Is he a prophet? No, no, and hell no.
And since I’m first, I’ll just point out that the evil “mall girls” aren’t (for the most part) having sex with each other–there are ADULT MEN involved fod God’s sake, and I don’t see either Rod’s or the Pope’s condemnation of them. No, it’s the 14 year old girl must once again be the one who’s singled out as the one whose conduct is particularly egregious. Rod, you know some of your commentors are going to pile on you about this dichotomy, and now it’s clear that you absolutely bait us with it.

Did he see something that many of us are missing? In that case, the tragedy is ours.
But then, isn’t that almost always the case when God sends a prophet? Would that there were more Ninevites in our midst.

Oh come on Connie,
Men may shoulder some of the b;ame but 14 year old girls are willing to sell themselves for a piece of clothing. There is a problem here. And the girls do bear responsibility. From the excerpt Rod quoted the girls are doing the initiating.
This is timely since just last night I blew up over a piece of garbage my daughter wanted to watch on TV last night. I want to get rid of the whole box but I am in the minority here. Garbage in – garbage out. Pollute the collective minds of innocent girls and they will think nothing of selling themselves for a bit of bling.
We are all responsible.

We are all responsible.
I decline to accept any responsibility for the decision of Polish teenagers to engage in prostitution.

The Suro interview is fascinating. Can you be prophetic while also being so profoundly tone-deaf and closed?

Sounds exactly like Japan’s gyaru culture.
Blaming capitalism is too simple. If that were the case, we’d have a similar phenomenon here for many years, which (AFAIK!) we don’t. I’d say it’s more specific, “new” capitalism plus a sudden release of social boundaries.

It’s not capitalism that causes this. It’s the Hobbesian world that is left over when Marxism has done its job destroying the family and the church, the two institutions that give birth to a just happy society.
The Church and the family are the only cure — following Jesus and sacrificing for your very own family, today. Economics will take care of itself when we have strong families and a brave church.

Connie: And since I’m first, I’ll just point out that the evil “mall girls” aren’t (for the most part) having sex with each other–there are ADULT MEN involved fod God’s sake, and I don’t see either Rod’s or the Pope’s condemnation of them. No, it’s the 14 year old girl must once again be the one who’s singled out as the one whose conduct is particularly egregious. Rod, you know some of your commentors are going to pile on you about this dichotomy, and now it’s clear that you absolutely bait us with it.
Connie, take off your ideological drunk glasses and join us here in the Reality Room. The Pope, in his 1991 visit to Poland (that’s when he made his remarks; John Paul II died in 2005), warned his countrymen who had shaken off the communist yoke not to yoke themselves to the hedonism and materialism of the West. I brought up JP2 here because the “mall girls” phenomenon — teenagers prostituting themselves for the sake of obtaining luxury goods — is precisely the sort of thing he feared would happen. How on earth do you figure that my bringing up this story — which appeared in today’s NYTimes — is a condemnation of women designed to bait you? I hate to break it to you, but women have the freedom to choose to do awful things. The men who patronize these teenagers are just as guilty, and there’s something wrong with a culture — a capitalism without a strong moral foundation — that produces “mall girls.” It’s just nutty to me that you see this discussion in narrowly ideological feminist terms, such that you can only read it as an exclusive condemnation of women. What a sadly narrow vision you appear to have.

Peter: Can you be prophetic while also being so profoundly tone-deaf and closed?
How do you know that John Paul II is the one who was profoundly tone-deaf and closed? Maybe it’s you. Which was Suro’s point: many of us see the old man as having been out of touch, but we have to allow for the possibility that he really was a prophet, and we were the ones who failed to heed his warnings. I would say the mall girls phenomenon in Poland is a piece of evidence that vindicates his prophetic message from 1991.

Polistra said, “Sounds exactly like Japan’s gyaru culture.
Blaming capitalism is too simple. If that were the case, we’d have a similar phenomenon here for many years, which (AFAIK!) we don’t. I’d say it’s more specific, “new” capitalism plus a sudden release of social boundaries.”
The difference is that capitalism here must take place in a culture based (at least originally) upon the Judeo-Christian ethic. The problem in the post-Soviet bloc countries is that you have an introduction of sudden capitalism taking place in a primarily godless, formerly Soviet context. When the rains come and the winds blow, the house falls.
JamesG.
(from my pov as a Christian minister in Russia in the years immediately following the Soviet collapse)

Leila… Not sure why you’re so quick to lay the blame at the feet of Marx. Luther and Calvin destroyed the “church” and turned it into another human construct long before Marx.
Capitalism has destroyed plenty of families on it’s own without any kind of assistance from Karl. For hundreds of years as chattel slavery was practiced in the US, families were consistently broken apart at the auction block, women bred intentionally (and used as sexual playthings by those who had power over them), everyone was systematically denied access to education (among many other injustices.) In my estimation, these became imprinted into the fabric of the culture as “normal” patterns and for the most part are identical to a lot of the problems that face the black community today.
I’ll go so far as to say we need to banish these twin bastard children of the enlightenment (Capitalism and Marxism) from the face of the planet.

He was a prophet and I admire him immensely for his life and his works. He loved Poland! This run to western values is all over eastern Europe now.

Remember the discussion of whether or not the free market corroded moral character?
The answer is here.

Remember the discussion of whether or not the free market corroded moral character?
Because Polish teenage girls never exchanged sexual favors for goods and services under the Communist regime.

I would say the mall girls phenomenon in Poland is a piece of evidence that vindicates his prophetic message from 1991.
Of course you would. But is prophecy based just in isolation?
And I’d say telling starving people in Latin America they shouldn’t use birth control as the only response to their plight is tone deafness.
Did you read the whole piece? Suro is very critical of JPII when it comes to his reponse to Latin America, liberation theology, and Africa.

Re: Suro is very critical of JPII when it comes to his reponse to Latin America, liberation theology, and Africa.
Yeah, that was a great interview. And I have to say that I rather agree with Mr. Suro.
The mall girl phenomenon, is of course revolting. And the late Pope was a man who I think was right about many things, and wrong about many others.

I guess if JPII was a prophet, he was not a prophet in his own land, he did almost nothing to prevent and was complicit in the priest sex abuse. As repugnant as I find mall girls, at least they are not being raped by trusted religious figures. I cannot remember where he expressed outrage about this scandal. The irony is that in an effort to prevent “scandal”, the church has fulfilled almost every anti-Catholic trope imaginable.

This part stuck out for me:
“Giving in to desire, to sex, to consumption: that is the Europeanism that some supporters of our entry into Europe think we should accept. But we mustn’t become part of that Europe. We were the ones who created Europe, and with much more effort than those who claim exclusive rights to Europeanism. What is their criterion? Freedom. But which freedom? The freedom to take the life of an unborn child? Brothers and sisters, I protest against this concept of Europe held by the West. And this message must be shouted loudly from this land of martyrs. Europe is waiting for redemption. The world needs a redeemed Europe.”
Wow. I wonder which Europe, which period, which country, would exemplify the Europe JPII would have liked to have seen restored.
The nostalgia for a by-gone era is understandable and is something many people feel, but what hubris.

At the risk of being flamed, I think Connie has a point, even if she makes it a bit stridently. There’s a long tradition of prostitutes being bashed for their harlotry (and harlotry it is) while their customers are dismissed with a “boys will be boys” wrist slap.
And consider this: what if some 14 year old Mall Boys were selling themselves to adult gay men for Prada and Gucci wear? I suspect we would be hearing jeremiads against pedophiles who corrupt the innocent youth instead.
By the way, why do several posters claim that the Communists destroyed the Church in Poland, or that Poland ceased to be Catholic under them? The Church operated under some obnoxious restrictions, that is true, but far fewer and less severe restrictions than the Church had to deal with in majority Protestant lands after the Reformation. And maybe the government was officially atheist, but the nation as a whole decidedly was not. It remained, as they say, more Catholic than the Pope.

After reading the linked articles he does seem a tragic figure – by his own statements it seems clear he knew he had misunderstood many things and ultimately felt he had failed. That is tragic. It seems too as if he became over time almost a prisoner of the role.
However, given the times we live in and thinking especially of the revelations about Lehman Bros, the previous article re: the UK and the erosion of the manufacturing base in the US (which takes the middle and working class along with it) – his concerns about capitalism and the West do seem prophetic and accurate.
The Mall girls – just when I think nothing will surprise me anymore I read this. It really is a debasement of humanity to think that doing this to yourself and your partner (of sorts) is really worth it – and for what – not food to survive or to save your life – but a trinket – one that will go out of style in a year. That we have somehow managed to create a culture where people think possessing this junk matters – that it does something to make your life fuller, richer if you own a chanel scarf or whatever. These young woman represent the extreme of our culture of acquisition but looking at this extreme reflects the rot that pervades the whole. This is it – thousands of centuries of human suffering, achievement, struggles – so we can go to the Mall and buy that i Phone. Yes of course not everyone seeks their happiness in stuff and yes we do need some stuff. But our current situation makes it clear that most people do buy the stuff makes you happy line – and most people have succumbed to the consumerist mentality. It isn’t as if rampant consumerism is not damaging either – personal debt and environmental damage not to mention the poverty of the Third World make it clear that consumerism is a profoundly destructive force. In this sense I do think JPII was prophetic – we do need a spiritual awakening – and of course this need not of a necessity be a Catholic or even religious awakening but a realization that meaning and joy do not come from stuff but from one’s relationship to others, that discipline and denial are a part of finding joy and meaning, and that we can all share in the bounty of this planet. A freedom which does nto recognize limits is not a true freedom.
Nancy – I too find JPII response to the scandal in the US to be disappointing. His lack of control of the curia ( as mentioned in the links) seems a big part of his failure in that area. People who went to Rome to speak with him about this have reported that he told them that the US Church effectively was out of the control of the Vatican. These reports were made from private audiences and can’t be confirmed but if true…..
Chris said: I’ll go so far as to say we need to banish these twin bastard children of the enlightenment (Capitalism and Marxism) from the face of the planet.
yes I am getting to the same perspective myself. Funny how some folks decry the enlightenment when it comes to morality etc but still worship capitalism – the twin of Marxism .

It seems that as soon as people have the freedom to abandon religion they do. So unless societies are prepared to force people into a church and into compliance with a church’s teachings no solution based on religious values is going to solve any of these problems. Perhaps we should be looking at other ways to deal with these problems – since short of coercion to few people are going to pick a religious one.

Dreher writes:
The men who patronize these teenagers are just as guilty
I strongly disagree. The girls are wrong, but they are stupid teenagers acting stupidly. We expect less from teenagers. The parts of their brains that control judgment are literally not fully developed. That’s why we give kids more protection and less liberty than adults. That’s why juvenile offenses are generally treated differently than adult crimes. And that’s why it’s often a crime for adults to have sex with kids, but not for the kids to have sex with adults.
Adult men should know better. We hold adults to higher standards than teenagers. Middle-aged men who have sex with 14 year-old girls are exploiting the kids and are often committing a very serious crime (depending on the respective ages and local laws). Also, many of the men are likely married, so they are betraying their vows.
You are right that if this is systematic as the article suggests, it is a sign of bad things in society. But in no sense should teenagers who have sex with middle-age men for money be considered equally culpable as the men who pay them.
I’ve seen this mistake in other posts. Sometimes you miss distinctions in the degree of wrongness. You say that things are either wrong or right. But some bad acts are worse than others. And a 14 year-old engaged in prostitution should be viewed as a kid with problems we need to address. She should not be put on the same moral level as middle-age men who have sex with 14 year-olds.

Are you saying the mighty Catholic Church will be toppled by a bunch of mall girls and the culture that produces them?
Anyway I was hoping that consumerism would be our secret weapon to defeat Islamism. I’d rather they be obsessed with shopping for shoes than making bombs.

Public Defender,
Well, to be fair, the article does make it clear that many of the girls are over the legal age of consent- the article cites one 18-year old mall girl.
Re: By the way, why do several posters claim that the Communists destroyed the Church in Poland, or that Poland ceased to be Catholic under them?
It would seem to me that Poland today is still a pretty strongly Catholic country- certainly more so than most West European countries outside Ireland. I have a friend who grew up in Poland during the ’80s and she went to church regularly then (though she really doesn’t much anymore- I think she calls herself a ‘agnostic Catholic’ or some such), and didn’t really feel that she was being repressed.

The whole story seems familiar even if it has a twist in it involving secular youth in a supposedly religious nation.
Nonetheless, with age I feel firmly I can find a definite answer to this difficult issue. This answer is that a religious “culture of life” can exist only where resources are abundant and at little or relatively little risk of being stolen – whether this theft be by government or others around the resources’ owner.
For Europe, whose sole natural resource is – as I have said many times before – soils of a fertility whose geological uniqueness (as I suspect it from what paleopedological evidence does exist) is not realised even by its scientists – this fact provides a lesson for both conservatives and liberals. That is that Europe, with its paucity of “modern” (reactive, lithophile) metal ores owing to glaciation and mountain building, a “culture of death” is the inevitable result of the devaluation of its extraordinarily fertile soils from the development of fertilisers and machinery that allow the cultivation at much lower cost of soils of geologically much more normal fertility in the tropics, Australia, and sub-Zambezian Africa. Once such land, which can farm more crops per year and also higher-value crops, is put into production, Europe (and also Asia, New Zealand and most of the Americas) remains with a paucity of resources for the modern industrial economy that is unrivalled by any society before it, even the most resource-poor foragers such as the Aborigines of Central Australia.
In the context of Poland, we see a country that in the pre-industrial age was probably the most resource-rich on Earth with its flat terrain and soils scoured of their toxicants by glaciation to give a country that even with the opening of less fertile regions remains one of the world’s major agricultural producers – enough that Poland requires significantly less farm subsidies than Western Europe. John Paul II very much should be understood in terms of a major agricultural producer creating a prosperous rural society in which deep religiosity is extremely advantageous – then confronted with a society in which, economically at least, it is the severest disadvantage.

How widespread is this subculture really? I’m both pretty prudish and pretty cynical, but I also know that many moral panics turn out to have little basis in any actual behavior that is going on. Can any genuine Poles weigh in?

This story DOES make one rather nostalgiac for communism. I recall two news items from the period when the Polish government was transitioning, after the Peasants Party decided to break its arranged marriage to the Communist Party and form a coaltition with Lech Walesa’s crowd
One, was a chemical factory, which proved able to operate in an open global market, paying its bills, generating a modest profit, while continuing to support the day care centers, recreation centers, medical clinics, subsidized housing, all the benefits of socialism it had always provided to the workers in the plant. Some hot shot “liberal” economists who had come from The West to advise the new government moaned “It runs so much like a typical socialist enterprise.” I thought, so what? It produces a product, there is a market for their product, they sustain this typical socialist enterprise without subsidies, what’s the problem? Would to God the world had more such typical socialist enterprises. I bet their fourteen year olds are not out prostituting themselves in the malls for Chanel scarves. They have parents near at hand, loving adult supervision, and plenty of recreational opportunities to keep themselves busy, plus their families have a steady income.
The other story concerned the hot-shot western economists’ advice about Polish agriculture. Those who take a long view will recall that there was intense resistence to collectivizing agriculture in the 1950s. Wladyslaw Gomulka saved the communist regime, and averted a bloody Soviet military intervention, by cutting a deal: small private family plots would be respected, there would be no collective farms, and the farmers would go home and behave themselves. So what did these western liberals say in the 1990s? They said, these little family farms are so inefficient, we have to consolidate them into larger modern enterprises like we have in the United States!!! Yes, capitalism certainly is wonderful, isn’t it? John Paul does have a point, but not one that had much to do with why NATO opposed communism in the first place.

Siarlys Jenkins,
Amen, amen!

Siarlys and Hector, I wonder whether it’s true that prostitution (child and adult) is any worse now than under communism. Dictatorships often promote a sense of entitlement in leaders. Also, crimes like prostitution are often tolerated even among people not in the leadership class. Of course, we wouldn’t have seen movies or other news stories on the issue because the government would not have allowed such a discussion.
So it’s possible that the freedom the Pope and Dreher criticize did not cause the problem, but instead has allowed it to come to light where society can deal with it.

When I get not one, but TWO “Amen”s from Hector, I have to stick up for the post that generated that enthusiasm. I don’t have detailed statistics, and I’m not aware of extensive sociological studies, but from what I’ve read in general, prostitution was less prevalent in socialist countries for a number of reasons. One is that basic needs were taken care of, so there weren’t girls out on the corner at the end of the month trying to raise the rent. Another is that, as Justice Antonin Scalia has pointed out more than once, crime is generally much lower in a totalitarian police state. Another reason is that the luxury goods these mall girls are motivated by were seldom available at any price — and a lot of the “luxury goods” are little more than a high status label anyway.
It is certainly true that high party officials were known to indulge in various ways, but not enough to sustain an entire class of mall girls. Enver Hoxha in Albania, the most boring communist in the history of all four internationals, was said in some accounts to be quite psychopathic. Whenever there was an opening to western trade, much of it initially considered a luxury, there was of course an increase in prostitution by those who wanted to get their hands on some of it. On the other hand, I see no reason that a devout Roman Catholic couldn’t be happily employed, and freely worshipping, within the “typical socialist enterprise” I described above.
Closing note on my opening about Hector: he is my brother in Christ, but we have different views on many matters of doctrine and history. He is Anglican, I am Methodist, although if I had everything my way I favor a congregational form of governance. We find many points to agree on also. We are both three dimensional human beings, and enjoy the sharpening of iron that occurs in these discussions. Did I get that right Hector?

Chris: I would have to say that the selling of indulgences in the early 1500s in Germany was a great capitalistic enterprise. First of all, the fund raising monk, Tetzel, had to convince people to buy something they did not need.
Martin Luther was able to recognize this abuse. He first wrote to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz, asking him to stop Tetzel. When that did not happen, Luther went public with his complaints in 1517. Luther must have been correct because the last session of the Council of Trent 1561-63 FINALLY forbade the sale of them.
The economic forces in Europe had more to do with the rise of Capitalism than the church reforms of those days. However, encouraging people to be thrifty and work hard cannot be bad. Those historians, Weber and Tawney, who thought they saw a connection between the Capitalism and Protestantism have been more critcally examined in recent times. See Pages 584 – 586 in THE REFORMATION by Diarmaid MacCullough.

Regarding The Mall Girls: Circa 1985 I was once in Landover Mall in Landover, MD. There were a few girls flitting around who were really dressed up. I thought they must be going to some swanky banquet somewhere. Later I saw them with a young man who appeared to be telling them what to do. I am sure if this activity was going on, someone must have notified the police. Landover Mall closed down a few years ago.
Perhaps we have this problem in malls in the USA?

Indeed, the USA has always had a shortage of typical socialist enterprises.