The plight of the Domestic Church

Catholic Families in Crisis: New Study Finds Catholic Homes Are Spiritually Bankrupt

Holy Cross Family Ministries recently sponsored a first-of-its-kind study through the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown on spiritual health of the Catholic family The results paint a sobering picture, I offer an explanation of how the family has fared in the decades since Vatican II in The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God.

Mass Attendance

Only 22% of Catholic families attend mass weekly.

Only 18% of Catholic families with an infant attend mass weekly.

Larger families do a slightly better job with mass attendance but still, only 33% of families with 3 or more children attend mass every week.

Religious Education

68% of Catholic parents do not have their children enrolled in any type of religious education. Only 8% enroll their children in Catholic grade schools, 3% in Catholic high schools, and 21% have children in some type of parish-based religious education (i.e., “CCD”).

When faith education is considered in light of Mass attendance, 42 percent of weekly Mass attenders having a child enrolled in parish-based religious education (though NOT Catholic school) compared to 27 percent of monthly attenders. But, of course, that means that almost 60% of the most committed families (weekly mass attenders) do not have their children involved in religious ed of any kind.

Many people believe that cost is a serious impediment to enrolling kids in Catholic schools. This would not appear to be the case insofar as only 14% of families in the upper middle class income bracket ($85,000+/yr) send their children to Catholic school.

Family Prayer

About 36% of Catholic parents say they pray daily but if it is true that the family that “prays together stays together” then Catholic families are in serious trouble.

Only 17% of Catholic parents who pray on their own also pray as a family. An additional 7% of Catholic parents say that they don’t pray on their own, but will join in if their family is praying.

While about 50% of Catholic families eat dinner together daily, only 13% of Catholic families say they pray before meals every day.

It means, that the kids are NOT all right. It means that Catholic family life is NOT OK. Most importantly, it means that we, as a Church, need to stop assuming that the families in the pews have been equipped to live and proclaim the gospel and that whatever other ministry we may do, we need to allocate resources to shoring up our own spiritual house, because it is falling down around our ears.

In light of this study, parents should commit to living out the 5 Marks of the Catholic Family , bearing a full and vigorous witness to the Catholic difference in our own lives.

Here are additional resources for help in living out the fullness of the Catholic vision of family life, made challenging in the face of the moral therapeutic deism so prevalent among Catholic families at present.

Discovering God Together: The Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids (COMING AUGUST 2015–Sophia Institute Press) Raising faithful kids is a possible mission for Catholic families. This book exposes the latest research on what it takes to pass the faith onto your children. Discover how to make your faith the source of the warmth and love in your home. Celebrate uncommon closeness to Christ and your kids. Get more out of your prayer life and the sacraments.

Parenting With Grace: The Catholic Parents’ Guide to Raising (almost) Perfect Kids–Discover faithful ways to respond effectively to the challenges of each age and stage of your child’s life and create they close, loving, joyful family God wants for you.

Then Comes Baby: The Catholic Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the First 3 Years of Parenthood–Parenthood should be a celebration. Discover how find a healthy balance that enables you to meet your needs, baby’s need, and maintain your marriage as well. This book helps you enjoy your new addition to the fullest!

Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Raising Sexually Whole and Holy Children--You can raise moral kids in an immoral world. This book shows you, step-by-step how to respond to difficult questions, overcome challenges, and build character in your kids that enables them to make godly choices in every part of their lives–even when you’re not breathing down their necks.c

Comments

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with Fox News Digital. "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years. Listen to her testimony.

On the Universalist Heresy

Universalism is the speculation that we can know with certainty that every single human being or possibly every creature, including the devil himself, will be saved, and was condemned in 543 by the Church. It dates from the time of Origen in the third century, with his defense of what he called “Apocatastasis,” the notion that all things will be all in God—everyone shall be saved. I dare say it is a belief well-established among Catholics today, supported by some Catholic theologians predisposed to this view. Universalism stems from doctrine of hell, the idea that people might be separated from God for all eternity and endure eternal conscious torment because of this alienation. Universalist theologians, following Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar say that Universalism represents the triumph of hope over biblical evidence. Yet t he Church has taught from the beginning that both heaven and hell exist, and there are two possibilities for each of us: eternit...

A Book for all Seasons

Decades as a Christian leader — most notably at the U.N. as president of the Center for Family & Human Rights — have earned writer Austin Ruse, once a Washington liberal with little faith, his share of defeats and triumphs. Perhaps most valuably, he has intuited keen tactical insights from his confrontations with the dark side of human nature. You come away from this groundbreaking book with the sense that Ruse knows the enemy better than the enemy knows himself. In Under Seige, Ruse carefully examines how the anti-Christian forces gained power over every elite institution in America. He exposes their most deviant plans for the future. He then issues his authoritative call to arms, brilliantly arguing that there is no finer time to be a faithful Catholic. God Himself called each of us to live in this time and place, to contribute to the renewal society and the Church, and to vanquish the enemies of civilization. Ruse argues that each of us is called specifically to th...

Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor

Tucker Carlson: The Biden Scandal Is Real And Not Going Away Posted By Ian Schwartz On Date October 30, 2020 TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: It's been obvious for decades now that the Biden family has gotten rich from selling influence abroad. Joe Biden held a series of high level jobs in the U.S. government. Based on that fact and that fact alone, Biden's son and brother approached foreign governments and companies, sovereign wealth funds, energy conglomerates, Third World oligarchs and dictators, and they offered to exchange favors from Joe Biden for cash. The polite term for that practice is influence-peddling. Sometimes it is legal under American law, sometimes it is not. But it has always been the economic engine of the Biden family. They've never done anything else. Until recently, no one debated this fact. Several liberal news organizations, in fact, have written detailed stories about the Biden secret business dealings over the years. Look them up, assuming you still c...

Signs of These Times, or "Life Under the Relativist Dictatorship"

While reading Ralph Martin’s A Church in Crisis I encontered an endnote reference to a blog post by Fr. Longenecker, which sheds light on the roots of contemporary secular befuddlement: RELATIVISM, IRRATIONAL RAGE AND REVOLUTION One of the most disturbing aspects of the troubles of 2020 has been the confusion and bewilderment caused by so much uncertainty. When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic every other news report or social media link or comment has been contradictory. “Masks are useless. Everybody must wear a mask! Only sick old people will get this disease. My friend knows a guy in his forties who is an athlete and very fit and he nearly died! You can get it just from touching your groceries. The virus doesn’t transmit that way. The threat is global. Only New York City is being hit. Not us.” We’ve seen the most amazing contradictions over the last week with the massive demonstrations. We’re supposed to observe social distancing, but thousands are encouraged ...

Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON NOVEMBER 22, 2020 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS , LIBERALS , SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

The Body of Christ and the City of Men

The “Statement of Principles” issued by select Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, disapproving of Bishops in the United States for allegedly “politicizing the Eucharist” is an example of deceitful equivocation. Essentially, the Statement maintains that the Bishops should not “politicize” the Eucharist. On this the insight of Flannery O’Connor proves enlightening: Those whose lives are not ordered by, around, and toward the Eucharist, therefore, are those whose lives are defined by some love other than love of the Christ who is present there. Rather, their lives are ordered by the earthly city, manifest in this case, by, variously, partisan political identity or individual, radially sovereign conscience. This applies across the American political spectrum, to those who deny human dignity of the unborn, the immigrant, and the person on death row. In Catholic teaching the Eucharist creates St. Augustine’s City of God, the definit...

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

Cardinal Sarah’s warning of “demonic” “apocalyptic beasts” of “the idolatry of Western freedom” verified in Argentina

There is indeed a great battle being played out in that three-week meeting that is rightfully being followed and reported on by all the world’s media. Society is reaching a climax in the war against the family. In the above video, hordes of women, many of them masked and half naked, violently assaulted a group of young men who stood outside the Cathedral of Mar de Plata, praying. One Peter Five has written: Over the past three weeks, Catholic Church leaders from around the world have gathered for the Ordinary Synod of the Family in Rome, the second in a two-part session that began in October 2014. The meeting was a perfect opportunity for bishops to discuss how to strengthen the family in the midst of serious challenges — issues such as contraception, abortion and chastity in a sexually licentious culture. Instead, it has become mired in debates over long-settled teaching on sexual mores, with agendas advanced by progressive and controversial...

Novus Motus Liturgicus

From The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God: In 1959, Pope John XXIII saw a true need for liturgical renewal within the Roman Rite in accordance with the metaphorical principle of organic development, the aim of the Liturgical Movement endorsed by Pope St. Pius X. In authentic organic development, the Church listens to what liturgical scholars deem necessary for the gradual improvement of liturgical tradition, and evaluate the need for such development, always with a careful eye on the preservation of the received liturgical tradition handed down from century to century. In this way, continuity of belief and liturgical practice is ensured. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote at the time, the principle of organic development ensures that in the Mass, “only respect for the Liturgy’s fundamental unspontaneity and pre-existing identity can give us what we hope for: the feast in which the great reality comes to us that we ourselves do not manufacture , but receive as a gift. Organic de...

Search This Blog