Thank you for a good bit of perspective!

Thank you for the advice, Father.  Sadly, it isn’t just mediocre religious education programs that some of us have experienced, it is teachers who openly dissent with Church teaching & propose erroneous (& even scandalous) ideas to our children.  I do believe the majority of religious education volunteers are sincere & well-meaning Catholics, but I also believe that many are poorly catechized themselves.  It is important for parents to understand that both the Catechism of the Catholic Church & Canon Law support the parents role as the primary educators of the children, particularly in matters pertaining to the Faith. 
Now, a vocation question for you, Father John: Can you give us suggestions for fostering openness to a call to the religious life in our children??  Thank you!

Thank you Father!  I’m going to print this out and save it.  Even though I attended Catholic schools throughout my entire life, save for a few years in elementary school and high school, I don’t really recall anything that was taught in school about the faith.  I do remember going to church with my family, participating in the liturgy, attending wakes and funerals, praying the rosary,  attending the parish picnic and so forth.  It was my parents who led the way, not the school, not the CCD program, not my own incompetence.

Father,  what do you suggest I should do in my situation?  I have a DRE that buys Protestant posters and materials for the children.  The main books are Catholic but many supplies are not and my fellow teachers seem to not notice.  In our rooms, we have a list of the protestant books of the Bible instead of the Catholic ones and the 10 commandment posters list a version very different from the Catholic one.  They have changed the liturgical colors to light green for Ordinary Time, blue for Advent, and a yellowish brown for Easter and Christmas.  I have talked with the parish priest and he is very indifferent to the situation.  Last year, I had three children tell me that they never received First Reconciliation before they received First Communion because they were sick that day and the DRE told me “that happens sometimes” and didn’t write down the names of the children that told me this.  Should I be contacting the archdiocese?  Is anyone else in a similar situation?

Thank you, Father, for your emphasis on parents as the primary educators of their children.  We, as parents, are not perfect, but the example of our Faith speaks volumes to our family, our Domestic Church.  Our parish, the Church of Saint Paul in Ham Lake, MN, has developed a program, Family Formation, with this focus in mind.  The lessons are arranged so that three lessons per month are taught within the home (lessons follow a three-year cycle) and one lesson per month is taught in a traditional classroom setting with a well-formed catechist.  While the children meet with their catechists, the parents gather to listen to a talk on the same topic as the children’s lesson, thus forming the entire family. 

I cannot say enough about how this program has impacted our family’s understanding of Church teaching, let alone increased our prayer life as a family.  We have especially enjoyed the lessons pertaining to particular liturgical seasons like Advent and Lent.  Lessons are available for “distance parishes” or “distance families”—families that may wish to supplement with their parish’s formation program.  Please visit http://www.familyformation.net/ for more information.  You may also benefit from Family Formation’s new blog: http://familyformationblog.net/ 

May God bless you all as you seek to bring up Saints for the Kingdom!

Love this, Father!  I had been thinking about this since last week.  When I was a kid, we, for several years, attended a parish that was way “out there” in terms of, well, pretty much everything.  The reasons we left our home parish were fairly unclear to me as a kid, but I know it had something to do with my mom’s sense that it was not at all family-friendly.  The parish we ended up in (I think my mom had been there a few times in her youth so that’s where we tried) was quite unorthodox.  We almost never said the Creed (I can still recite what we did say, which, while not directly heretical, was certainly no Creed known to the Church); the unleavened bread used for Communion was valid, but nowhere near licit; people had no hesitation about not just skipping, but inking out the sections of the lectionary they did not like; and so on.  Why did we stay?  The first Sunday we walked into the shabby (partly b/c of tastes, partly b/c the parish was so poor), tiny parish, there was no walled-off cry room, just a rocking chair in the back.  While abortion was, I think,  on no one’s list of social justice issues, they were so welcoming to families: no one looked askance at noisy kids and anyone would help hold a baby while you dealt with a toddler or vice versa.  There were a couple mentally ill people who regularly attended and they weren’t just tolerated, they were an integral part of the parish community.  Many good, though deeply confused people there.  The first pastor while we were there was content to just let things go.  The next was a good, orthodox, saintly man to whom it must have been a terrible cross to spend his last years (he died of cancer while there) serving a parish so far off the deep end - but he did so much good in his gentle, patient way to lead the parish in a closer-to-orthodox direction.  Maybe God led us there partly to be a support to him…  We gradually stopped going there under a third priest, more like the first, but not a bad guy. 
Our home parish was not at all bizarre liturgically, but religious ed (where we went when we had to for sacrament prep) was a mess with some non-Catholics as teachers and not-necessarily-orthodox folks anyway. 
My parents, as I recall, avoided bad-mouthing the powers-that-were and just lived and taught us the faith at home.  If we said that such-and-such teacher taught something and “I thought you said [the opposite]” they just explained what was accurate without rolling their eyes at the goofiness or its source.  (Sometimes they’d say “well, Mrs. X isn’t Catholic, so she just didn’t know.”)  We all have stuck with our faith, including my sister who has entered religious life.  The funny thing is that I still have a hard time sticking with a not-so-great parish, even though I know firsthand that that’s not the most important thing (though certainly helpful).  Good reminder to me too that I shouldn’t waste too much (any?) of my time crabbing about what I don’t like at our parish and just living the faith as best I can in our home and in our parish as far as we participate.

Thank you Fr. John for this article.  I have to say you hit it on the dot for me.  I’m a young mom of 2 little ones and you are so right about ...it all.  I grew up in public school with an alcoholic father and very loving mother.  Although, both are Catholic…struggling that is, my upbringing was far from perfect. Yet, I am always so THANKFUL and SURPRISED that GOD lead me to a life now of peace and understanding.  One can only pray and hope their children will have the same blessings.  Living it is key.