by Father Lovasik, Catholic Family Handbook
Parents must use their God-given authority to lead their children to eternal, as well as temporal, happiness.
You have at your disposal three means of directing your children to Heaven and to a useful and happy life in this world: a knowledge of God and of all that He has revealed; observance of the laws of His Church; and the use of the sacraments and prayer.
Know Your Faith and Teach It to Your Children
There is only one means of attaining Heaven: Jesus Christ, the Son of God. If you are a good parent, you will want your child to be fashioned according to His example and to share in His merits. But Christ and His teaching and commandments have to be known before He can be accepted.
If you wish to preserve your faith, you must use your mind to understand the reasonable foundations and essential teaching of the Catholic Church.
Faith is built on reason, and the more a person studies its bases, motives, and applications to life, the stronger will faith become. Some people lose their faith simply through inexcusable ignorance; they give it up because they are too slothful or busy with other things to learn how reasonable faith is.
All human beings are born with tendencies to evil as a result of Original Sin; these tendencies can be offset or weakened and replaced with habits of virtue only through the merits, the example, and the grace of Jesus Christ.
Now, no child by himself is going to learn about Christ, find access to His merits, and come to be influenced by His example and words. This happens only through his parents, and through the Church and religious education to which they introduce him.
To make Christ mean anything to your children, you yourself must have been transformed by Him. You must be convinced, as St. Paul says, that there is another law besides the law of God fighting in the members of your children, from which they can be delivered only through the grace of Jesus Christ.
Real parental love can be learned only from the example of Christ and practiced only by the grace of Christ. Without Christ, the other law within the parents, which fights against the law of God, is bound to be stronger than the unselfish parental love that children need.
As a husband and wife, you need religion. God had a great deal to say about marriage, and about what those who enter that state must do if they are ever to reach the unending happiness of Heaven.
Christ transformed the natural contract of marriage into a sacrament that would bring special graces to those who would freely and rightly make use of it. He compared the love that should bind husbands and wives together to the love that binds Him to His Church, the love that made Him lay down His life for all His people.
It is only through religion that you can come to know these necessary commands of God’s will and find the strength to obey them at any cost.
As a parent, you need religion in rearing your children. Parents, by the very fact of their bringing children into the world, become actual representatives and spokesmen of God Himself. The very first right and responsibility of educating children rests on the parents and must be exercised in the home.
Other religious instruction can do little for your children unless you lay the foundation in the home.
Take Notice of the Following Principles:
• The example of your life as a parent is the first exercise of your obligation of educating your children. If you are quarrelsome, profane, immoral in speech, and irreligious in word and deed, you are forming your children’s characters in the same mold. On the other hand, if you are kind, self-sacrificing, religious, prayerful, and morally upright, you are laying the foundations of a solid education for your children.
• You must exercise your teaching authority by implanting min your children’s minds the basic elements of religious truth as soon as they can grasp it even partially.
• You are responsible for teaching your children what is right and what is wrong and for giving them the proper religious motives for doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. You are the first to teach your children that swearing, lying, stealing, disobedience, anger, and revenge are wrong – and that they are wrong because they offend God and must be punished by Him.
For your family to be an ideal family, all its members should think and believe together. From the earliest moment of your children’s mental awareness, set yourself the goal of helping them believe in and think about truths such as the existence and omnipresence of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the authority of the one Church founded by Christ, the Real Presence of Christ on the altar of every Catholic Church, the necessity of prayer and the sacraments, and the reality of Heaven and Hell.
It is your privilege and responsibility to introduce your children to the knowledge of Jesus Christ; you cannot delegate this task to others. Make Christ known to your children at the earliest possible age. You can do this through habits of reverence formed even before your children are able to understand the reasons for them and, as reason begins to dawn, by implanting the first ideas and motives that make for faith and confidence in Christ and obedience to His will.
This knowledge should deepen in your children as they mature. Try to make Jesus, His Blessed Mother, and the angels and saints real to your family. Display religious statues and pictures in prominent places in your home, and tell your little ones whom they represent.
Tell them stories about God and the saints as often as you tell them other stories. Have a Bible in your home and read it. Subscribe to Catholic magazines and newspapers, and make them accessible for your children to read.
Instill in your little ones an interest in good, worthwhile literature. Build up a home library that you can be proud of and that you and your children can use frequently.
Only religion can teach you what God wants for your children and how God’s will for your family can be attained. Only religion can provide you with the spirit of sacrifice, the motivation to persevere in your efforts, and the gifts of understanding and true love that are necessary for parents, since they are representatives of God to accomplish His will.
Without religion to inform, inspire, and help you, you may make your children physically sturdy, socially prominent, successful in business, or famous in sports or the arts; but all the most important things will be neglected.
The search for peace within the self is always doomed to fail; the two loneliest places in the world are a strange city and one’s own ego. When a man is alone with his thoughts, in false independence of the Love Who made him, he keeps bad company. No amount of psychoanalysis can heal the uneasiness that results, for its basis is metaphysical, its source the tension between the finite and infinite. ~Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I discuss the dynamics of our Catholic family life….
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In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own “resurrection”—his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead.
Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him…..
Captured by a Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a “Vatican spy,” Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. Only through an utter reliance on God’s will did he manage to endure the extreme hardship. He tells of the courage he found in prayer–a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustration, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amidst the “arrogance of evil” that surrounded him. Ciszek learns to accept the inhuman work in the infamous Siberian salt mines as a labor pleasing to God. And through that experience, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit.
He Leadeth Me is a book to inspire all Christians to greater faith and trust in God–even in their darkest hour. As the author asks, “What can ultimately trouble the soul that accepts every moment of every day as a gift from the hands of God and strives always to do his will?”
Timely, very timely… Matches that quote, it is easier to build kids than restore men.
Thank you! 🙂