Intentional Catholic Family: Creating Your Growth Plan for a Purpose-Filled Year

Margaret Dwyer Hogan reviews Julianne M. Will's new book, designed to help busy families prioritize their faith.

Intentional Catholic Family: Creating a Growth Plan for a Purpose-Filled Year

by Julianne M. Will
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How I wish I had a tool like Julianne M. Will’s Intentional Catholic Family: Creating a Growth Plan for a Purpose-Filled Year to help me prioritize faith in our family 20 years ago! I can vividly see my Sandra Boynton family calendar hanging on our kitchen desk when our family of four children was at its busiest. Each child had a color assigned to them. There was never enough space to write it all in — all thosee activities! While we always accomplished the Catholic basics — taking kids to Mass, altar serving, Grace before meals, nighttime prayers — this book would have helped us go deeper. 

In Intentional Catholic Family, Will has taken the best ideas of the most famous time management experts and used these tools to help you design a plan for your family that is attainable and focused. Progress is made in the small steps your family takes to achieve your family’s mission.  

The inspiration for this book:

There are myriad well known experts teaching all of us how to develop a mission and vision and set goals in our careers and the business world. So why not learn from their expertise and apply it to that most important of organizations: our families? (Introduction)

A single mother, working full time and raising her daughter, Will talks about the reality of the competing demands on our time — and the need to put faith at the center of our family circle. When I started reading the book, I was a bit intimidated by the idea, but in the end realized: why wouldn’t we take this approach to family priorities? How can fostering a deeper more meaningful spiritual life in a family be less important than the demands of our secular culture? Jesus should be at the center of our day, our lives — our week. 

God is at work in the big and the small, around the globe, and in our living room. This is where we’re called to be, and where we’re called to see him too. 

Skills, fortitude, and grace

Let’s face it: handling the schedule of a busy family requires skills and fortitude. Life can have its own momentum. Normal activities coupled with the challenges all of us face at any given time — illness, elderly parents, a spouse or sibling struggling — can make just keeping our heads above water an accomplishment. Meeting as a family weekly, which the book provides a page and prompts for, to evaluate progress and connect can bring nothing but grace to a family with children of any age. Intentional Catholic Family is the perfect tool to help your family grow deeper in your Catholic faith! Such a family-based effort can produce nothing but pure grace!  

It is not enough for every individual family to experience affection for each other within the home. The domestic church must move beyond the walls of hearth and home to offer hospitality to the world. The charism of the family is to embody the sacramental love of the Word made flesh not an experience of affinity, but in kindship offered to everyone who hungers and thirsts for meaning. (Page 148) 

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Copyright 2024 Margaret Dwyer Hogan
Images: Canva