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“Now, sisters and brothers, let’s welcome our little candidates,” said Father Joe. He signaled the young
couple to bring their children forward to the baptismal font.
Mary and Bob had just recently returned to the Catholic Church after several years of inactivity. Today their two children,
two-month-old Carla and two year-old Scott, were to be baptized during mass. Bob and Mary were sitting in the back pew because
they thought the children might be fussy.
At the priest’s invitation, they swept the little ones into their arms and started down the center aisle. But young
Scott began to squirm, vigorously resisting the move. To calm him Mary whispered words of comfort in his ear.
“It’s all right, Scottie” she said. “Father Joe’s going to bless you and you are going to become
a Catholic.” It didn’t work.
All the way to the front, Scott screamed, “But I don’t want to be a Cath-o-lic! I don’t want to be a Cath-o-lic!”
A lot of our kids are like Scott. Many resist our efforts to raise them Catholic. Some come into the church kicking and screaming.
Others don’t make it. Like Bob and Mary, they drift away for one reason or another.
And we, the battle-scarred, war-weary parents—how do we feel? Tired. Worn down. Paranoid about passing on the faith.
Discouraged. Guilty.
Especially guilty. All the while we are raising our kids, we feel like we could be doing more to introduce them to the faith.
We think maybe we should be doing something differently. We compare ourselves to parents who seem to be doing better. We look
back and recriminate. “Maybe,” we think, “we should have taken a second mortgage and sent Tom to a Catholic
College.”
We Catholics are famous for our guilt. We’re good at it. That’s why the idea of guiltless Catholic parenting may
strike us as strange. But no-guilt Catholic parenting is not an oxymoron, an impossible combination of contradictions like
“jumbo shrimp.”
Quite the contrary! Guiltless Catholic parenting is the way it should be. Here are two reasons:
1. God does not hold parents accountable for their kids’ decisions. He gave our children free wills so that they could
make their own faith choices. All he expects parents to do is our best job of pointing the way to faith. We’re just
supposed to prepare our children to choose rightly, not choose for them. If we do what we can as best we can, there’s
no guilt and, thus, no reason to feel guilty.
2. To do a good job of raising our kids Catholic, we don’t need to do a lot of things. We don’t need, for example,
to control every detail of our kids’ lives. We only need to a few things faithfully to form them as Catholics. Like
introducing them to Catholic practices, teaching them to pray, and talking to them about our experience of God. We don’t
even need to be exemplary religious educators, let alone saints, to perform the task well. All the Lord wants is our best
effort.
You can hang on to your guilt, if you like. But I and Mary Lou, my wife, put ours down a long time ago. We gave ourselves
permission to be guilt-free Catholic parents. Mary Lou and I want to hand on the faith to our four sons and three daughters.
We pass it on without paranoia. We struggle along doing what we can to nudge them in the right direction. But we do it guiltlessly.
SIDEBAR
Family life is messy. So don’t expect your religious education efforts to be flawless. They will be messy, too.
To raise kids Catholic you don’t have to do everything perfectly. Just do some things consistently as well as you can.
When circumstances foul up your well-laid plans, laugh a little. A good sense of humor fosters a family’s growth in
faith.
It’s OK to start over as many times as you need to. No one is counting failed efforts except you. When something doesn’t
work, try something new or take a different approach. Truths That Set You Free
Let the Holy Spirit carry his part of the load. His is a big piece of the effort and he wants to do it. Don’t try to
God’s work for him.
© Copyright 2009 by Bert Ghezzi
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