(LifeSiteNews) — News about crimes committed by minors appears in the media daily. “Child thieves” (“Pibes chorros“) are a sad reality. Very often they travel on stolen motorcycles: they are “motochorros.” Added to these are the armies of hitmen – little soldiers – working with drug clans. On many occasions robberies include murder. Just as the Seventh Commandment is violated, because the natural value of property has been disregarded, so has human life lost its intangible character.
Children and adolescents are killing others with an astonishing coldness. People who preserve an authentic sense of reality do not feel safe, and exclaim, “What kind of world do we live in?” Sociologists and philosophers try to sketch an interpretation and look for the causes of such situations. The plural “causes” is appropriate because the complexity of the matter cannot be reduced to a single reason.
In passing I point out the rapidity of changes and their contrast with the calm recurrence of social phenomena. Even if history records revolutions and provoked catastrophes, the absence of an authentic sense of human truth has not occurred until now. Here lies the problem: young people – children, even – have not been trained in the recognition of that truth.
The phenomenon I refer to as “pibes chorros” has three main causes: there is no family, no school, and no Church. The natural reality of the family has been altered: there is no longer exclusively husband and wife, man and woman, but “partners” (who are very often mismatched). The reality of marriage is the origin of a true and stable family. Children are its fruit – they are protected and formed for the correct pursuit of freedom. I recall a memorable message of Eva Perón from the 1940s: “Our century will be considered the century of victorious feminism; the victory of feminism consists in the indissolubility of marriage and the presence of women in the home” – words that are a reflection of Christian humanism.
In our time there is an overabundance of incomplete families; usually it’s the woman alone with one or two children, or rather with a new “partner” and often harassed by her “ex.” The family is no longer the natural environment for the education of children and formation of their personalities. The figure of the stepfather can be sinister, especially for female children. The streets are a place reserved for children by a family that is no such thing. The education they receive prepares them to repeat the cycle of a dysfunctional family – or for crime. In Rosario, the “narco capital,” children become “little soldiers” at the service of an “orga.” I am not exaggerating. Looking at the problem as a whole, it is worth saying that there is no family. The context is shown by statistics: in Argentina, 48 percent of the population lives in poverty, and almost 10 percent in extreme poverty. The future is at risk.
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The second cause I identified is a lack of schooling. Minors who commit crimes are usually dropouts who have not completed the entire primary school cycle. It must be recognized that, despite its defects, school attendance accustoms children to living in an environment that socializes them and helps them distinguish right from wrong. The alternative to school is the streets. Despite the limitations of school secularism, imposed in our country in the 19th century, a natural morality is transmitted at school, and respect for the property of others and the value of life is taught. Currently this system is in crisis and accompanies the general decadence of Argentina; it is in this context that we find “pibes chorros” who are capable of killing for a backpack or a cell phone.
I have written that there is also no Church. What I mean is that the de-Christianization of Argentina has caused a rift between the Church and the people. Is ours a Catholic country? Father Leonardo Castellani described it as “mistongo” Catholicism, that is, not very serious. Let us note two deep-rooted problems that reflect our secular reality: the vast majority of the baptized do not go to Mass on Sundays (5 percent?), and the First Communion has become the only Communion, so the ecclesial community is not growing.
Moreover, the number of baptisms is decreasing today. Politicians have traditionally failed to understand the meaning of Article Two of the National Constitution: the State supports Catholic worship. They have reduced this principle, which is supposed to be protected and promoted, to “throwing a few bucks to the priests,” an economic benefit which the episcopate has just renounced. This decision signals the bishops’ choice of material poverty, which will make an effective evangelization of society impossible.
The bishops of the Argentine Episcopal Conference do not understand the famous Article Two of the Constitution either. Catholicism is paired with other religions, and it will no longer be “mistongo,” but rather alien to the national community – there will be no Church for it. Long live Vatican II! A functioning parish, especially in the neighborhoods (barrios), is a place of education; it is where one learns to follow Jesus Christ, where God’s Commandments are incorporated in a vital way, and where society is Christianized. Lay Catholics think that priests are supported by the government, and so they are reluctant to reach into their pockets and collaborate.
The episcopate has concluded its “synodal” week with a sociological document criticizing the government which it obviously does not reference by name. La Nación reported on it (page 20, in the Politics section). This text invites us to love and joy (to “everyone, everyone, everyone,” according to the secretary general). That would be the Gospel.
Returning to the case of the “pibes chorros,” many propose a desperate solution: lowering the age of imputability from 16 years old to 14, or perhaps even younger. But then jails would be filled with children who would perfect their “art” of delinquency there – or wherever they are concentrated.
Therefore, I insist on the true solution, an arduous and costly path: that there be a family, that one be educated in the family, that schools are places of instruction and learning, not ideology, that the Church recovers her place among the people, and that, as Jesus commanded the apostles, the Church makes men, the majority of Argentines, true Christians.
+ Héctor Aguer
Archbishop Emeritus of La Plata
Buenos Aires, Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Saint George’s Day