Raising Hell: What Stops Parents From Handing on the Faith to Their Children. (Book Review).

St. Clair McEvenue, Raising Hell: What stops parents from handing on the faith to their children, Interim Publishing, 2001, 104 Bond St., Toronto, ON, tel: [phone], pp. 251, $15.00 Cdn.

Gary Wills, the prophet, calmly surveys the ruin of our society, its broken marriages, its murderous assault on the unborn, its confusion, its grief, and pronounces it the best of all possible worlds. (Father Daniel Callam, C.S.B., "The Demands of Office" in The Chesterton Review, August, 2001).

Not so, says Deacon St. Clair McEvenue in a new book called Raising Hell. Isaiah says, "Woe to those who call good evil, and evil good...." Mr. McEvenue calls evil and good by their names, and does so not only on the strength of long and varied experience--in the Navy, in business, as the father of ten children, and now as a permanent deacon--but experience informed by the Faith as by its soul. The book is an antidote to the Gary Wills philosophy so deftly described by Fr. Callam above. It is not just the secular world which knows neither Christ nor His Father (and so had made secularism into a religion), but school boards and teachers and teachers' unions and, so often, parents themselves, who are inculcating in their children not faith in God but faith in this world, as if man really did live on bread alone. St. Clair explodes this thesis in informative detail.

Even more informatively, he explodes the reverse error; namely, cultism, which would replace faith in God with faith in evil spirits, something the world would rather not even speak about, which makes it the more enticing to the young. Few can broach this subject with St. Clair's savvy. St. Paul says, "Our wrestling is not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, against the princes of the world of this darkness" (Eph. 6:12). St. Clair has answered "I hear you" to that. A young artist by the name of Lisa Klaming deserves high marks for capturing that point on the book's cover.

Is it not now the case that the world has lost its moral compass and is looking for it? The world is now teaching that evil is good, that Satan's way is the right way, that Satan's compass is the right compass to guide us to our goal. It is not our goal, of course; it is the goal that Satan has in mind for us.

Raising Hell went to press just before September 11, 2001, and what better time to get published! John Paul II says that there is no such thing as a coincidence in the Providence of God. On that consideration, Raising Hell is timely as well as timeless.(+)