The Family as the School of Love

Jackie and Bobby Angel discuss a new program from Ascension Press that emphasizes parental involvement in their children's spiritual formation.

We know the blessing and exhaustion of forming children. Through homeschooling and chauffeuring them around town to piano lessons, field trips, and other activities, forming our kids is a sun-up to sun-down endeavor. In trying to juggle work and other projects, we’re always being stretched to grow in patient love, and we usually crash not long after we wrangle the last toddler to bed.

For the majority of us, family life is where we become saints—through the conversations, the laughter, moments of trials and forgiveness, and worshipping God together. The family is a little cell of larger society, a laboratory where behaviors are learned and, at its best, a true school of love. Wounded by sin as we all are, family is a constant opportunity to do model forgiveness, strive for improvement, and daily start anew.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church #2204:

“The Christian family constitutes a specific revelation and realization of ecclesial communion, and for this reason it can and should be called a domestic church" (Familiaris consortio 21; cf. Lumen gentium 11). It is a community of faith, hope, and charity; it assumes singular importance in the Church, as is evident in the New Testament (cf. Eph 5:21–6:4; Col 3:18–21; 1 Pt 3:1–7).

Having both come out of youth ministry programs and devoting the last twenty or so years of our lives working with teens and young people, we can attest that our kids are looking to their parents to communicate whether the faith is actually important or not. It doesn’t matter how dynamic the teacher is or how slick the DVD is. “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children” (CCC #2223). Our kids are always watching us ... if all we do is drop off our kids at a catechesis class but they never see us praying, prioritizing the Mass, or serving others in love, they internalize that this Christian thing is all show with no substance, another test to take and forget about soon after.

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Quoting a well-known preacher in his homily, our parish priest recently affirmed to us that “Rules without Relationship leads to Rebellion.” When Jesus ministed to people, he didn’t come out of the gate with the Torah and Aquinas’ Summa; Christ built relationships and trust with others before he called them to conversion and proper order in their lives. As parents, its a constant balance to have warmth but conveyed with authority, to place the faith before our children not as a mere system of rules to follow, but as a dynamic relationship with the living God.

To that end, we were blessed to be a part of Ascension’s newest sacramental program Renewed and Received, which is a whole-family model of preparing young people for the first Reconciliation and Communion. The videos for the kids share the story of Felicity and her family as she prepares for her sacraments. They are colorful and dynamic, well-acted with cartoon imagery, and our own kids actually were laughing along and fully engaged with her story, wanting to know what comes next. Going at our own pace, we were able to stream the videos from home and guide our children with the prompting questions as they prepare for their own First Communion this May.

There’s also companion tracts within Renewed & Received for parents and catechists themselves, full of encouraging content and helpful child psychology from qualified presenters like Sr. Josephine Garrett, Fr. Mike Schmitz, and others. We contributed our own experience as to those sections for fellow parents and leaders, and we really believe this program is going to bless parishes and families in a powerful way.

Before her death, Sister Lucia dos Santos, one of the visionaries of of Our Lady at Fatima, Portugal, asserted that, “‘The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family.” Though the attacks continue and the wounds we sustain are real, we have nothing to fear, for in the end Mary’s Immaculate Heart will triumph. Imperfect as we all are, God wants us as parents to bring His story of healing and love to those entrusted to our care, from the tiniest toddler to the sassiest sophomore and all those in between.

Visit AscensionPress.com for free previews of the new Renewed and Received programs!

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