In recent weeks, many of the children in our parishes throughout the Diocese have made their first Confession and received their first Holy Communion. A good number of our children and youth have also received Confirmation.

As Bishop Garcia, Bishop Quinn and I visited our parishes to confer the Sacrament of Confirmation, we were reminded of the important role that parents play in the spiritual formation of their children. The privilege and primary responsibility of the parents to pass on their faith to their children and the parish’s responsibility to nurture the faith of both parents and children is an important topic of our upcoming Diocesan Synod.

Almost 40 years ago, toward the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI along with the Council fathers affirmed the parents’ privilege and responsibility of educating their children: “Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators. This role in education is so important that only with difficulty can it be supplied where it is lacking...Hence the family is the first school of the social virtues that every society needs. It is particularly in the Christian family, enriched by the grace and office of the sacrament of matrimony, that children should be taught from their early years to have a knowledge of God according to the faith received in Baptism, to worship Him, and to love their neighbor....Let parents, then, recognize the inestimable importance a truly Christian family has for the life and progress of God’s own people.” (Declaration on Christian Education, No. 3)

In this way, we see how as the “first school of social virtues,” the family contributes to society by insuring that the children are not only cared for in a physical or material way (provided with food, clothing and shelter), but also by making sure that the children are given a spiritual, social, emotional and psychological foundation. In a certain sense, while it can be challenging to provide a child with food, shelter and clothing, the more difficult task for parents is to foster their children’s spiritual and emotional life.

In his Apostolic Exhortation of 1981, “On the Christian Family,” the Holy Father acknowledged that the parental task of educating the children is not easy: “In a society shaken and split by tensions and conflicts caused by the violent clash of various kinds of individualism and selfishness, children must be enriched not only with a sense of true justice, which alone leads to respect for the personal dignity of each individual, but also and more powerfully by a sense of true love, understood as sincere solicitude and disinterested service with regard to others, especially the poorest and those in most need.” Ultimately, the self-giving of the parents is the “model and norm” for the self-giving of the children. (No. 37)

The family as the “domestic Church” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, No. 11) looks to Christ who lives in obedience to Mary and Joseph and through them to the Father. In other words, the human family looks to the first domestic Church, the Holy Family, in order to live in obedience not only in their relations with each other, but also in obedience to their salvific mission of the Church as a whole. The enriching of the Church depends on families which live zealously and obediently the call to holiness that is specific to the state of marriage.

Pope John Paul II noted in his 1981 Apostolic Exhortation that the parental role in the education of their children is a “ministry”: “The sacrament of marriage gives to the educational role the dignity and vocation of being really and truly a ‘ministry’ of the church at the service of building up her members.” (No. 38) (This goes along with the understanding of the family as the domestic Church.) The Holy Father added: “In order that Christian parents may worthily carry out their ministry of education, the synod fathers expressed the hope that a suitable catechism for families would be prepared, one that would be clear, brief and easily assimilated by all.” (No. 39) As a result of this hope for a catechism for families, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was promulgated in 1992 (and published in English in 1994).

Nonetheless, with the wonderful gift of the Catechism to the Church, we know that there is still much work to do in supporting our parents and families in the area of Christian education. Presently, the United States bishops are considering the most recent draft of a briefer “Catechism for Adults” based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, efforts are being made in our own diocese to shore up our adult and family catechesis. It is my hope that the upcoming Diocesan Synod will give us to a clear mandate to develop more effectively adult and family catechesis in the Diocese of Sacramento.

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