National Catholic Register portal (April 24, 2026) published a commentary by Father Carter Griffin, rector of St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington, D.C., titled “Forming Your Children for Chastity: A Letter to Parents.” The article addresses the urgent question of how Catholic parents can form their children in holy purity in an age saturated with pornography, social media, and digital addiction. Father Griffin identifies the primary threats to chastity as the “attention economy” of Silicon Valley, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the toxic allure of online pornography, noting that the average age of first exposure is between 9 and 12 years old. He offers three main pieces of counsel: fostering regular, positive, and honest conversations about chastity from an early age; implementing strict governance over screen usage, including keeping bedrooms screen-free and monitoring app consumption; and nurturing the child’s imagination through contact with three-dimensional reality such as sports, books, and family activities. He concludes by emphasizing the importance of the spousal relationship as a model of chastity, the role of the sacraments and adoration, and the cultivation of self-restraint in daily life. While the article presents itself as a practical guide for Catholic families, it operates almost entirely within a naturalistic and psychological framework, reducing the supernatural virtue of chastity to a matter of behavioral management and parental technique, while remaining conspicuously silent on the theological gravity of sin, the necessity of confession, the reality of the devil, and the doctrinal chaos of the post-conciliar era that has made the formation of children in purity a near-impossible task for the average Catholic family.
A Virtue Without Theology: The Reduction of Chastity to Parental Technique
The article by Father Carter Griffin, published in the National Catholic Register, begins with a superficially acceptable premise: parents must form their children in chastity. Yet from its opening lines, the reader notices something profoundly troubling — the near-total absence of any genuinely theological framework. Chastity is defined not as a supernatural virtue infused by God’s grace, ordered toward the love of God and neighbor, and inseparable from the sacramental life of the Church, but rather as “the power to love well, body and soul” and “one of the great goods of life.” This language, while not formally heretical, is dangerously ambiguous. It echoes the anthropocentric shift of the conciliar era, where the virtues are no longer understood primarily as participations in the divine nature oriented toward eternal beatitude, but as natural human capacities perfected for the sake of earthly flourishing. The Council of Trent taught that justification is not merely the forgiveness of sins but the sanctification and renewal of the interior man through the voluntary reception of grace and gifts (Session VI, Chapter VII). Chastity, in Catholic doctrine, is a fruit of this sanctifying grace — not a natural “power” that parents can cultivate through technique.
Father Griffin’s opening counsel — to “respect our opponents” as one respects “sharp knives and loaded pistols” — while vivid, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the spiritual combat. The enemy is not merely “slick marketers, IT professionals and psychologists.” The enemy is the devil, the world, and the flesh — the three enemies of the soul identified by every Catholic manual of ascetical theology prior to 1958. St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars, taught that the devil is a great fishhook and that without mortification and prayer, chastity cannot be preserved. Pope St. Pius X, in his Catechism of Christian Doctrine, taught children that the means of preserving chastity are: frequentation of the sacraments, prayer, the flight of occasions of sin, and the avoidance of idleness. The reduction of the spiritual combat against impurity to a contest between parents and Silicon Valley marketers is a symptom of the very disease the article claims to cure: the loss of the supernatural sense of the Faith.
The Omission of Sin, Confession, and the Supernatural
Perhaps the most glaring deficiency of this article is its systematic silence on the theological reality of sin and the sacrament of Penance. Father Griffin speaks of “struggles,” “threats to holy purity,” and the need for “self-restraint,” but nowhere does he identify impurity as a mortal sin that wounds the soul, destroys sanctifying grace, and merits eternal punishment. Nowhere does he urge parents to ensure that their children frequent the sacrament of Confession — the ordinary means established by Christ for the forgiveness of sins of the flesh. Our Lord Himself instituted this sacrament with the words: “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them” (John 20:23). The Council of Trent anathematized anyone who would deny that confession is necessary for salvation (Session XIV, Chapter II).
Instead, Father Griffin offers “Covenant Eyes” — a surveillance software — as a technological solution to a spiritual problem. This is emblematic of the post-conciliar mentality: the substitution of human techniques for divine means. Where the pre-conciliar Church prescribed the sacraments, prayer, fasting, and mortification, the neo-church offers apps and monitoring tools. The implicit message is that chastity can be managed through behavioral controls rather than through the grace of God received in the sacraments. This is not Catholic teaching; it is Pelagianism dressed in digital clothing.
Furthermore, the article makes no mention of the reality of the devil and his specific role in tempting souls to impurity. St. Paul warns: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the devil is the most dangerous enemy of man and that without God’s grace, we cannot resist his temptations. Father Griffin’s “well-paid army of marketers” is, at best, a pale shadow of the real enemy. By omitting the devil entirely, the article implicitly adopts the modernist error condemned by Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907): the denial of the reality of the supernatural order and the reduction of the spiritual life to naturalistic categories.
The “Imagination” Without the Supernatural
Father Griffin’s third suggestion — nurturing the child’s imagination through “three-dimensional reality” such as hikes, sports, board games, and cooking — is presented as a counterweight to the “two-dimensional” world of screens. While the practical advice is not inherently objectionable, it operates entirely within a naturalistic framework. The imagination of a Catholic child is not merely to be filled with wholesome natural activities; it is to be formed by the supernatural realities of the Faith: the lives of the saints, the mysteries of the Rosary, the liturgical year, the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, and the reality of heaven, hell, and purgatory.
St. Philip Neri, the great apostle of youth, filled the imaginations of Roman children with the stories of the martyrs and the wonders of God’s grace. St. John Bosco, the father and teacher of youth, used the Preventive System — which he explicitly founded on the triple pillars of reason, religion, and loving-kindness — to form saints. For Don Bosco, religion was not one element among many; it was the foundation. He taught that the first duty of an educator is to lead souls to God. Father Griffin’s advice, by contrast, could be given by any secular child psychologist with no knowledge of the Faith whatsoever. The word “supernatural” appears nowhere in the article. The word “grace” appears once, and only in passing, paired with “parental love” as a “formidable weapon” — a formulation that dangerously conflates natural and supernatural categories.
The Spousal Relationship Without the Theology of Marriage
Father Griffin writes that “your spousal relationship is of the greatest importance in the formation of chastity” and that children learn how to treat the opposite sex by observing their parents. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly enough. The article presents the spousal relationship as a natural model of “respect and love between men and women” without any reference to the sacramental character of marriage, the theology of the domestic church, or the supernatural graces proper to the married state.
The Catholic Church teaches that marriage is a sacrament that confers grace upon the spouses for the fulfillment of their duties: mutual fidelity, the procreation and education of children, and the sanctification of their souls. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Casti Connubii (1930), taught that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children, and the secondary end is mutual aid and the quieting of concupiscence. The education of children in chastity is not merely a byproduct of a healthy parental relationship; it is a sacred duty flowing from the sacramental grace of marriage itself. Father Griffin’s omission of this sacramental theology reduces the formation of children in chastity to a matter of social modeling rather than supernatural cooperation with divine grace.
The Silence on Doctrinal Chaos and the Conciliar Apostasy
Perhaps the most damning omission of the entire article is its complete silence on the root cause of the crisis it describes: the systematic destruction of Catholic doctrine, catechesis, and sacramental life that has occurred in the conciliar era. Father Griffin notes that young people “swim in waters polluted by the debris of cultural upheavals that happened decades before they were born,” but he identifies these upheavals solely in terms of technology and media. He does not mention the catastrophic failure of post-conciliar catechesis, the suppression of the traditional teaching on sin and hell, the dilution of the sacrament of Penance, the destruction of the liturgy, or the widespread heresy and scandal that have characterized the structures occupying the Vatican since the death of Pope Pius XII.
The truth is that the crisis of chastity among Catholic youth is not primarily a technological problem; it is a doctrinal and spiritual one. When the neo-church abandoned the traditional teaching on original sin, the necessity of baptism, the reality of hell, the gravity of mortal sin, and the propitiatory nature of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, it removed the very foundations upon which the virtue of chastity is built. You cannot form children in chastity while simultaneously teaching them — as the conciliar sect does — that all religions are paths to salvation, that the Church has no right to exercise temporal authority, that religious freedom is a natural right, and that the Mass is merely a fraternal meal rather than the unbloody renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary.
Pope St. Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, identified Modernism as the synthesis of all heresies — the error that reduces religion to subjective experience and denies the objective reality of divine revelation. The article by Father Griffin, with its naturalistic psychology, its omission of supernatural categories, its reliance on technological solutions, and its silence on doctrinal truth, is a perfect specimen of the modernist approach to spiritual formation. It treats the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
The “Seminary” of St. John Paul II: A Conciliar Institution
It is necessary to note that Father Griffin serves as rector of St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington, D.C. — an institution of the conciar sect named after one of the most destructive antipopes in the history of the Church. Karol Wojtyła, who took the name John Paul II, was a manifest heretic and apostate who promoted the cult of man at Assisi, embraced false religions, kissed the Koran, installed pagan idols in the Vatican, and systematically dismantled Catholic doctrine through his ambiguous and modernist writings. That a seminary bearing his name would produce a rector who writes about chastity without reference to sin, grace, the devil, or the sacraments is entirely consistent with the nature of the institution.
Wojtyła’s personalist philosophy, with its reduction of the virtue of chastity to the “personalistic norm” and its rejection of the traditional Thomistic understanding of the theology of the body, is precisely the kind of naturalistic anthropology that pervades Father Griffin’s article. The “theology of the body” developed by Wojtyła is not a recovery of authentic Catholic teaching; it is a modernist reinterpretation of human sexuality through the lens of phenomenology and personalism — philosophical systems that were explicitly condemned by Pope St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907) and Pascendi. Father Griffin’s definition of chastity as “the power to love well, body and soul” echoes Wojtyła’s personalist language rather than the precise definitions of St. Thomas Aquinas, who defined chastity as a virtue that moderates the appetite for venereal pleasures according to right reason and the law of God (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 151, a. 1).
The “National Catholic Register”: A Conciliar Publication
The National Catholic Register is not, and has never been, a reliable source of Catholic doctrine. It is a publication of the conciliar structures, subject to the authority of the local “bishop” and ultimately to the antipope in Rome. Its editorial line consistently reflects the ambiguity, doctrinal relativism, and naturalistic pastoralism that characterize the post-conciliar sect. The fact that this article was published in its pages — and not in a publication faithful to the integral Catholic Faith — is itself a mark of its unreliability.
A genuinely Catholic publication would have included, at minimum, the following elements that are entirely absent from Father Griffin’s article:
- The reality of original sin and its effects on the human appetites, including the disorder of concupiscence that makes the virtue of chastity a lifelong struggle requiring divine grace.
- The necessity of the sacrament of Penance for the forgiveness of sins against chastity, with practical advice on how to prepare children for their first confession and how to encourage frequent confession.
- The reality of the devil and his specific tactics in tempting souls to impurity, including the importance of prayer, the sign of the cross, and invoking the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.
- The importance of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the source and summit of the spiritual life, and the necessity of attending the traditional Latin Mass — the only Mass that preserves the full theology of the propitiatory sacrifice.
- The role of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Refuge of Sinners and the Mother of Fair Love, and the importance of Marian devotion — particularly the Rosary and the wearing of the Brown Scapular — in the preservation of chastity.
- The necessity of flight from occasions of sin, including not merely surveillance software but the concrete, practical avoidance of near occasions: bad companions, immodest dress, indecent entertainment, and immodest conversations.
- The teaching on modesty in dress, as prescribed by the traditional Church and codified in the Decree on Modesty in Dress issued by the Sacred Congregation of the Council in 1570 and reaffirmed by numerous papal documents.
- The reality of eternal punishment for unrepented sins of impurity, as Our Lord Himself taught: “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).
Conclusion: A Clean Heart Requires the Blood of Christ
Father Griffin concludes his article with the Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” This is the only explicitly doctrinal statement in the entire commentary, and it is a good one. But the road to purity of heart, as taught by the Catholic Church for two millennia, does not pass through Silicon Valley surveillance software, family movie nights, or collaborative parent groups. It passes through the Cross of Jesus Christ, the grace of the sacraments, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the flight from occasions of sin, the practice of daily prayer and mortification, and the unwavering profession of the integral Catholic Faith.
The article’s final sentence — “There is no greater gift that you can give” than “a clean and loving heart capable of giving itself to others, above all their Father in heaven” — is a beautiful sentiment. But a clean heart is not formed by parental technique alone. It is the fruit of sanctifying grace, received in Baptism, nourished by the Eucharist, restored by Penance, and preserved by the lifelong cooperation of the human will with the inspirations of the Holy Ghost. Without these supernatural means, all the parental love, all the screen governance, and all the family hikes in the world will avail nothing.
The crisis of chastity among Catholic youth is, at its root, a crisis of Faith. And the crisis of Faith is the direct fruit of the conciliar apostasy — the systematic destruction of Catholic doctrine, worship, and discipline that has been carried out by the structures occupying the Vatican since 1958. Until parents recognize this truth, and until they return to the sources of the integral Catholic Faith — the traditional catechism, the traditional Mass, the traditional sacraments, and the traditional teaching on sin, grace, and the spiritual combat — their efforts to form their children in chastity will be, at best, palliative. At worst, they will be complicit in the very system that is destroying their children’s souls.
Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in illam mittat lapidem (Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone). But let no one mistake mercy for indifference. The Church has always taught that chastity is preserved not by human effort alone, but by the grace of God — and that grace is found only in the true Church of Jesus Christ, not in the conciliar sect that has abandoned the means He instituted for our salvation.
Source:
Forming Your Children for Chastity: A Letter to Parents (ncregister.com)
Date: 24.04.2026