To fight a battle, you need soldiers. To fight a spiritual battle, you need spiritual soldiers. To fight an Enemy working to eliminate the Strong Father, you need an army of strong fathers to serve as spiritual soldiers.
To build an army of strong fathers, we must recruit young men in large numbers. How can we do this? By offering them brotherhood, tradition, and a rigorous initiation.
The model: the French Foreign Legion
At a time when most militaries struggle to fill their ranks, one brings in new recruits by the thousands: the Foreign Legion.
Young men from all over the world flock to the Legion because it offers them a chance to prove themselves as men. They also join it for its strict code of honor, its strong traditions, and the real camaraderie among its soldiers.
These things are very difficult to find in modern society. They are also tremendously attractive to the masculine soul.
In the Legion, recruits are trained in what is called the “old-fashioned way:” They’re put through a month-long ordeal of physically- and mentally-demanding field exercises, and held to very high standards of cleanliness and order.
The Legion is also “old-fashioned” in its observance of Catholicism. All of its soldiers participate in Catholic rites, even if they are Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim. Every unit within it has a patron saint that all of its soldiers honor.
Other old-fashioned aspects of the Legion are its men-only units, its insistence on selfless service, and its reverence for tradition. Your duty is to fight and maybe die, its soldiers are told, and if you do, you will have been part of the Legion’s 195-year history of sacrifice in battle, emblazoned on its flags.
The organization: the Knights of Columbus
What organization can recruit young men as spiritual soldiers, by offering them initiation, tradition, and brotherhood? The Knights of Columbus. It’s not something the Knights currently do, but they recognize the need for it.
In its series of videos based on Into The Breach, the Knights’ Supreme Council pointed out that Catholics are engaged in a spiritual battle for the soul of the family, a battle in which men must lead and fight.
In these videos, the Supreme Council also noted that mainstream American culture provides boys with little guidance in how to be men. It provides few models of real masculinity, and tries to make fatherhood irrelevant.
With over a million members in the US, the Knights have the manpower and resources to address the problems they’ve identified. They can do that by creating a program to recruit and train an army of strong fathers.
The “boot camp:” initiation into manhood
For tens of thousands of years, boys were initiated into manhood. Their tribes initiated them in accordance with the timeless truth that women are born, but men are made.
Through trials and ordeals, boys proved to themselves and their tribes that they could fulfill a man’s primary purpose: to protect and provide.
Through pilgrimages and rituals, they sought and received spiritual guidance, and established a personal connection to the Divine.
This is part of humanity’s cultural DNA. That’s why, after we became civilized, male initiation persisted in new forms. Ritual hunts were replaced by military training, and vision quests gave way to knightly vigils.
It persisted because boys have an innate desire to confront fear and danger, perform difficult tasks, and connect with the Divine. They feel that they must do these things to become men. Sadly for boys today, initiation isn’t part of the modern world.
Boys in our society make do with substitutes, as when they join the Marines, practice martial arts, and take hallucinogenic drugs. These pursuits, however, lack the spiritual component of initiation: the experience of the Divine needed to transform a boy into a man in full.
To build an army of spiritual soldiers strong enough to win the battle that’s raging today, we Catholics must revive the practice of male initiation. When we do, we’ll likely get an overwhelming response from the young men of America.
Read the next section: A Training Program for Men >>
