the only kind of crime that matter? That stabbings, cudgellings, rapes, burglaries, muggings, beatings, and drug OD's aren't important? Is it your position that gun laws reduce gun crime? (If so, Chicago should be the safest place on earth, right?) Why is gun crime especially heinous compared to other kinds?

 

The suject is gun crime, not crime generally but the thing about guns is their ability to kill at distance, even leaving the marksman undetected. The other forms of attack upon the individual that you mention are in themselves just as potentially deadly and illegal in a civilised nation but their use in mass killings is limited. That's why the lunatics are so fond of using guns for indescriminately killing large numbers of people. Guns are designed for exactly that purpose so from the killiers point of view it is an obvious choice in the interests of efficiently killing victims at a distance from themselves. I'm surprised you don't seem to have understood that the solution to your problem is either to get rid of the lunatics or get rid of their easy, legal, access to guns.

My guess is that a child of 6 years old could have worked this reasoning out. So it's also my guess that any bright 6 year old is old enough to understand enough, (if taught), to receive Communion at the table along with the adults,(some of whom even perhaps, still don't understand what Communion is all about).
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I'm with you on this Tiffy. I've been thinking a lot about how pathetic Sunday school literature is, on the whole. The children's stuff is usually a bunch of disjointed stories with no application to anything we do as a church. I've got some ideas for better curriculum but have other projects to complete first. But I start catechizing kids when they can read enough to read the basic prayers.

 

I own guns and am not anti gun but I don't think the Chicago analogy holds. They have tight gun control laws but the area around th em not so much. So you can drive in and out no problem and buy guns

 

Speaking on this topic my 6 year old received for the first time last Sunday. He has always been blessed but he was not sitting with me but with his teacher. So they went up there and the priest communed him. He walked back to me with it in his hand because he did not know what to do. We had a good talk after that about what communion is. I do now feel he is ready to receive again and will continue the conversation with him just to make sure.

 

Some non-Americans really have their underwear in a wad over this issue, an issue that doesn't involve them because it's an issue in America that involves Americans. I sometimes wonder what their emotional problem is, that they have to subvert conversations about communion or abortion to bring up this other issue. Seems like they could at least start their own thread and leave the other topics alone.

 

The world teaches your kids the ways of the world in America. American Christians are free to teach their own kids the ways of God in their own home.

Those parents who take the resonsibility of rearing children seriously know this. By the age of 7 most children brought up by loving, godly parents will already know enough about the faith of Christ to receive Holy Communion faithfully.

 

I applaud the parents that take the time to educate their young children on the receiving of communion. It is a big part of parenting, just as teaching of morals and social graces are and not that of the schools. I thank you all. They are our future.

I will most likely have a different perspective of the gun-control issue discussed. I am a Vietnam veteran. I was in Law Enforcement, at some level, for over thirty years. I was a personal-protection and home-defense instructor for twenty of those years. I am also a first-generation American. My father and his family migrated to the USA at the time of WW-I and most all of his elders remained in what is now Slovakia. A number of his uncles and cousins fought against the Nazis as partisans. Their village in old Austro-Hungary was taken over by the Nazis, without firing a shot. Why? Hitler and his local puppets enacted firearms laws that denied ownership of handguns and locked rifles and shotguns in a community-armory and they had to be checked out and ammo had to be signed for each hunting outing and spent cases returned to be counted. When the Nazis did march into the village, NO ONE had a firearm with which to defend themselves. They had but farm tools, like pitch-forks and axes. So, the people were gathered into the town-square and the village fell. This is why I am so adamant in defense of the Second Amendment. Please do not say it will not happen in the USA. Just look at what our own government did at Waco TX and Ruby Ridge.

I also have to bring to light when Great Britain requested the USA send personal weapons to them in WW-II, for home-defense. How soon we forget.

 

I can appreciate your point of view given the experience of your family under the Nazis.

However had your countrymen had weapons to fight the invaders with they would all have been killed anyway, just might have taken a few Germans with them but none would have been left to tell the tale to future generations. As it was some may have been lucky they couldn't fight back. The Germans didn't take a lot of prisoners, treated captives very badly and anyone who fought back was usually summarily killed because they were just an inconvenience to the invaders. I don't think the situation in the USA is remotely comparable. The USA is not being threatened by invasion from brain washed psychopathic killers with a ruthless world domination desire, under the despotic leadership of a deranged, narcisistic, jingoistic mental case.

It seems some Americans are so distrustful of their own elected governments that they are in constant fear of a military coup, like in tin pot South American countries. Not surprising with the number of military style weapons freely available even within the general population in the USA. Gun ownership outranks many banana republics per head of population. An INVASION by Fascists or Commies is so unlikely that assault weapons in the general population pose a far greater threat to young American lives and your Rule of Law than did any of your previous 20th century governments, even Trump's, (whom, in the end, you had some difficulty getting to comply with the rules of your own democratic system). If he gets in again you may need all those guns you have floating around, to get him out again when he does the same thing as he tried to do before.
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There’s no real connection between the relative strictness of gun laws and the relative unresponsiveness of government. Plenty of tyrannical regimes have had comparatively lax gun laws (Nazi Germany, Ba’athist Iraq), while plenty of free countries have had very strict gun laws (Israel, UK, Australia). The opposite is also true. There’s no real connection there, as a simple regression analysis will show. The question of the frequency of firearm ownership is actually irrelevant not only to the question of the relative freedom of a society, but also to the prevalence of firearm-related crime. The US is far and away at the top of the list when it comes to firearm ownership rates, yet isn’t even in the top 10 when it comes to firearm-related homicides per 100K. Australia, for example, which has instituted a very strict regime over the past several decades, and which has the population of Florida yet spans a whole continent, didn’t actually have a homicide problem to begin with, so their gun laws can hardly be credited with bringing them “down”. There’s no connection between mere ownership and crime. But it is also true that that the state of civil rights in general, and the state of democracy itself, is much healthier in Australia than it is in the US. Both sides of the debate are simply wrong.

 

Unless you include Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and their legions of influenced-by-money individuals in positions of authority (including the heads of most universities, Anthony Fauci, the head of WHO, Al Gore, editors of major media outlets, Pres. Biden, etc.). "The love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Tim. 6:10).

If you don't believe there are evil, greedy maniacs in positions of power, pick up a copy of The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Naysayers will argue that I'm spouting a conservative conspiracy theory, but Kennedy is an avowed tree-hugging Democrat. There's enough damning evidence in just the first few dozen pages to make one wonder why Fauci hasn't been arrested for conspiracy to commit murder on a wholesale scale.

Well, there you go. See, we may need all those guns after all. Or maybe we'll need the guns to fend off the rioting, looting, burning, destroying, hate-filled anti-Trumpers; they have a track record, you know.

 

I will not offer any sort of rebuttal to the comments. I gave my opinion and it is fruitless to debate it. We all have our opinions and none of us will change our minds, no matter how long we debate it or attempt to discuss it. I do sit back and smile reading comments from Brits and Aussies about the USA. We did have a Revolution for a reason. Enough said...

 

RFK Jr. is crazy. Why would anyone take a book written by him seriously, other than because of confirmation bias favoring anti-vaxxers? He studied history and literature in the 70s and has a law degree. He's a big-time "environmentalist". BFD. He has no medical credentials, or any scientific training for that matter. Nor is he a historian or an investigative journalist. He's used his name recognition and connections to push crackpot conspiracy theories for years, then projected that pathology onto others like Gates, in order to make yet more money. Why should I or anyone else care what he has to say in a book written about Fauci, of all people? That's Twilight Zone level paranoid delusion.

 

I have always argued - as did Samuel Seabury at the time - that the War of Independence (it wasn't really a revolution) was a textbook example of an unjust war. The irony (or perhaps tragedy) is that we arguably would have been far better off remaining a group of colonies and achieving independence gradually, the way Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did. There would have been no bloody War of Independence, or even bloodier Civil War. Women's suffrage would've happened more quickly, slavery would have been abolished decades earlier, soccer would be our national pastime, and we would have a functioning and responsive constitutional system embodied in parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, rather than the gridlocked, unresponsive, and unrepresentative mess we have today.