Don’t Fail your Children

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · September 14, 2015

The greatest gift I received from my parents was my faith. One of my first memories is sitting at the dining room table while my dad tried to teach me to recite the Hail Mary. I couldn�t have been more than four or five.

A family prays before Mass. The surest way to turn a child away from the Church is to live as if Mass and catechism are less important than other events, Sara-Leah Pimentel writes.

Every night at dinner, we gave thanks for the day, breaking bread together as reminder of the bread of life that we would receive on Sunday at Mass. Growing up, we read the Bible together as a family, and as soon as I was able to read, I received a children�s Bible and was encouraged to read it often.

As I grew older, debates on religious topics, sometimes heated, often interrupted whatever television programme might be playing.

I remember being seven or eight and asking what happened to people who did not believe in Jesus or had never heard about him. It became a topic of conversation that was revisited numerous times as I grew in understanding and maturity.

Other conversations I remember include the position of a comma in different translations of a particular Bible passage and how that changed its meaning, the teachings of the Church, the role of the Vatican. We didn�t always agree, but it wasn�t the outcome that was important�what mattered is that there was a place in our home for these conversations.

At great financial sacrifice, my parents sent me to a Catholic school and encouraged me to be involved in Church activities. They never delegated my religious upbringing to others. My parents were my first catechists. Any other catechesis at best complemented what was happening at home.

It is thanks to my parents who first created the space for dialogue that today I have a voice with which I can participate as a lay Catholic in conversations about faith. Because of them, I continue to pray, reflect, read, and search for the answers to my own faith questions and their application to real life.

Years of preparing teenagers for confirmation have shown me that the upbringing in faith that I received is, sadly, not the norm in many Catholic families. We have allowed other priorities to dominate our family lives.

Many families mistakenly think that the religious formation of young people is the task of the parish priest and the catechist�with a combined contact time of about two hours a week. Yet, parents see their children for several hours each day. They have the greater influence.

The surest way of producing a Catholic who will one day leave the Church is to drop your son or daughter off at Mass on a Sunday but never partake in the sacraments as a family.

Constantly finding excuses for why your child couldn�t attend catechism teaches them that a relationship with God is the least important thing in a list of other competing priorities such as the soccer final, the premiere of the latest movie, the birthday party, the music concert or the extra-curricular activity.

The family is the first site of evangelisation. The family is the first church that children will encounter. If your domestic church is an abandoned place, filled with cobwebs, you cannot be surprised when your children want nothing to do with God or the Church.

Young people seek relevance. And if the faith they encounter in the home is irrelevant to daily life, then they�ll look for meaning in a thousand other distractions.

In October, the bishops of the world will meet in Rome to discuss challenges that modern families face.

During the first iteration of this meeting last year, the media picked up on a set of controversial topics. While it is good that they are being discussed, they should not stand in the way of the central theme: How can the Church provide pastoral support to and assist the family�s task of primary evangelisation?

Last year the bishops recognised that �the family needs to be rediscovered as the essential agent in the work of evangelisation�. The working document for this year�s synod, called the Instrumentum Laboris, calls for an examination of the �spiritual aspect of family life�.

It highlights that this begins with �rediscovering family prayer and listening in common to the Word of God� and �faithfully participating in the Eucharist� as a family. The role of the Church is to assist this process by providing �adequate pastoral guidance�so that a concrete family spirituality can grow in response to questions which arise in everyday life�.

None of this is new. It merely echoes what we should be doing in our families already. Each family is called to model itself on the Holy Family. Like Mary and Joseph, we are invited to present our children to the community of God�s people and to celebrate in the life of that community in our common meal, the Holy Eucharist.

Daily family prayer should be part of the everyday routine, as a sacred space into which each family member brings the joys and frustrations of the work and school day.

Read the Bible together. Discuss matters of faith openly. Encourage debate and questions from your children. As they grow older, discuss important topics such as relationships, sexuality and career choices in the light of faith. As parents, continue to deepen and foster your own inner faith and knowledge of the Church�s teachings.

The resolutions coming out of the Synod on the Family in October should only complement what each parent commits to on the day they bring their child for baptism: to play the primary role in their religious formation.

If we are not doing this, we have failed our children, rejected our God-given role as the custodians of life and abandoned the mission Christ left us: to be his witnesses to the end of the earth.