This coming year I will have one child receive her confirmation and another receive his first confession and first communion. As a parent of five young children, one of the greatest responsibilities I have is to prepare my children for their reception of the sacraments. It is a maxim of the Catholic Faith that a saintly life is a sacramental life – one simply cannot become a saint without the help of grace, and the sacraments are the best way to receive that grace. So I take very seriously the need to have my children ready when it comes time for them to receive a sacrament for the first time.

One of the best ways to do this is to give them books which explain the sacraments in such a way that they can understand better the reality of what is happening when they go to confession or receive communion or are confirmed. I have not found a lot of good books out there, but one great book is offered by Precious Life Ministries, called “The Little Butterfly Who Loved Jesus.” Precious Life also offers other books on the Faith, and they have been aggressive in getting their books into the hands of missionaries around the world to help Catholics everywhere to instruct their children in the Faith.

Precious Life Ministries is run by three sisters who each have large families and have been very active in pro-life work through the years. Their purpose in running this apostolate is not to make money, but to bring children everywhere closer to Christ in his sacraments. I highly recommend them and I encourage you to buy some of their books or just give them a donation to help their worthy cause.

Any mature Christian knows that the path to sanctity travels through suffering. No servant is greater than his master, and our Lord suffered to bring us salvation, and suffering is part and parcel of being a follower of Christ. Likewise, any good parent wants their child to grow in holiness and become a saint. But how many parents want their children to suffer?

Thus the dilemma of the parent: we want our children to be saints, and we know saints must suffer, but we don’t want our children to suffer. What is the parent to do?

I think this is where many modern parenting methods fall woefully short. Countless times I have seen parents employ what I call the “switcheroo” method of parenting; by this I mean that if they want to deny their child something he or she wants, they simply switch that item with something else the child wants. “Johnny, you can’t play with that knife, but here play with this remote control instead.” In order to prevent the child from a negative reaction (i.e. screaming his head off), the parent avoids this by immediately satisfying the child’s desires in another way. In doing so, however, they are often missing the opportunity to teach the child a lesson in self-denial. If they just said, “Johnny, you can’t play with that knife”, period, they would demonstrate to the child that not all of his or her personal desires must be fulfilled (although the child will still scream his head off).

Another problem with modern parenting is the decline of chores. I admit that growing up in a suburban neighborhood in the 70’s I had few chores myself (and I can see the negative results of that fact in my own life even today), but today it seems that few children have any significant chores to speak of. But giving a child responsibility over certain age-appropriate tasks is a great way to build the discipline into their life necessary for the Christian life.

I’m not saying that parents should go around finding ways to deny their children the pleasures of life or to work them to death. But life is not about satisfying one’s personal desires, it is about taking up our cross and following Christ. If a child is never denied any of his or her desires in their youth, how is he or she going to one day be able to practice the self-denial necessary to pursue holiness?

If we truly want our kids to be saints, we need to acknowledge that their life will require self-denial and will contain suffering. As parents, we should not impose suffering on them, but we should give them the foundation for handling suffering in a mature, Christian fashion and for denying themselves for the sake of Christ.

(A great resource for practical ways to raise kids to be saints is Good Discipline, Great Teens by Dr. Ray Guarendi.)

Recently, the Archdiocese of Washington had a “Seminarian Family Day” in which current seminarians and their families gathered to celebrate Mass and enjoy a picnic. The purpose of the day was to recognize the importance of the family in a young man’s decision to pursue the call to the priesthood. Our diocesan paper reported on the event, and something struck me about the families of the three seminarians they profiled:

Doug Powell, the father of seminarian Jonathan Powell, said he is proud of his son’s decision to explore a vocation to the priesthood…

He and his wife, Tam, the parents of 12 children, have tried to foster vocations in their home by being open about faith, committing to family prayer and homeschooling their children, he said…

Kimberly Schnitker, the mother of seminarian Max Schnitker and a parishioner of St. John Vianney Parish in Prince Frederick, said her family fosters vocations by attending daily Mass, praying the rosary, homeschooling their children and maintaining friendships with priests who are an “inspiration to them.”

Michael Berard, a parishioner of St. Hugh Parish in Greenbelt whose son, Jack Berard, is a seminarian at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, said he and his wife, Pat, fostered vocations in their home by striving to be living examples for their 10 children.

Did you notice what I highlighted? One seminarian family has 12 kids and homeschools, another homeschools, and the third has 10 children. What is common about these three families? They are counter-cultural.

In today’s society, there is probably nothing more counter-cultural than a religious vocation. Choosing to be celibate, obedient and poor is the trifecta of counter-cultural choices in the over-sexed, rebellious and materialistic culture of death in which we live. Those who are immersed in our culture are going to have an extremely hard time hearing the call to the religious life, which is why parents need to live in counter-cultural ways. Do your kids watch the same TV shows, wear the same clothes, go to the same schools, have the same number of siblings and entertain themselves the same way as every other child? Not every Catholic family is going to homeschool or have a large number of children, but every Catholic family is called to counter the culture of death in which we live in some way. Along with giving their children a more solid path to holiness, parents may very well be helping to solve the vocations crisis in our country as well.

Some people criticize Natural Family Planning (NFP) as just “Catholic birth control.” It is fundamentally no different, according to critics, than condoms, birth control pills, or other means to prevent pregnancy. These are obviously people who have never actually used NFP in their own lives, for if they did, they would know how different it really is.

The great thing about NFP is that using it helps one to recognize the great gift of marital sexuality as well as the great blessing of children in a marriage. Whereas artificial birth control focuses exclusively on preventing the natural consequence of sexual relations, NFP helps a couple focus on the two primary purposes of sexual relations: procreation and marital unity. This often leads them to a deeper marriage and a greater openness to children – and even a greater appreciation of the Catholic Church, as can be seen with this couple:

Couple credits NFP for changed worldview

Chris and Christelle Hagen weren’t Catholic when they decided to use natural family planning instead of artificial birth control.

Christelle was initially attracted to NFP for health, not moral, reasons, she said. At first, Chris was surprised she didn’t want to use birth control pills, but he was happy to oblige.

Now, 13 years into their marriage, the Hagens, members of St. Michael in Stillwater, say using NFP has positively affected not only Christelle’s health, but also the way they view their marriage, intimacy and children.

NFP also opened the door to the couple’s exploration of the Catholic faith, and their eventual conversion to Catholicism from the Evangelical faith in 1999, said Chris, 34.

Learning to trust

Unlike contraception, which uses barriers or hormones to prevent the marital act from producing life or, in some cases, can act as an abortifacient, NFP ensures the couples’ marital act is always open to life. When a couple does not want to become pregant, they abstain from sex when the wife is fertile.

According to the Catholic Church, NFP is the only moral way to regulate pregnancies.

Christelle, 37, first learned of NFP while living with a Catholic family after college, and she explained it to Chris, whom she was dating. They made a decision to use NFP after they married.

But, out of fear of pregnancy, the Hagens used condoms during their honeymoon. A few nights later, however, they had a spiritual experience — something Chris said is difficult to describe.

“We both felt an intense amount of fear, we felt very vulnerable, and we both had the sense — we were experiencing this at the same time — that it was because we were using condoms,” he said.

They didn’t use a condom after that night and tried better to trust God, they said.

Their Evangelical church didn’t teach contraception was wrong, and initially, the Hagens thought that, while it was wrong for them, contraception wasn’t wrong for everyone, Christelle said.

They eventually changed their minds. Chris was persuaded by the fact that no Christian denominations approved artificial birth control until the 20th century. Although Christelle had already changed her mind, a miscarriage eight months after their wedding confirmed her beliefs, she said.

“That experience for me was really a turning point emotionally for NFP, because I realized more of what was at stake with sexuality — that it had incredible power to it, the power to create life, and after that, I’ve never looked back,” she said.

They started to teach NFP, which they did for eight years as a couple through Couple to Couple League. When Chris became too busy to co-teach, they retired from Couple to Couple League, and Christelle focused on her growing interest in childbirth and parenting.

Practicing NFP deepened their appreciation for children, they said, and today they have four, ranging in age from 2 to 9.

Continue reading…

Recently I ran across this profound and insightful statement by Joseph Ratzinger, written in 1977:

[In] the very structure of modern society the corporate life of the family is increasingly displaced by the logic of production and the specializations which it has developed. As a result, the family home frequently seems no more than a sleeping-bag. In the daytime it effectively dematerializes. No more can it be that sheltering space which brings human beings together in birth and living, in sickness and dying. (Eschatology, pp. 69-70, emphasis added)

Two hundred years ago in this country, the vast majority of families had all their members stay close to home throughout the day. The mother stayed at home to tend the house and raise the kids, and the father either worked the farm or at a local shop nearby. Family life revolved around the house, making it a “sheltering space,” as the future Pope Benedict noted. Today, however, nothing could be further from reality. As Ratzinger writes, during the daytime, our homes “dematerialize.”

It is amazing how my own neighborhood becomes a virtual ghost town during the day, even during the summer. Although plenty of families have young children, you never see any during working hours, as they are all away at day care or summer camp (at night, it is little better, as yards are still empty and most homes seem to have a TV-blue glow emanating from their homes). The days of children playing with their siblings and the neighborhood children are long gone, as are many of the deep bonds that unite a family together and to their community.

It would be easy to point the finger at individuals and blame them for this epidemic. But, as Ratzinger points out, such a situation is due to the very structure of modern society. Everything about our modern economy and society pushes families to become two-income households, and drives families to live farther and farther away from work-centers, thus adding to the total time away from the home. And the process is self-perpetuating: as more families become dual-income, their total income rises, thus rising the cost of homes, which in turn pushes more families to become dual-income and to live farther from work-centers. The devil has done a wonderful job in modern times in preventing homes from becoming “sheltering spaces” as long commute times and mothers having to work outside the home are destroying any sense of the family home being anything more than a “sleeping-bag.”

All of these factors make me more and more appreciative of stay-at-home mothers. I understand that there are situations in which a mother must work outside the home, but I still cannot but praise those families who make the great sacrifices necessary to have the mother stay at home with their children. I am very grateful to my parents for many things, but one of things I’m most thankful for is that my own mother stayed at home throughout my childhood years. By doing so, she made my home a “sheltering space.” Without exception, there is no job I admire more than mothers who stay at home with their children. This feeling of admiration even is greater than the one I have for priests, of whom I have great admiration. In my estimation, stay-at-home moms have an even more noble – and thankless – task. As grace builds on nature, so too does the work of the priest build on the work of the mother, the first educator in the school of love for any child. A loving mother does more to help a priest in his work to sanctify souls than any other person.

The greatest human person who ever lived – the Blessed Virgin Mary – was a stay-at-home mom, and her task was a humble one, although it was also the most important one given to a human person in the history of mankind: to raise the God-man, Jesus Christ. In the fifth glorious mystery, we contemplate the coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth: here is a simple stay-at-home mom made the Queen of men and angels! I often think that there will be countless other unknown stay-at-home mothers who will one day be glorified in heaven because of their work to make their homes sheltering spaces and not just sleeping-bags.

Our Lady, Mother of God, pray for us!

My oldest daughter is now 13, and as any parent of a teenager will understand, my thoughts have begun to contemplate college. Well, not college as much as college tuition. The cost of higher education has gone through the roof over the past few decades and it has far outstripped inflation. When I went to college in the early 1990’s, the total annual costs for both room and board for me was less than $5,000. Now that would barely cover your book fees at some places. Some are saying that college expense are in a “bubble” which may soon burst. Whatever the case may be, it is a serious issue for all parents.

As a Catholic parent, there are other factors as well. I don’t have any inclination to help pay for tuition at a state-college which is anti-Catholic in its teachings and campus life. Nor will I send my hard-earned money to a “Catholic” college which thinks the Catholic tradition started in 1968 with the rejection of Humanae Vitae. So I’d prefer to help pay for a college that is authentically Catholic. Yet those colleges are not cheap (I can’t afford to pay the whole tuition), and I don’t want to saddle my children with huge amounts of debt as they go out into the world.

So what is a middle-class Catholic parent to do? I don’t have any answers (I wish I did!), and I think every option has its positives and negatives.

Option 1: Send my child to an authentically Catholic college for four years and allow them to get into significant debt.
The advantage here is that the child gets four years of life in a great incubator for real life. They are away from the home learning how to live on their own, yet are also in an environment that supports living the Catholic Faith. However, if they are in serious debt when they graduate, they add significant stress to their lives which will affect their career, even vocational, choices and their marriages. This should not be taken lightly.

Option 2: Send my child to a community college for two years and then allow them to finish their degree at an authentically Catholic college.
This has the advantage of being significantly less expensive. I know of families who chose this route and their kids were able to completely pay for their first two years on their own through working, and then the parents were able to completely (or almost completely) pay for their final two years. Thus the children were not saddled with excessive debt going into life. But the disadvantage is that they miss much of the “college experience” of living at an authentically Catholic college, and this could have a great impact on how they live their lives as Catholics going forward.

Option 3: Skip college or only go to community college.
To most middle-class Americans, this seems like a terrible decision. But is it? The “value” of college has in many ways been overblown, and as Catholics, we should not be making our decisions based solely on how much mammon we can gather in our lives. There are many solid careers that one can have without a four-year degree, and for the entrepreneurial among us, college might just slow them down. But of course the child would lose many of the benefits of an authentically Catholic college, such as the deep bonds they form with their fellow students that can last a lifetime.

In my own case, I don’t know what we will do. There is a good chance, in fact, that we might do something different for each child, depending on their personality and life goals. But no matter what we choose, I’m going to always remind myself that the most important goal in life is getting into heaven, not Harvard.

One of the distinct features of many practicing Catholic families is its size. In my Catholic homeschool group, our family – with five children – hovers around the median in regards to family size. But how do you know if you have a “big family?” Here is a guide to help you:

You might have a big family if…

1) You don’t park your van, you dock it.

2) When you go out for a family walk in the neighborhood, you need a traffic cop.

3) Even your parents ask you “are they all yours?”

4) The army asks for your advice about logistics regarding food distribution.

5) You have been asked hundreds of times, “don’t you know how they are made?”

6) There is nothing “mini” about your van.

7) You are constantly asked the name of the day care you run when you go out.

8) You don’t have a shoe rack in your house, but instead a shoe room.

9) You have to reserve the party room whenever you go to a restaurant.

10) You have grandchildren older than some of your own children.

We are a Dodge Caravan family and have five kids, not two, but other than that, this is how the Sammons family rolls:

H/t: Marcel

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has strong words regarding the relationship between a country’s population growth and its overall health as a nation:

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia stresses the importance of solving Russia’s demographical problems and improving nation’s health.

“What’s the good of having economy, if our nation is sick? How will we reclaim these boundless spaces, vast lands, not only in European part of Russia, but in Siberia as well?” the Primate said at organizational meeting of the Belgorod branch of the World Russian People’s Council.

He reminded that birth rates had recently grown in Russia.

“We hope this tendency will be stable and our people rather than strangers with alien culture and alien faith will inhabit our vast lands inherited from God and our hardworking forefathers and this greatest treasure – our land – will be cultivated by descendants of those who merged it to the great Russian state,” Patriarch Kirill said.

Would that all religious and political leaders realize that a nation’s best resource is its people, and the more children we are having, the better. For those who believe that overpopulation is a problem, check out these videos:

…is now Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family:

Cardinal: Stay-at-Home Moms Need to Be Paid

Of course, considering that stay-at-home moms work 24/7, even paying just the minimum wage would work out to over $60,000/year. Where do we sign up?

Last week I took my teenage daughter to a special Mass which I hoped she would find especially appealing. It included inspiring worship music, elaborate visual stimulation and inspired preaching. And afterward, when I asked her what she thought, she enthusiastically told me that she liked it. Here is a description of this “teen-friendly” Mass from the parish’s website:

A Solemn High Mass in the Extraordinary Form for the Feast of the Purification (Candlemas) with a blessing of the Candles and Procession with polyphonic propers composed by William Byrd, and the Ordinary from his Mass for Four Voices, sung by Chantry.

Now I admit that I am not an “Old Mass-only” Catholic. Nor do I think the Mass needs to be in Latin; I prefer the vernacular, truth be told. However, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that we have spent countless hours and enormous amounts of energy over the past 40 years trying to create a Mass that is “relevant” and engaging to our teens, when perhaps it was collecting mothballs in the closet the whole time?

When I was a teenager, I was very involved in my (Methodist) youth group. It was a wonderful time in my spiritual life, and I am very thankful for all the things I learned during that time. I think there are many Christian adults today who can look back at their time in high school youth group as a time of spiritual growth and advancement. Yet I have to admit that I have for a long time had an uneasy feeling about the culture of youth ministry within the church.

My concerns revolve around two common aspects of many youth groups: the lack of parental involvement and the “consumer” mentality of many of these groups. The fault for the first problem often does not lie with the youth ministers, but with the parents, who consider the parish’s youth group a means to “outsource” their duties to raise their kids Catholic. I’ve known many youth ministers who practically beg parents to get involved to no avail.

But the origin of the other problem – the “consumer” mentality of youth ministry – I think falls more closely to the nature of modern youth ministry itself. I recently ran across an article (entitled “I think I’m doing youth ministry all wrong“) by Tim Schmoyer, a youth minister who articulates my concerns quite nicely (emphasis added):

Despite knowing otherwise in my head, the way I actually lead my church’s youth ministry is mostly from the mentality that our youth ministry is a program or service we provide to families. It’s almost like I’m unintentionally feeding the consumeristic perspective by sometimes using language like, “We offer small groups…” and, “We provide connection points for your teens…” Since when was ministry ever supposed to be about what a paid staff member and a couple adult volunteers are expected to spiritually provide for teens and families?

Youth ministry should not be about how the church can serve the youth or even how we can provide programs that help them grow spiritually. That’s the parents’ responsibility. In fact, I don’t think youth ministry should even accidentally enable parents to outsource their God-given responsibility to us, something I know my ministry is all too guilty of. Support parents, yes, but enable them to outsource? No.

The Greek word for “church” is literally “ekklesia,” a community of believers who are “called out” to serve and edify each other and the people around them.

Instead of fueling the consumerism mentality of what a church “offers” or “provides” and which church in town does it best, youth ministry should probably be about helping teens use their God-given gifts to serve the body. It should teach families that youth ministry isn’t just about what the church does for them, but that they are “called out” to think beyond themselves with a servant’s heart. I bet teen church drop-outs would decrease if they actually served as a valuable and essential part of the local body of Christ.

Note the first section I highlighted: it is the parents’ responsibility to help their children grow spiritually. This cannot be out-sourced. A youth program’s purpose is to simply assist the parents in this task. But it is not the job of the youth program to “sell church” to teenagers. It is to give teens an outlet for practicing the faith that has already been imparted by the parents to them.

I recognize of course that in the real world many, many parents are not doing this job, and many youth ministers are heroically trying to fill that gap as best they can. But no matter what, the focus of youth ministry should be less about making the Church conform to the desires of teenagers as it is making teenagers conform to the demands of the Church.

Another German reader takes issue with my support for asylum for a German homeschooling family. He writes:

In Germany we do not tolerate any kind of extremists – neither left nor right nor religious ones. As traditional christian schools seem to actually not be christian enough for this family, my only guess is that they want to indoctrinate their children with stong xenophobic values.

I am happy that our judges forbade this. We don’t allow fundamentlistic muslims to indoctrinate their children either so why should we allow Christians? Parallel societies never led to anything good in our history – so why should we help those who want to start them? If it was only about Christian values then I must say it is something the parents could have taught their children after the normal school as well (which ends at around noon in the first grades).

And just because the law was written when the Nazis were ruling our country (which it was) it doesn’t mean that the law itself may not make sense. Nobody is arguing whether it makes sense to have motorways either despite them having been built mostly to enable the war machinery to go quickly from east to west.

It seems clear to me that Germans have a much different view of extremism, schooling and freedom than (most) Americans do. A few specific points:

Why assume these people are “extremists”? He seems to define them as extremists simply because they want to homeschool. That makes millions of American families and countless other families throughout the world through the ages “extremists”. Extremism as a descriptive term is completely subjective: it simply means someone who significantly disagrees with you. Perhaps they think you are an extremist: should they be able to tell you how to raise your children?

Our German friend further states that because this family wants to homeschool “my only guess is that they want to indoctrinate their children with stong xenophobic values”. That is quite an illogical leap. Many, many people in this country who are non-religious (or, as he would say, “non-extremist”) choose to homeschool simply because they find it is a superior educational method to institutional schools. One may disagree with this assessment (although many studies would support it), but one cannot dismiss it outright, considering homeschooling has been with us since the beginning of time and has produced some of the world’s greatest intellects. Assuming homeschooling=indoctrination is simply a coded way of saying that you don’t agree with what these parents believe and you want to prevent them from teaching it to their children. This is one very small step from just taking children away from their parents who don’t support the beliefs of the majority mob.

Finally, a point about freedom. In a truly free society, you must allow a wide multitude of beliefs and practices. Some you may find distasteful, but that is the cost of freedom. Unless they are advocating a truly criminal behavior (such as assassination or other types of violence), they should be allowed. And yes, this means practicing Christians, Muslims and other religious people. But perhaps that is too “extreme” for modern Germany.

The German homeschooling family I blogged about has been granted political asylum!

However, at least one of my German readers would be perfectly happy with restricting the freedom of those he doesn’t agree with.

Many people don’t know that homeschooling is illegal in Germany. It seems absurd that a developed, democratic nation would ban homeschooling outright, yet it is true. The draconian Deutschland laws actually date back to the Nazi era when the government wanted complete control in how children were educated indoctrinated (thus making this a case in which Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply).

A German couple who wanted to homeschool found out the hard way that Germany still intends to enforce this law. Persecuted by German authorities, they fled the country for America back in 2008. Now it looks like they might be granted political asylum:

In what could be a major international embarrassment for Germany a federal immigration judge in Memphis Tennessee is expected to rule this Wednesday on the political asylum case of the Romeike family who fled persecution by German authorities over homeschooling in August 2008.

“The persecution of homeschoolers in Germany has dramatically intensified,” said HSLDA staff attorney Michael P. Donnelly. “They are regularly fined thousands of dollars, threatened with imprisonment, or have the custody of their children taken away simply because they choose to home educate.”

It’s for these reasons that the Romeikes fled Germany and with the help of HSLDA filed for political asylum in the United States.

Uwe Romeike, a music teacher, and his wife Hannelore, have five children. “The freedom we have to homeschool our children in Tennessee is wonderful. We don’t have to worry about looking over our shoulder anymore wondering when the youth welfare officials will come or how much money we have to pay in fines,” said Mrs. Romeike.

“We left family members, our home, and a wonderful community in Germany, but the well-being of our children made it necessary,” said Mr. Romeike.

“If the political asylum application is granted it will be the first time America has ever granted political asylum to Christian homeschoolers fleeing from German persecution,” said Donnelly.

Pray for the Romeike family that they might be able to be the primary educators of their children in the manner in which they choose.