How to Keep Our Kids Catholic

to see my father unself-consciously kneeling in the pew obviously deep in prayer well i mean to this day it's vividly in my mind and when you're seven years old and you see that you say yeah well he's taking this with utter seriousness he's the most important person in my life and so of course i'll take it with utter seriousness welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vot the host and the senior publishing director we got a great topic today that i know a lot of people are interested in namely how do we keep our kids catholic we've had some discussions in the past about how to draw them back to the church after they've left but i know a lot of parents teachers church people educators are wondering well how do we prevent them from leaving in the first place and that's what we'll be discussing here today with bishop robert baron bishop good to see you hey brandon always good to be with you let me ask you something that i haven't asked in a while namely what books are you reading i know you're always in the middle of several so tell us about them oh yeah okay um i met this wonderful guy andrew ferguson who's a former speechwriter for george h.w bush he's been a political commentator for a long time now out here in santa barbara researching a book and we had a wonderful lunch together and he has a great little book called land of lincoln and he and i are both lincoln people and he knew that so he gave me this book it's kind of a look at at our culture and how lincoln is appropriated and it's very wise it's very insightful very funny so i'm reading that i'm reading ron chernow's biography of george washington about halfway through that um oh another one i'm reading now we mentioned last time that i was in baltimore right for the dedication of or the anniversary of the basilica i discovered that archbishop laurie of baltimore is a huge franklin roosevelt buff he has all the books on roosevelt and i have a great interest in roosevelt too so we're going through his his book collection and i was saying oh yeah i've read that i don't know this one and i pointed to a book called uh fdr's funeral train i believe it's called i said boy i don't know that one and he said i've got a second copy of it why don't you take that one so i brought it home with me and i'm currently reading that too so anyway i'm kind of on a history biography a kick at the moment well i want to talk with you about another new book that just came out it was written by our friend dr christian smith we've had the pleasure of working with him over the years in several things christian is a sociologist he teaches at the university of notre dame notre dame i should say and he has a new book yeah the french pronunciation there he's a new book out with from oxford university press it's titled handing down the faith how parents pass their religion on to the next generation the book doesn't only cover christian parents it's kind of a survey of all sorts of parents who want to pass their religion on to their children and it takes all this data and filters it and focuses it and tries to develop a picture of what does it look like to successfully pass your faith down to the next generation highly recommend the book i've spent a good deal of time in it today we're going to go through some of the main points in the book some of his main findings about how to effectively raise religiously practicing adults so let's go through some of the principles he discovered first of all he found in his research that effective parents believe and practice their own religion genuinely and faithfully and he says at the very beginning this is by far the most important factor i'm going to give a quote here and then love to hear your response christian says parents exert far and away the greatest influence on their children's religious outcomes no other institution or program comes close to shaping youth religiously as their parents do not religious congregations youth groups faith-based schools missions service trips summer camps sunday schools youth ministers or anything else it's the parents what do you say to that yeah amen amen and amen he's backing up with all this statistical study i would just say it suits me intuitively absolutely you know brandon over the years how many times parents have come to me either in person or online with some version of this question like bishop what is the church doing to keep our young people in the church what is the church doing to get them back why doesn't the church do more of course there are fair questions of course the church should be doing things and is involved but in light of these findings especially i feel totally confirmed in my intuition that the answer is right in front of you totally under your control is the most important thing more important than any program or any initiative on the part of the church would be your own fidelity to catholicism a kid that sees his parents worshiping god going to mass taking religion seriously not just talking about it but doing it making it part of their their daily and weekly practice there is nothing more important so it's not to you know just hit the tennis ball back to the lady or throw the lady under the bus it's simply to acknowledge this fact more important than anything we could possibly do as an institutional church is what you can do parents in your own family i think brandon it totally confirms gosh my own experience growing up in this catholic family why am i a catholic much less a priest and a bishop because my parents were because i saw my parents living this faith in a normal unself-conscious way it's just part of life in fact it's the most important part of life i think i've told this story before but when i was a little kid we lived in michigan at the time so i would have been like six or seven and um my parents of course you know were sunday mass and my father was not a real tall man but he was big a big broad-shouldered guy and he'd been an athlete as a young man and he was you know he was a i thought the the toughest strongest person in the world you know when i was seven years old and to see my father unself-consciously kneeling in the pew obviously deep in prayer well i mean to this day it's vividly in my mind and when you're seven years old and you see that you say yeah well he's taking this with utter seriousness he's the most important person in my life and so of course i'll take it with utter seriousness my mother i'm in the same way my mother i mean missing mass if she had had smallpox and cholera she would have crawled to mass on sunday um i loved the story this is before i was i was consciously aware of things but i've heard from from family members and friends that when my parents were first married um they went to mass every every morning the church wasn't that far from where they lived this beautiful queen of all saints basilica in chicago and they would go there to mass every day my mother i told this story is often during lent she would commit herself to daily mass well my point is it was just part of the natural rhythm of their lives and we of course picked that up so yes yes yes the most important thing is parents live your faith now talk to pastoral people across the country over the years you'll hear stories like how many parents drop the kids off at religious education on sunday morning and then okay see ya see ya i'm gonna go home i'll pick you up in an hour and a half even though mass is going on at that time and the idea was no that you know the parents should go to mass or maybe they'd bring the kids to mass after whatever the deal was but these parents who would absent themselves well what's the kid gonna gonna learn sure i'm learning things in class but my parents aren't taking this seriously that's a number one so christian smith says that's the clearest finding in the whole book the parents are the most important factor but then it raises the question well okay what are parents supposed to do then if we take this role seriously what are we supposed to do to keep our kids in the faith and the rest of the book sort of fleshes out the answer to that question here's one of the principles he gives in response to that he found that successful parents have an authoritative but warm parenting style he says they avoid the two extremes of cold authoritarianism on the one hand and passive permissiveness on the other hand i'm going to read another short quote here he says religious parents who most successfully raise religious children tend to exhibit an authoritative parenting style such parents combine two crucial traits first they consistently hold their children to clear and demanding expectations standards and boundaries in all areas of life and second they relate to their children with an abundance of warmth support and expressive care it is not hard to see he says why this parenting style works best for raising religious children the combination of clear expectations and effective warmth is powerful in developing children's formation amen right i mean if if the problem let's say pre-council was more the former now it's the latter what i mean is pre-council maybe there was too much of a stress on you know the the authoritarian you got to do it and just the expectations and the demands and then you know threats and so on if it wasn't lived up to okay i get it but then did we over correct saying yes in my experience my generation the ones after mine i think that you know the warmth and the love and the acceptance and no matter what and all that and what he's putting his finger on is very wise that it's a artful combination of the two that's the key to successful parenting i remember this is years ago i'm in the parish and uh this kid came to serve mass he'd never served before so i said oh hi you know what i'm doing here and then his mom came back and i said hey it's good to have whatever his name was and i haven't seen him before and she goes yeah he doesn't come to church we decided just to kind of leave it up to him and that when he came of age you know he he joined so what he's doing now is he's trying out different religions and i remember i had this i hope not scolding but but frank conversation with her i said well would you ever accept that logic when it comes to uh learning a sport or learning a musical instrument would you say like yeah go to practice when you feel like it um yeah you know if you think your coach has something good to say pay attention but otherwise you know just do whatever you want well of course not because what she was doing there was she was erring on the side of the warmth and love and no matter what with no uh authoritative expectation when it came to religion well why do we think religion is different than these other areas of life of course you you give clear expectations of course there's a sense of you know consequence if you don't live up to this expectation there's going to be a consequence that's not repugnant to i love you no matter what you know and i think every good parent knows that but i think we've as usual we've oscillated from one extreme to the other and striking that balance is is key for parents would you have described your parents in that way that they had an authoritative but warm parenting style yeah precisely and they wouldn't have been able to articulate it probably quite that way uh and my guess is brandon a lot of parents at that time knew that in their bones they knew intuitively i mean my parents had expectations absolutely maybe i've told this story before even on this program about when i joined um the altar boys as a little kid i joined and you know how often happens with kids i i went to the first maybe couple of training sessions and then i decided no i don't think i want to do this and i told my father i was quitting and he said very gently but firmly you know if you don't want to join something you don't have to but once you join you stick with it and i did i did stick with it and now i'm a bishop but my point is he he knew of course i knew that if i had abandoned the you know alter service my father would still love me of course i knew that i i didn't live in some you know um nightmare of oh unless i live up to these you know expectations my father will reject me but at the same time i knew yeah he's expecting this of me and i don't want to let him down and he he thinks i'm i'm making a bad judgment here so i knew both those things from my parents very clearly and that's that's the fertile ground out of which very good things grow you know but one or the other is a problem another conclusion in christian smith's research is that parents who successfully pass on religious faith and practice to their children talk with their children about religious things as a normal part of family life during the week he says it comes and goes and talk easily it's not compartmentalized in certain slots of the week nor is it an unusual or awkward topic it's just part of who we are and what we talk about he says it doesn't mean they talk about religion all the time but it does indicate to the children that religion matters and that it's relevant enough for the rest of life that it should arise normally in ordinary discussions was that your experience growing up it was indeed let me just preface it with a reference to one of my favorite books that bryce had revisited remember the scene so charles ryder who's the kind of cool skeptic agnostic has now been brought into this house brideshead and it's full of catholics you know and they're they're chatting away one night and and they're talking about about religion and he says you you people seem to talk about religion a lot and um the younger sister uh cordelia says well it comes up rather naturally in the conversation doesn't it and he said not in my house it doesn't you know but that's what he's talking about is the the family at brideshead they were religious people and so yeah it sort of comes up naturally in conversation doesn't it and and charles who's the agnostic not not in my house we never talk about it there's a major difference if you don't talk about it as an ordinary part of your life then it's probably not going to take root in you if you do it will now with that i've been paying tribute to my father now to my mother my dad was not a speculative type or a theoretician a real practical man you know so he had these deep religious convictions but he wouldn't have been you know given to a lot of deep thought about them or raising a philosophical type questions but my mother was though she wasn't trained she didn't have a great education but she was a natural theologian she she raised religious questions naturally and she loved to sort of ponder them and i remember many times when i'm a little kid with my mother talking about religion about god about jesus about the cross about eternal life about what happens when we die and so that happened in my household we talked about religion and in fact my parents you know sent all the kids to religious schools from from grade school through graduate school um so yeah you live in a religious environment uh if you live in a baseball environment you talk baseball a lot right if that's the world you're coming of age in agent so you live in a religious environment it comes up rather naturally so yeah that happened in my case and i love the fact so not just in catechism class so yeah once a week in catechism or once a week at mass i think about god on tuesday at 11 o'clock i'm talking about god for different reasons i'm talking about my the moral demand i'm talking about the saints you know but that's a that's a hobby to us it's a it's a habit it's a practice that has to be consciously endeavored christian smith also found that parents are also more likely to succeed in passing on religion to their children if they allow their children to explore and express their own ideas and feelings along the way although he adds this caveat without letting discussions turn into relativistic free-for-alls so he says this means granting a freedom to consider doubts complications and alternatives without fear of condemnation combined with parents seriously engaging their children and expressing to them their own beliefs and reasons and hopes parents who either slam down the hammer on anything deemed unacceptable or convey a comfort with whatever will be less successful and bishop this reminds me of when you did the youtube amas how many people there and my suspicion is many of them were probably coming from a fundamentalist protestant background but a lot of catholics too how many of them would say none of my questions were answered people ignored my questions people shut down my questions that's like a common refrain among children but christian smith is saying let the questions come let the doubts and concerns arise but it's so good though isn't it brandon that i think the instinct today is to say oh yeah great let doubts arise yeah questions and then we leave them in a lurch like oh yeah that's great you got questions good for you and i got my point of view and you got your point of view see but that gets us nowhere the point's not the destination it's the journey right yeah right and everyone buys into that kind of romanticism of the journey thing where no as chesterton said the mind is meant it's open the way a mouth is open it's meant to close down on something nourishing finally so that's a delicate art to cultivate a conversation that has parameters uh you're not just both you know i don't know what the truth is let's let's let's just keep looking you have a sense of where you want the conversation to go but also you're respectful of the concerns and questions of your interlocutor um look at look at you know even socrates i mentioned earlier um socrates knew where he wanted to lead people you know he he had a very keen sense of what he was about even as he respected the questions they kept raising so that's an art though the scene it's easy to resolve it one side or the other shut up this is the truth you know i don't want to hear your stupid questions or i love your questions keep asking and who knows those are both easy easy but very dysfunctional the subtle art is what he's describing there you know um you know i think brandon i mentioned william f buckley earlier buckley's son christopher buckley who became a famous novelist himself when he was a young man like a teenager or early 20s kind of lost the faith and buckley william f buckley was the intensely catholic guy and christopher told the story i think i want to say they went to mexico that stays in my mind but they were they went like on a vacation and william buckley read him chesterton's orthodoxy out loud they just sat down and he read orthodoxy and then invited christopher to engage it you know well there's someone who's you know he knows his son's having doubts and having questions he doesn't suppress them but yet he also knew what the truth is and he wanted to kind of guide and lead his son so that's i think what smith is talking about there but you know brandon i think of yourself and many others who parents of kids i mean you're all going to face that your kids will go through times of doubt or maybe a teen rebellion etc and it's fine that that delicate space artfully managed between direction and permission that that's not easy not easy but important i think christian smith should take that narrative into account and note that a hundred percent of parents who have read chesterton's orthodoxy out loud have been successful in drawing their child back to the church actually until the god's truth william buckley was not that successful with it because christopher i think uh ended up abandoning the faith so to be fair i don't think he was that successful in that strategy but still worth trying okay let's look at a couple more here from christian smith next is what he calls religious channeling he says this is a very powerful way to keep your kids in a particular religion he defines this at channeling meaning subtly nudging introducing or steering children in the right religious directions he says good channeling is purposeful and even strategic but not controlling or overbearing it creates opportunities makes introductions and encourages involvement but it does not coerce or bribe children into religion but then he gets more concrete he says specifically research suggests that the most important of these channeling influences is channeling your child toward a non-family adult in a religious congregation who knows the child well and can engage him and talk on serious topics beyond superficial chit-chat he says the more that such adults are present the more a church feels like a community or an extended family which itself is a strong bonding force parents who channel effectively know how to encourage the development of such relationships for their children was there anyone like that in your life growing up other adults outside your family with whom you could talk about religion in a serious way yeah i think there were when i started doing my um my discovery of thomas aquinas and uh at first that was a very sort of private thing and i had known to talk about it with but then yes there were some teachers that came into my life who discovered oh this kid's interested in philosophy and and then they became mentors to me and and guides helped me to do the right reading and so on um wasn't brandon you or jared or maybe both of you talked about this that with their own kids maybe it was jared you know jared zimmer for everyone who runs our word on fire institute um to bring his own kids though to another adult to talk about like what it means to be a man or talk about what it means how to treat women with respect so it wasn't just his father telling him but another respected male from outside the family who shared the same values i don't know if you talked about that as well with your kids i think that's a really wise method because then the kid says okay this is not just some idiosyncratic preoccupation of my crazy father this is actually there's a wider community that holds this and this is a man that i really respect for whatever reason i i think this is a very intelligent good you know and kids might not be able to articulate that but they they feel it right they know it uh so that's a channeling that's extremely important and then he had good teachers because a parent might say but i can't answer all the questions my my child has these are kind of complicated but maybe there's somebody in the community maybe it's it's the priest of my perisher that could answer these questions good direct them that way maybe there's a um youth group that's led by someone that's really you know top-notch and that person could give them greater guidance that to me is really wise uh it convinces the child they're part of something much bigger than their own family as important as that is there's number one again but okay now i'm part of even a wider community of people who are interested in these matters and these aren't weirdos or they're not some you know cultic figures these are people i i know and respect so i love that i love that instinct i think that was a jared story uh and it makes sense one thing we've tried to do at our house is to make sure that these other adults that we're trying to channel our children toward are regularly in our home you know so we invite priests and religious brothers and religious sisters and ministers at our parish you know all these people over for dinner they're playing basketball and hockey with our kids they're hanging out all of that i think it shows the power of this channeling phenomenon that it just becomes for our kids normal that all you know adults that we like and respect they all take religion seriously it's just a normal thing to them well that's the interesting point you make there brandon i think of my own dad you know of course mass on sunday was a complete non-negotiable prayer piety but it wasn't unusual in the culture of that time now it's changed i'm going back now to the 1960s that's the way catholic men were you know catholic men went to mass on sunday catholic men prayed catholic men sent their kids to catholic schools you wouldn't have said like oh that boy that john barron he boy he's really that guy is really out there religious and what i mean there he he was a deeply committed religious man but that wasn't that unusual in the culture of that time that's that was what men did you know the fact that it's become much more unusual is a sad commentary but right to just draw people very naturally into this world i mean i assumed and statistically correctly that most of adult catholics that my parents knew went to mass on sunday i remember being genuinely surprised the first time many years ago i read stats such as you know 70 percent of catholics don't go to mass on sunday i remember being like no that can't be right not 70 so you know that's the cultural shift we've been watching for a long time but it affects this issue for sure because now you got to be a little more intentional i think when you draw people into this wider community we had priests over two at the house a lot i remember having sisters over at the house my parents had that good instinct too again we're discussing this new book by dr christian smith it's titled handing down the faith he did a massive amount of research on parents who have successfully raised their child in their faith not just christianity he involves a lot of muslim and jewish parents parents of other religions as well but these core principles are what he found in common among all of them let's look at one more bishop and i'm sure this one is going to have all the dres and parish people nodding their heads with vigorous agreement he says that parents are successful if they frame religious formation he says things like first communion confirmation as a series of steps toward adult practice rather than requirements for religious graduation he says you want to avoid those steps being viewed as obligations that children just need to get out of the way to appease parents yeah he's right of course but we've been struggling for decades with this question and i faced it in different pastoral settings i face it out here in l.a because on the one hand it's a way to get kids into these programs because we say well you have to do it to get confirmation or first communion but everyone sees the problem one of the lines i use at confirmations when the kids wear these robes sometimes they do and i'll say these are not graduation robes these are initiation robes this is not graduation day like okay throw a hat up in the air i'm done with that and i'm moving on i said no this is the first day you're being initiated now fully into the life of the church but how do you convince kids of that how do we do it programmatically um i agree of course with what he's saying but boy the pastoral challenge we've faced it for decades now how to do just that to see these as incremental steps on the way toward a fully engaged mature uh living of your catholic life it's hard it's it's a real pastoral challenge because see the culture too is so militating against us it's so anti-religious in many ways or aggressively secular that it's tough it's tough so that's a huge pastoral challenge i want to close with this bishop christian smith adds this caveat kind of sprinkled throughout the book and it's one that that we've added in the past when we were talking about how to draw people back to the church namely that none of this is formulaic or automatic he says nothing about this process is guaranteed i'm quoting him here life is complicated and children are finally the agents of their own development parents do have a major influence on their children religiously but that influence is never complete controlling or surefire what parents can do really all they can do is practice in their own lives the faith that they hope their children will embrace build warm authoritative relationships with their children be mindful and intentional about steering children into relationships and activities that can help personalize religion internally and then pray and hope that the divine forces in which they believe will lead their children into lives of truth goodness and beauty say something about that because i know there's probably lots of parents as parents listening to this maybe a little overwhelmed and maybe feeling a little guilty that they aren't doing all these things just right what would you say to them do one of them pick one that you think is really important that you can do so he's summing up the book there you know it's summing up all these steps and they're all important of course maybe choose one and say i'm going to really focus on that for the coming year and i love the thing at the end too of you know it's not a throwing up your hands but it's it's a surrender to god's providence that lord i'm i'm doing i'm trying to cooperate with your grace as much as i can here but finally it's um it's up to you you know to keep these kids close to you so i surrender to god's providence but maybe pick one of those recommendations and really focus on it for the coming year or a couple years so i encourage everyone to pick up the book it's by dr christian smith it is titled handing down the faith how parents pass their religion on to the next generation it's a little heady it's a scholarly book published by oxford university press but i'll include a link to that book and also a link to an article which is much shorter where christian smith sums up some of these major findings [Music] well now it's time for our question from one of our listeners today we have a question from a young boy his name is frankie he lives in omaha and he's got a question here for bishop baron let's listen to frankie hello bishop baron my name is frankie i am 10 years old and i live in omaha my question is how do we know which religion is right catholicism or protestantism thank you and god bless you and word on fire well god bless you thank you for that um here's the first observation it's not a question of like right wrong right like that's completely right that's completely wrong uh because there are so many elements of truth within protestantism there are so many points of contact right overlap between the two so don't think of it as you know just a either or true or false so having said that and knowing that you know frankie this would take us years to go through all the different points of difference between catholicism and protestantism i'll put my fingers on one thing what martin luther thought was central to his reformation which is the idea of justification by grace uh through faith and the idea there in luther was that i'm justified i'm set right with god i'm ready for heaven in the measure that i accept his grace in faith and he distinguished sharply between faith and what he called works and the catholic church has always said yes all right relationship with god must begin in faith but that it's brought to fulfillment through our cooperation with grace and so it's both faith and works that draw us fully into the life of christ that you might say is the major difference now who's right i'll just say this real quickly i think the catholic position and i'm speaking obviously as a catholic bishop the catholic position respects the richness and complexity of what we find in the bible i think if you look at the bible in the gospels and the letters of paul especially you'll see both these elements faith yes indeed but also the works of love are essential to salvation i think catholicism honors the complexity of the biblical witness more than martin luther did so if you want one quick answer i'd say that's why i think catholicism is right on this central issue well thanks for the great question frankie a couple things here before we wrap up i mentioned that you should get christian smith's great book handing down the faith if you're looking for a book on how to draw back a loved one who's already left the church i encourage you to check out our book return how to draw your child back to the church i wrote the book word on fire recently published it and for a limited time we're selling copies for only seven dollars so you can get a copy at wordonfire.org return also i haven't asked this in a while but if you can if you like this show the word on fire show please leave a review on your favorite podcasting service whether that's apple podcast or google play or stitcher somewhere else leave a review the more reviews that the show gets the higher it rises in the rankings and the more people discover it so it helps us out a lot it only takes you a couple seconds but please take a few seconds and leave a review for the word on fire show well thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel

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Published: Mon Sep 20 2021