The surprise winner of this year’s Best Picture Oscar was veteran South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s social satire Parasite, the first foreign-language film to win the award. Set in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, it chronicles the comedic and underhanded attempts of the Kim family to find work in the home of the wealthy Park family, who live in a cavernous mansion high above the city. The contrast drawn between the two families lies at the core of the ensuing drama: the poor but united Kims, and the economically rich Parks—the epitome of privileged detachment. The role of the fathers is particularly crucial to this dynamic. World-weary, unemployed Kim Ki-taek, patriarch and “man without a plan,” may not seem like a model father, but he nonetheless clearly loves and is loved by his wife and children. This is made particularly clear in a scene where the family finds work folding pizza boxes in their cramped basement apartment, teasing and joking together. Park Dong-ik, by contrast, struggles to be at home due to working long hours as a successful software entrepreneur. He therefore remains detached from his teenage daughter and hyperactive young son in a house whose vastness speaks of the family’s emotional distance.

The film clearly stuck a chord with a worldwide audience. Among its many themes, it highlights how both societal pressures on family life and emotional distance between parents and children can have a debilitating effect on human development. Spiritual writer Richard Rohr traces the roots of such disconnect to the industrial revolution, where the patient passing on of skills from father to son was replaced by migrations and work patterns that removed fathers from such immediate and influential relationships with their children. Exacerbated in the intervening centuries, he perceives a great father hunger in many men—with a consequent search for approval and acceptance—in many cultures, including our own in North America and Western Europe.[1]

Abba, Father

This is a problem for a religion where God is called Father, and where all prayer is an outworking of a basic cry of the heart to the One we call Dad. When Jesus spoke of God, he used the unconventional and original Aramaic word Abba. One feature of the originality of naming God in this way lies in naming God at all. Jews refused to speak the name of God, replacing the Tetragrammaton YHWH with the euphemism Adonai, an injunction extended to Catholics by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. To know a person’s name is to know their core and to gain power over them, which none can presume with the almighty God of Israel. To name this God “Dad” is truly daring; yet, it represents “the cry used by Jesus in the moment of his supreme earthly confidence in God.”[2] Following the Lord’s example, St. Paul sums up all prayer as that of adopted children who cry out in the Spirit in the same words as Jesus (Gal 4:6), placing our trust in the Father who will give us much more than any earthly father (Lk 11:9-13). The child-father relationship, so humanly significant as to be irreplaceable, is to be the blueprint of the Christian’s loving and personal relationship with God.

A Personal God?

If the image of a father is being weakened in Western societies, then catechetics as an affective process, in which the young are initiated into the life of God the Father in the domestic church, will inevitably be weakened too. Indeed, contemporary empirical evidence points in this direction, indicating that belief in the God just described—the God of the Scriptures—is in decline, even among self-declared religious people. A 2018 Pew Survey discovered that 68% of self-declared US Catholics “believe in God as described in the Bible,” as opposed to “believe in other higher power or spiritual force” (which was affirmed by 28% of self-declared Catholics).[3] The figures roughly correlate to findings of a separate 2019 Pew survey, which showed that 64% of self-declared US Catholics are “absolutely certain” that God exists, and 27% are “fairly certain.”[4] Where respondents are “absolutely certain” that God exists, they are almost three times as likely to consider religion important in their life, and more than twice as likely to attend religious services and to pray at least daily than those who are “fairly certain.”[5]

There appears to be an urgent need to rediscover the God who is revealed as Father in the Scriptures—a personal God rather than an impersonal force—in order to open the way for many Catholics to embrace a relationship with the Lord, nourishing that relationship though prayer and liturgy.

¿De qué manera es la familia un camino a la santidad? ¿Qué quiere decir la Iglesia al referirse a la familia como iglesia doméstica? Un breve resumen de la Escritura y del desarrollo de la aplicación el término nos será útil.

One of my favorite short stories is George MacDonald’s “The Light Princess.” It tells the story of a princess whose not-so-amiable aunt casts a spell upon the girl at her baptism.

Aun cuando los documentos del Magisterio sobre la catequesis se refieren a los padres como los educadores primarios en religión, muchos padres y educadores religiosos en nuestras parroquias, no comprenden la importancia de esta afirmación. No se espera de los padres que hagan una catequesis formal, de tipo escolar. En cambio, el rol de los padres es uno que solamente ellos están llamados a cumplir: su responsabilidad vocacional para inculcar la Fe en un plano cotidiano, a través de la oración, la celebración litúrgica y la formación moral. A diferencia de los catequistas, que suelen tener solamente una hora por semana con los niños, los padres están con sus hijos diariamente a través de sus años formativos, con el potencial de establecer en ellos hábitos de oración, alentar la participación en la liturgia, y dirigir un progreso real en su formación moral. Mientras que los catequistas en la parroquia y en la escuela bien puedan proporcionar dirección y consejos, además de enseñar la doctrina, sin embargo, los padres y los miembros del núcleo familiar son esenciales para una correcta vivencia de la Fe. Una buena formación en el seno familiar, por lo tanto, provee un buen fundamento para la catequesis formal, de modo que los dos pueden ser enriquecidos mutuamente.[1]

Los padres son indispensables en el desarrollo de la consciencia y de la virtud. Esto se debe a que, como el Directorio Nacional para la Catequesis, explica: “La catequesis en cuestiones morales involucra mucho más que la proclamación y la presentación de los principios y la práctica de la moral cristiana. Presenta la integración de los principios de la moral cristiana en la experiencia de vida para el individuo y la comunidad.” [2] La familia es para el niño la primera y más importante comunidad para este aspecto esencial en su formación moral. El Directorio Nacional para la Catequesis confirma que los padres son responsables de la formación moral de los niños, de acuerdo a la ley natural. “Los padres son catequistas, precisamente porque son padres. Su rol en la formación en los valores cristianos en sus hijos es irremplazable.”[3]

¿Qué es la virtud?  ¿Qué es el bien?[4]

La virtud es un hábito o habitus. La forma latinizada se debe preferir aquí, porque nuestro entendimiento familiar de la palabra “hábito”, no está en consonancia cuando consideramos la virtud. Como habitus, la virtud ocupa una posición entre las potencias del alma y los actos de una persona. No es simplemente una acción repetida; es una habilidad dinámica de crecimiento hacia el bien en una acción humana. Se requiere de un habitus para hacer funcionar las potencias humanas que tienen más de una manera de ser activadas. Mientras que cada sentido físico, por ejemplo, tiene una particular función: los ojos ven, los oídos oyen y la lengua gusta, la voluntad, por el contrario, puede desear muchas cosas, requiriendo para ello un habitus para darle forma; una voluntad recta, una voluntad débil, malicia, todos describen el habitus de una voluntad particular. El habitus, en sí mismo, es un término neutral, que se refiere simplemente a un patrón de crecimiento en una potencia humana en particular, dirigido hacia determinados tipos de acción. Por ejemplo, una persona de buena voluntad tiene un patrón de crecimiento en la virtud, pero la persona maliciosa tiene un patrón de crecimiento hacia el vicio. Las virtudes se desarrollan a través de una acción humana correcta, y el trabajo en conjunto del intelecto y de la libertad, que afecta no sólo a las acciones ejecutadas, sino también resulta en el desarrollo moral de una persona humana. La virtud de la valentía ayuda a perfeccionar los movimientos del apetito irascible del alma en acciones que toman cuerpo en buscar el bien en circunstancias adversas. Las capacidades verdaderamente humanas del conocer y del amor requieren de la virtud para funcionar bien. Además, el carácter moral de una persona cambia a través de la virtud, de modo que la persona con virtud es una buena persona.

El bien es un concepto análogo. Cada cosa posee o muestra el bien de un modo que es específico al tipo de cosa que ella es. Un bolígrafo bueno escribe bien, una silla buena está construida de tal manera que soporta a la persona que está sentada sobre ella. Para que una persona sea buena, las potencias del alma, las emociones, y las pasiones deben estar guiadas por el intelecto hacia el propósito o el objetivo en la vida. Los padres cristianos están guiando a sus hijos a los más grandes objetivos: la unión con Dios, a través de la imitación de Cristo. Este es el bien que surge a través de la virtud. [5] El crecimiento en la virtud, por tanto, significa crecimiento en el bien, una acción buena consistente que trae alegría al agente.

While magisterial documents on catechesis refer to parents as a child’s primary religious educators,[1] many parents and parish religious educators misunderstand the import of this statement. Parents are not expected to do a formal classroom-type catechesis. Instead, the parents’ role is one they are uniquely positioned to fulfill: their vocational responsibility to inculcate the faith on a day-to-day level through prayer, liturgical celebration, and moral formation. Unlike catechists, who might have one hour per week with children, parents are with their children daily throughout their formative years, with the potential to establish habits of prayer, foster participation in the liturgy, and direct real progress in moral formation. While parish and school catechists can provide guidance and support, as well as teach doctrine, parents and family members are essential to the actual living of the faith. Good formation within the family, therefore, provides a solid foundation for formal catechesis so that both can be mutually enriching.[2]

Parents are indispensable in the development of moral conscience and virtue. This is because, as the National Directory for Catechesis explains, “Moral catechesis involves more than the proclamation and presentation of the principles and practice of Christian morality. It presents the integration of Christian moral principles in the lived experience of the individual and the community.”[3] The family is the child’s first and most important community for this essential aspect of moral formation. The National Directory for Catechesis confirms that parents are responsible for the moral formation of children, according to the natural law. “Parents are catechists precisely because they are parents. Their role in the formation of Christian values in their children is irreplaceable.”[4]

What is Virtue?  What is Goodness?[5]

Virtue is a habit or habitus. The Latinized form is more suitable here because our familiar understanding of the word ‘habit’ doesn’t quite fit when considering virtue. As habitus, virtue occupies a position between the powers of the soul and the acts of the person. It is not simply a repeated action; it is a dynamic ability for growth toward the good in human action. A habitus is required for human powers that have more than one way of being activated. While each physical sense, for instance, has one particular function: the eyes see, the ears hear, and the tongue tastes, the will can desire many things, needing a habitus to give it form; a good will, a weak will, malice all describe the habitus of a particular will. Habitus itself is a neutral term, simply referring to a pattern of growth in a particular human power towards certain kinds of action. For example, the good willed person has a growth-pattern of virtue, but the malicious person has a growth-pattern of vice. Virtues develop through properly human action and the working together of choice and intellect, which affects not simply the resulting actions but also results in the moral development of the human person. The virtue of courage helps to perfect the movements of the irascible power of the soul to actions that embody seeking the good in difficult circumstances. The truly human capacities of knowing and loving require virtue to function well. Further, the moral character of the person is changed through virtue, so that the person with virtue is a good person.

Goodness is an analogous concept. Each thing possesses or displays goodness in a manner that is specific to the kind of thing that it is. A good pen writes well, a good chair is constructed so as to support the person sitting in it. For a person to be good, the powers of the soul, emotions, and passions must be guided by reason to the purpose or goal of life. Christian parents are leading their children to the loftiest of goals: union with God, by imitation of Christ. This is the goodness that comes about through virtue.[6]  Growth in virtue, therefore, means growth in goodness, consistently good action that brings joy to the agent.

“I guess we’ll all get to see how well our pandemic plans actually work.” The moment my dad said that to me is the moment I realized that none of us were prepared for COVID-19. Even businesses that developed a pandemic plan never really tested it. And I do not know of a single parish that planned ahead for the complete interruption of normal operations. Now that we experienced “Corona Time,” as my pastor likes to call it, we have learned much about virtual ministry, found best practices, and discovered its unique benefits. Corona Time has forever changed our parish’s formation strategy and disaster preparedness for the better.

Our Virtual Ministry

The key for our Faith Formation Team was to establish a schedule, both for working from home and for our digital presence. When we first started, we all struggled with throwing together some content and slapping it on the parish Facebook feed whenever it was finished. Within a week, we settled into a programming schedule that kind of felt like running a TV station. We continued emailing specialized content to specific groups—we emailed First Communion Preparation content to second graders’ families and Sunday reading worksheets to every family every Sunday—but most of our content was posted to social media at designated times.

 To register or to get more information about the Theology of the Body June 2020 Conferences, visit RuahWoodsPress.com/Training or call (513) 407-8672.

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“Parenting was so much easier when I raised my non-existent children hypothetically”.

A friend shared this meme with me a few months ago, and it resonated. Before I became a mom, I had lofty ideas about how much screen time and fresh fruit children should consume. My parent-self, on the other hand, decided screen time doesn’t count if it’s Veggie Tales or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood; and if this pouch of applesauce says it’s 100% real fruit, then who am I to judge?

Nowhere, however, was my hypothetical parenting more exercised than during my interactions with the parents of my students in sacramental preparation and youth ministry. My twenty-something single-self couldn’t understand why parents didn’t seem to read my clever emails, attend all my parent meetings, and (most importantly) get their children to Mass on Sunday or the Saturday vigil. My thirty-something newly-married-self had animated conversations with my husband after a night of youth ministry about how our kids would be different.

Then we became parents, and every prayer for humility I had ever uttered was answered. Perhaps it was a more unusual adjustment than most, since we became parents through fostering children whose exposure to faith in general, and Catholicism in particular, was limited or even erroneous. However, the more I listen to other parents, the more I learn that, with the task of raising tiny humans (whether they are biological children, step children, grandchildren, adopted children, or foster children), there is a constant sense of inadequacy that creeps into everything we do: the food we serve, the educational methods we select, and the extracurriculars we elect.

However, as a professional lay minister—whose resume includes years of work as a youth minister and as a catechist at a mission in Central America and at parishes in both South Carolina and Florida—I was unprepared for the thoughts that buffeted me when I went from being a catechist “on staff” to being the primary catechist of the children in my home. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize these thoughts for what they are: lies. Sometimes the truth of how God sees us and how the Holy Spirit is moving can be hardest to discern in our own life and in the lives of those closest to us.

Here are some of the negative thoughts that bombard me, especially at frustrating moments when attempting to share the faith within my own home. Perhaps you can relate.