Painting by Giuseppi Magni, 1865-1956
by Mary Reed Newland, How to Raise Good Catholic Children
Gathering together all the times of love and great devotion, and all the times of irritation and misunderstanding, we see God’s wisdom in this sacred thing called family.
No one comes into the world knowing anything. That there will be pain and struggle in the learning is the most obvious thing of all. We start from scratch.
We have souls upon which He will pour His grace so that we may learn. We have minds we must subject to others so that we may learn. We have instincts, senses, and a great variety of gifts all beautifully ordered and planned by God, but at every step of our learning, we think we’ve learned enough to be our own masters; because we have not, however, our instincts, our senses, our impetuous minds make of our lives a magnificent hodgepodge.
It’s part of growing to maturity that we will pass through one stage of hodgepodge after another.
But suppose He had skipped the family, this small and private cell where beginning begins. Suppose we were put to discovering why we are here and how we are to act on it in the middle of a mob! The family by its very nature is private, and even at its largest, it’s never a mob.
I remember reading a long time ago about a little girl who told Monsignor Ligutti that she liked living in the country “because nobody can hear us yell at each other.” Or did she say, “hear us fight”?
No matter; whichever she said, that is a distinct advantage, not only about living in the country, but also about being part of a family, because in all families, no matter how hard they struggle for holiness, there are times when tempers fly, when judgments are not prudent, when selfishness makes ugly claims over all loyalty, and we get fed up.
And even if the family doesn’t live in the country, at least they can “keep it in the family”!
Obviously these defections are not pleasing to God. But for creatures inheriting Original Sin, weakened by its scar even after it’s removed by Baptism, they’re almost inevitable.
This isn’t to imply that our sins are predestined. It’s just facing the facts. We’ve inherited a terrible weakness and God has great compassion for us in our weakness — or else why the Redemption?
Even though He did design the family before sin came (I can hardly tear my mind away from this once I get to wondering what it would be like to raise children untouched by Original Sin!), its pattern is the ideal beginning of life even in a world full of sin.
He has combined our obligation as stewards of children who rightfully belong to Him with our own fierce pride in possession, made our children from our own flesh, and planted deep in us strong parental instincts, enclosed us with a sacrament that continually feeds us grace, and in this combination of securities, a new generation begins.
It would certainly seem, then, that somewhere there ought to be a foolproof pattern for raising a Catholic family. Do we not have the law of God reduced to the most careful detail so that we need never guess about the right or wrong of anything?
Have we not the Mass, the sacraments, sacramentals, and methods of knowing and meeting God through prayer, work, suffering, and joy? We’re even called to be part of the Body of Christ, the Church — which gives our lives motive far beyond even the highest humanitarian reason for being good.
We are partakers in divine life, every day, every hour. Having conceived us in His mind without any need for us, after the Fall and the Redemption, He permits us to be needed. To be needed by God puts the highest price on human life.
Certainly all this ought to produce a formula for all Catholic parents to apply and thereby achieve the ideal. It would — if we did not have free wills. Like nicely trained animals, we could be trained and forever after do as we’ve been trained to do. But added to all the other gifts — and higher than all the others — is the gift of free will.
Free will puts us, in one way, almost on a par with God. He made us because He loves us, but He does not force us to love Him back. He has left us free to love Him or not to love Him. The price of the happiness for which He created us is our own love, freely given.
Nothing could prove better than this how God loves man. Both man and the angels fell when they loved themselves more than God. To define very simply what is the weakness left by Original Sin: it’s the ancient inheritance of Adam’s self-love.
Self love, a dangerous pastime, it can color so many things badly…. 😞
Thank you! 😇