One of my hobbies is genealogy - I love piecing together my family's history and trying to imagine the details that brought us to today. Each one of us is preceded by ancestors who have shaped us not only genetically, but also emotionally, intellectually, culturally, and even spiritually. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents, and sixty-four great-great-great-great grandparents. Every single one of your many, many ancestors is necessary for you to exist, and every singe one of them shaped who you are, however subtly.

Pope St. John Paul II once said, "The future of humanity passes by way of the family" (Familiaris Consortio 86). What you do today with your family today and tomorrow matters, in ways that we can only begin to comprehend. If you are a Mom or a Dad (whether biological or adopted), your words and actions in the family today are forming your children in deep, profound ways. Studies repeatedly show that parents and grandparents influence their kids more than teachers, friends, or celebrities. You are making a difference in the lives of your kids that may ripple down to future grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and more. Those ripples can change the course of human history itself.

So what kind of difference should we strive to make in the lives of our children? The Catechism of the Catholic Church offers these important words:

Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery-the preconditions of all true freedom. Parents should teach their children to subordinate the ‘material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.’ Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them. (CCC 2223)

The Catechism goes on to say:

Education in the faith by the parents should begin in the child’s earliest years. This already happens when family members help one another to grow in faith by the witness of a Christian life in keeping with the Gospel. Family catechesis precedes, accompanies, and enriches other forms of instruction in the faith. Parents have the mission of teaching their children to pray and to discover their vocation as children of God. The parish is the Eucharistic community and the heart of the liturgical life of Christian families; it is a privileged place for the catechesis of children and parents. (CCC 2226)

There's a great deal of wisdom contained in those two paragraphs. Through your words and actions as a Mom and Dad, you are called to create a home where the Gospel is lived out and virtue flourishes. We have a responsibility not only to try to keep our kids healthy and happy, but to help them to be holy. What difference does it make if we help our kids to get into the best college if we aren't actively helping them to get into heaven? Catholic parenthood is not an easy mission, to be sure, but it's a beautiful - and essential - one.

It is the responsibility of the parish to support you in your mission and to help you to form your children into disciples of Jesus Christ. This happens especially when we gather for the Sunday Mass, but also happens through opportunities like our Family of Faith program, which is designed to empower and support you in handing on the faith to your children. For information and registration, go to our parish website.