How do we pass on the Catholic faith to our kids? This is what we all want, right? Keep them Catholic? To raise little saints? But the really big question is, how do we accomplish that?
Boy, if I had the foolproof way to answer these questions, I’d be the smartest person in the world.
All we can do is our best. After all, God gave all of us free will, and our children will have to choose God for themselves freely. If you wanted to say that Adam and Eve had “parents”, it would be God. God was the perfect parent to them, providing everything they needed, loving them, and nurturing them flawlessly. Yet, Adam and Eve still messed up, didn’t they? While keeping that in mind, we still want to do the best that we can.
Here are the ways I am working on passing on the Catholic faith to my kids.
- Teach them the basics. Your kids need to have an understanding of the basics from a young age. Basics such as understanding (as much as they can) the Trinity, the True Presence in the Eucharist, why we have Saints, what the Mass is all about, and the amazing blessing the Bible is to all Christians! Understanding these basic principles is going to help in the future lessons we teach them so they can have a greater understanding of everything later on.
- Saturate the home. Fill your home with prayers, love, Christian virtues, and yes, even statues, pictures, medals, and other reminders of our religious heroes. These things can’t just exist at church, they need to be in the home.
- Make religion relatable and engaging for children. Meet them at their own level! For me, I have used a lot of crafts, activities, and songs to reach my children with the word of God at their own level. Now that my kids are getting a bit older, we’re having more discussions, starting prayer journals, and reading more books.
- Make sure they really get a good Catholic education. This education can’t come from 1 hour of CCD per week! It’s not enough. It has to come from you, the parent.
- Weave the faith into your Life. Do not let the faith be like a puzzle piece in your life that could be plucked out and tossed aside. The faith should be so interwoven into your life that if you tried to remove it, you wouldn’t even know where to start, and if you succeeded in removing it, the whole masterpiece would be destroyed.
- Lead by example. The whole do-what-I-say-and-not-what-I-do thing? Ya, that’s not gunna cut it.
I have more coming in this series of “Passing on the Catholic Faith to Your Children” soon, where we will have time to talk about some of these things in more detail. How about you- what are your efforts for passing on the Catholic faith to your children?
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