Why is your child, who has been raised by the TV and the computer and given no moral system by which to make sense of the world, undisciplined, hyper and anti-authoritarian?  Why because he is an Indigo Child, of course!  He is the next evolution of mankind; he is smarter, a master of technology and needs no systems to constrain his creativity.  In fact, your conscience as an uninvolved parent can be clear: your laissez-faire parenting style has produced the pinnacle of human development.  Sounds great, doesn't it?  This is the gospel being preached in Jan Tober and Lee Carol's books The Indigo Children and Indigo Celebration.

If this is not sufficient, one may turn to the internet community that has sprung up to celebrate the Indigo "phenomenon." Apparently, not only are disobedient, over-indulged children the next evolution of humanity, they are also the forebringingers of a world-wide spiritual awakening. Messages supposedly received from an "ascended master" have revealed that these children have been sent to prepare us to "return to our galactic Being-ness" and to become "multi-dimensionally oriented." (For those not familiar with New Age terminology, an ascended master is a spiritual being assigned to help guide the spiritual evolution of humanity. There is general disagreement over whether they are aliens from another planet, or human beings who have reached a higher plane of development -- but either way we can be sure that Jesus Christ was actually one of their number.) Apparently, these children are establishing a sort of psychic infrastructure that will enable all of us to achieve wholeness, oneness and godhood. Naturally, they also have a new form of DNA, advanced psychic powers, and an ability to perceive more than three dimensions of reality.

This is this obviously idiotic new age tripe, but its implications are rather frightening.  The language used by these people is almost worshipful, as if their kids were higher beings -- so you can imagine what sort of effect this will have on their parenting, and on the psychology of their supposedly more evolved offspring.  It’s a scary reversal of the parent-child relationship, which includes a dogmatic presupposition that your child knows what is good for them better than you do. Add to this the fact that one of the signs that your child is an Indigo is that they are already spoiled, demanding and disobedient, and you can see that what is being proposed is a recipe for disaster. It's interesting to note that even the authors of the book recognize that the children responsible for school shootings in the U.S. have all been "Indigos" -- makes you wonder whether these "Indigo Children" are really the Chrysalids, as promised, or if they are more likely to turn out to be Midwich Cuckoos.

Transsexuals: A Learning Opportunity

It was bound to happen eventually.  Sex changes (or "sex-reassignment surgery" as the enlightened call it) are now possible and people really do get them.  It was only a matter of time before one of them was an elementary school teacher.  This is exactly what happened in Vancouver at which a grade 5 teacher has undergone the surgery and will now be returning to the classroom in January as a woman.  We don't have to point out to any of you, our fine Catholic readers, the plethora of problems with this, but someone needs to tell the parents at that school.  You see, the most shocking thing about this story is not that it happened, but that only about half a dozen parents expressed concern.  The school administration is going to be treating the matter as a "learning opportunity" for the kids and will tell the students that it is a "medical condition".

The Order of the Holy Grail and the Schismatic Vampire Hunter

It was 1973, a small group of Britons calling themselves the Church of the Holy Grail got together in Glastonbury under the auspices of the Old Catholics (a schismatic group that rejects Vatican I and papal infallibility) and revived the Celtic Church, which was reconciled to Rome in 664.  This last group of real Christians consists of a few hundred people under one bishop, Seán Manchester, who, when he's not presiding over the entire Christian community of the planet, fights vampires.

Now you're probably picturing garlic, crucifixes and staked corpses a la Hollywood B-Movies -- and, if Seán's story is to be believed, your picture is right. He claims to have fought with scores of Vampires, all in the traditional way, and to have dispatched them using a combination of the Latin Rite of Exorcism (which is apparently not sufficient in and of itself), staking, and cremating the corpses. A liberal dash of garlic, a sprinkling of Holy Water, and the stories of a couple of young girls who claim to have been the victims of these vampires, and you have a story that is largely indistinguishable from  any of a dozen pulp horror novels.

So is this guy a charlatan, or are we to believe that vampires really do exist, and behave the way that they do in bad fiction? The answer doesn't quite seem to be either. Seán comes across as a hopeless Romantic who wants to believe in his own story far too much to have instituted an organized hoax. There are, however, certain details that can't be explained away except by clever and deliberate deception, or by the presence of real supernatural evil. Whether that evil is actually a vampire, whether it is effected by cement mixed with garlic, and whether Seán's relation of the events is entirely accurate is, obviously, subject to a healthy dose of salt, but, if you're interested in a modern, "real life" vampire story, and you can stomach the cliches, try searching on-line for the Highgate Vampire.