Faith-based parenting skills

WEEKLY PODCAST: "Aflame With Christ's Abundant, Merciful Love" found on the Podcast tab above.

Upcoming Program for Catholic Families:

"The Apostolate of the Catholic Family: Creating the Little Church of the Home."

Living a Christian Life in a Post-Christian World is Challenging!

CATHOLIC-CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE:

- A Catholic Christian marriage provides the foundation of a healthy, stable, holy family;

- Gaudium et Spes offers guidance for these parents because "authentic married love is caught up into divine love and is directed and enriched by the redemptive power of Christ and the salvific action of the Church, with the results that the spouses are effectively led to God and are helped and strengthened in their lofty role as fathers and mothers," (art. 48).

FAITH-BASED PARENTING:

- Parents must take the time and devote energy to becoming faith-based parents;

- They must learn and practice the core skills of holiness, virtue, conscience, and character development;

- These parents understand conscience and the importance of helping their children and adolescents develop their conscience;

- Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council explains "deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, tells him inwardly at the right moment: do this, shun that," (art. 16). 

PARENTS:

- Parents may feel they do not have the skills necessary to teach their children and adolescents the concepts of holiness, virtue, conscience, and character;

- The world we are living in today is so persistent and sneaky that it creeps up on us, our children and adolescents, with almost no warning, until it's too late. This is definitely a Post-Christian world because our Christian values no longer influence the thinking and behavior of the majority; 

- Spiritually-active parents do not allow the culture take over their role as primary educators of the moral life for their children and adolescents;

- are the primary educator of holiness, virtue, conscience, and character for your children and adolescents;

- must set an example by teaching them how to live and offer a living example of a holy, good life;

- are your child's and adolescents' most important moral teacher;

- must not leave this critical responsibility to chance, or worse, to a culture that is trying to do everything it can to influence your child or adolescent to think as it thinks;

- must choose to spend time with your child or adolescent and guide them in the way they are to go.