We continue the 52-week plan to grow in Catholic Manhood by becoming a better Catholic Son and Catholic Father.
For the last several weeks, we have been reflecting upon the ninth major habit: Major Habit 9 – Establish Authority, Order, and Culture in your Domestic Church and last week focused on Habit 30 – Maintain Order and Rules in your family.
We turn our attention to Habit 31.
Habit 31 – Build a Robust Catholic Family Culture
Build a Robust Catholic Family Culture with your bride in which your home has many symbols of the faith (Crucifix, beautiful images of Christ/Saints, candles, scents, music, Blessing of the Home) and family life revolves around the continual joy in practicing the Catholic faith, making it obvious to all that your family is a joyfully and devoutly Catholic.
What is a “robust Catholic Family Culture”?
A Catholic family can be thought of as the “domestic Church Militant”, the smallest cell of the Catholic Church Militant (the Church on earth), over which a married Catholic man is given headship, and along with his bride, is called to build, living out the faith together and successfully passing along a strong Catholic faith to each of their sons and daughters.
“Culture” comes from Latin words which mean “to tend, guard, till, worship” and describes what is worshiped, shared beliefs, customs, practices, values, and social behavior of societies. For Catholics, what is worshiped is summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Part 1 – The Profession of Faith – CCC 26-1065, particularly the Creeds – CCC 194-197).
“Robust” comes from a Latin word which means “oak or strength” and signifies strength, sturdiness and durability.
A “robust Catholic Family Culture” is one in which the family zealously lives out the Catholic faith, deeply loving God and His Holy Catholic Church and joyously embracing a thoroughly Catholic way of life; those who enter the family home and spend time with the family can readily see the profound and life-changing devotion each member of the family is blessed to possess. Children raised in a robust Catholic family culture grow in their love of the faith, grow into holy and happy adults and pass on their loved faith to their children.
A memorable formulation of this type of devotion is: “If your family was on trial for being Catholic, would there be enough evidence to convict?”
How can the metaphor of The Water Well help understand family culture?
God has created humans to be some 70% water and the consumption of plenty of pure water is necessary for a healthy life.
Imagine you had to locate and protect a well which was to be the only source of water for your family. You would seek a well that was drilled deep into rock and tapped into abundant deep aquifers which would flood into the well each day, constantly refilling and purifying the well. You would zealously guard the well so filth and pollution could not seep in, contaminate the well and poison your family.
A family culture is like a water well. Water is essential to sustain physical life and is consumed in ample quantities and a family culture is immersive and sustains the spiritual lives of parents and children. Like the physical bodies of people are largely made of water, each member of the family will be largely formed by the family culture.
Ample pure water yields healthy bodies and polluted water poisons and kills the body. Healthy family cultures yield happy and healthy family members and diseased family cultures yield unhappy and perverted family members.
How can the metaphor of The Water Well guide a strategy for building a robust Catholic family culture?
Using the metaphor of The Water Well:
Flood the family culture with God and His Holy Catholic Church – Just as men must work hard to acquire abundant pure water for their family’s physical health, every Catholic man must work hard to ensure the family culture nurtures and sustains the spiritual life of the family:
“Trickles” of Catholicism can’t sustain or cleanse – Small trickles of water cannot sustain the body. Likewise, the “trickle” of casual Catholicism is insufficient to sustain faith: millions of casual Catholics have simply drifted away into apostasy, do not consistently practice the faith, or only do the bare minimum of keeping the precepts. These casual Catholics are confused about basics of the faith (e.g. The reality of the True Presence, the nature of sin) and support all sorts of ideas which directly oppose Catholic Truth (e.g. abortion, homosexual “marriage”, etc.).
Small trickles of water cannot cleanse and refresh a body. Likewise, the “trickle” of casual Catholicism cannot lift a soul out of the sewage tsunami of the modern culture and cleanse a soul of his/her sins. For example, the majority of casual Catholics do not recognize the danger of eternal death due to their mortal sins; less than 1 in 5 Catholics receive the Sacrament of Penance even once year and only 1 in 50 receive the Sacrament of Penance once monthly.
A family needs to be flooded with Catholicism – The path to eternal life is to become a saint and every Catholic is called to sainthood; at the end of life, a Catholic will either become a saint in Heaven (mostly through the fiery cleansing of Purgatory) or become one of the damned in Hell.
Becoming a saint is unlikely for those who attempt to survive on a “trickle” of Catholicism because it is so diluted that it can get completely overwhelmed by the evil cultural tsunami Satan is using to kill souls.
Instead, to give souls the best chance of salvation, a Catholic father must flood his family with a lived Catholic family culture which inoculates the family against the poison of the modern culture and seeks to fill each soul in his care to the brim with the goodness, truth and beauty of God and His Holy Catholic Church.
Vigilantly protect the family culture from the flood of evil in the modern culture – Like a water well must be protected from filth and pollution so the water remains pure and healthy, a Catholic family culture must be protected against the filth and poison which seeps and floods in from the diseased and deadly modern culture:
The modern culture directly opposes God and promotes evil – The current secular culture has become increasingly polluted by a wide array of evils which: deny or denigrate God and His Holy Catholic Church, promote confusion about human sexuality, denigrate masculinity and pervert femininity, attempt to redefine the family, endorse all manor of the deadly sins, pits sexes, races, classes and religions against each other, endorse lawlessness and violence, and enslave vast numbers of humans through technology addiction.
The evil culture is infiltrating the family – This evil culture is like a sewage tsunami which floods over people through the ever-present media delivered through computers, TVs and most extensively through mobile devices.
Most damaging to children is “entertainment” (shows, music, social media, etc.) that is permeated with various moral poisons which are blatantly obvious or subtly embedded in apparently benign programming. In the past, it was difficult to reach and pervert children; now, the vilest of human defilement, like pornography, can bi-pass fathers and mothers and be delivered directly to any child with access to a computer/mobile device.
Children are also at grave risk in government schools which increasingly promote grave evils which are integrated into school curriculum, including increasingly perverted ideas about human identity and sexual behaviors and various other ideologies.
Extreme vigilance is needed to protect the family culture – No father would willingly give his children water contaminated with even small amounts of poison, let alone raw sewage. Instead, many protect water to an extreme degree installing water filters (e.g. reverse osmosis) to ensure drinking water is pristine and free from all contaminates.
In the same way, Catholic fathers must be hyper-vigilant to protect the family culture and hold back the flood of the evil culture from infiltrating his home.
How can a father build a Catholic family culture?
There are a variety of things that are necessary for establishing and maintaining a robust Catholic family culture:
Parents must embody the Catholic family culture – The family culture is established on what the father and mother believe and how they live. For a father to establish a Catholic family culture:
A father must strive for sainthood – Every Catholic father who wishes to lead his family to Heaven through the building of a robust Catholic family culture must first be committed to becoming a better Catholic Son. A father must first practice what he preaches and cannot credibly build a Catholic family culture unless he himself is striving for sainthood.
A father’s greatest impact on the Catholic family culture is to live a life of heroic Catholicism which the rest of the family can readily witness and seek to imitate. For more, see Becoming a Better Catholic Son.
A father must build Catholic unity with his bride – Going beyond his personal quest for sainthood, a husband must seek to Build Unity with His Bride for a robust Catholic family culture depends on the loving unity between the father and the mother which is Catholic in nature; if a father and mother are united in Christ through His Catholic Church, their joint Catholic faith and devotion will saturate the family.
A father and mother who are unified in the Catholic faith will commit and share in the hard work of doing the many things necessary to build and sustain the Catholic family culture.
Build Catholic family culture through togetherness – The unity of the father and mother in Christ is extended when husband and wife come together as one and share in the blessed procreation of children. A Catholic father and mother must strive to build togetherness in the Catholic family culture:
Satan seeks to divide and conquer – One of the widespread attacks of Satan is to divide and separate the family and a divided family falls apart (Mt 13:24-30; Mk 3:24-26).
The modern culture seeks to divide and separate the family through over-scheduling children’s activities (e.g. the cult of sports, extended school hours and activities), the pervasiveness of personal media, and the modern tendency of children to spend time alone in their rooms.
Rather than a cohesive family culture, the family devolves into a collection of blood relatives who happen to live in the same house.
Be motivated by being counter-cultural – With the modern society promoting all sorts of non-Catholic ideals and coercing people into conformance (e.g. speech codes, law-fare against “woke” resisters, etc.), simply attempting to live out the Catholic faith is mocked and attacked as somehow evil or out of date. Jesus repeatedly reveals that those who follow Him will be persecuted (Mt 5:10-12, 10:22; Mk 13:9; Lk 21:12; Jn 15:18-20, 16:33).
Sub-cultures which thrive are necessarily counter-cultural and do not conform to the norm. These cultures deliberately choose to live differently, oppose the predominate culture and form small, cohesive groups which detach and isolate from the outer culture.
To be Catholic in the sick modern culture is necessarily counter-cultural. Deliberately choosing to be counter-cultural as a Catholic can motivate for it is established based on the highest purpose of loving God and neighbor and it yields a protective mindset of spiritual combat; surviving and thriving in war is both necessary and motivating.
A Catholic father, mother and children must heroically live the God-given calling to know, love and serve Jesus Christ and His Holy Catholic Church and recognize and accept that being Catholic is counter-cultural.
Catholic culture is both taught and caught – To influence and pass along family faith and virtue requires much hard work but is heavily driven by how much time a family spends together; children learn in large degree by osmosis and spending time together is essential.
While deliberate education (“taught”) of children in the faith is necessary (see Major Habit 11 – Evangelize and Catechize the Family), much of the Catholic way of life is “caught”; the faith is passed along by millions of interactions between family members through observing and practicing how to love God and one another.
Spend lots of time together – Spending time together is not only necessary to learn how to live a Catholic life but it is fun and leads to happiness and health.
Each day and each week, the family should choose to spend lots of time together, not only in deliberate family time (e.g. meals, family outings, family meetings, etc.) but also simply often being in the same room. Turn off the media and do fun things together (talking, play, board games, sports, card games, reading, etc.) to build family bonds.
Spend time with God in prayer each day – Every Catholic is a child of God through baptism and part of the Kingdom of God on earth; ultimately God is head of His Catholic Church, including the domestic Church of the family. A Catholic family culture must constantly acknowledge the reality of God in the family by drawing close to Him.
Just like a healthy family has many personal conversations with each other every day, the family, and each member of the family, must have personal conversations with God in prayer.
Pay special attention to regular prayer including before (and after) meals, praying the Our Father and Hail Mary in the morning and at night, regularly praying a family Rosary and praying with children at bedtime.
Make daily conversations with God through formal and spontaneous prayer central in the family culture (for more, see Habit 22 – Lead Family Prayer).
Make Sunday the joyous pinnacle of the family week – After formally becoming children of God through the Sacrament of Baptism and further growing in the faith in the Sacrament of Confirmation, drawing closer to God on an ongoing basis through the Sacraments of Penance and the Sacrament of the Eucharist is essential (see Habit 34 – Bring Family to the Sacraments).
On a weekly basis, Sunday Mass and the Lord’s Day must become the pinnacle of the family week:
Make the Sunday Mass the highpoint of the family week – The “Eucharist is the source and summit” of Catholic life (CCC 1324) and the reception of the Sunday Eucharist is a Catholic’s greatest obligation and blessing (CCC 2042, 2181).
The Sunday Mass is the central part of a Catholic family culture and a father and mother must lead the family to the Sunday Mass with the highest level of honor and respect; for perspective, parents should lead the family to approach the Sunday Mass with a greater reverence, awe, honor and preparation that exceeds common “big events” in a family life (e.g. birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, proms, and even marriages).
Making the Sunday Mass a highpoint includes frequently receiving the Sacrament of Penance on Saturday, waking early and keeping the fast before the Mass, discussing the Mass readings, dressing in respectful “Sunday best” clothing, arriving early to pray, etc. The Sunday Mass should be seen by all as “a big deal.”
Rigorously keep the Lord’s Day – The 3rd Commandment is to keep the Sabbath Day (CCC 2168-2173) which has been brought to fulfillment in the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday and is rightfully called the Lord’s Day (CCC 2174-2176).
While the Sunday Eucharist is the pinnacle of the observation of the Lord’s Day (CCC 2177-2183), keeping the Lord’s Day (e.g. The 3rd Commandment) goes far beyond simply attending Mass.
The Lord’s Day is to look and feel different than other days as a day of grace and rest from work (CCC 2184-2188), including:
Suspend work – Rest and renewal by avoiding work including career work, menial work/chores and schoolwork; plan ahead and complete necessary work on Saturday or earlier.
Enjoy leisure – Spend time as a family doing things which bring joy, with a particular focus on spending time in Creation (e.g. walks, going to parks, relaxing in the back yard, etc.).
Spend time together – With busy modern lives, families can have a hard time synching up schedules. Making Sunday a day which every one is expected to “clear their schedules” and spend much of the day together helps ensure that at least one day a week the family has time to give glory to God and strengthen family bonds.
Visit friends and family – Sunday is also an ideal time to visit with family and with friends (e.g. staying after Mass for hospitality, gathering for brunch, etc.).
Study the faith – Clearing the deck on Sunday makes room for activities to grow in the faith including reading Scripture, studying Church history or art, going on pilgrimage (for example, to a nearby Cathedral or shrine, etc.).
Make Sunday dinner a feast – Because Sunday is a feast day, it is great to make the Sunday dinner special by taking the time to make a special home-cooked meal and gathering to feast around a well-set table; finding ways for all family members contribute builds camaraderie and lessens the burden on (typically) the wife/mother. Enjoy a leisurely pace to eating and extending the meal in conversation where each of the family members speaks and is heard and consider including time to read Scripture. Invite family and friends to join in the Sunday feast.
Avoid worldly activities – Much of the world denies or ignores the sacredness of the Lord’s Day. Be countercultural by avoiding organized secular activities (e.g. organized children’s sports, sporting events, going to an amusement park, etc.).
Avoid/minimize media – As discussed, much of modern media is corrupting and is often isolating. Be very cautious and limit TV both due to its worldliness and its tendency to isolate. Avoid watching anything that is violent, profane and does not help honor and draw closer to God (e.g. video games, movies, TV shows, worldly music).
Do not shop on Sunday – Keeping the Lord’s Day includes avoiding engaging in worldly activities not only for the spiritual renewal of the family but to also not support stores which requires others to work on Sunday (CCC 2187). Make it a priority to make any necessary purchases before Sunday; reusing to shop on Sunday (in person or on-line) sends a powerful cultural signal to the children.
Perform Works of Mercy – “Sunday is traditionally consecrated by Christian piety to good works and humble service to the sick, the infirm, and the elderly” (CCC 2186). Make it a regular habit to help those in need (see Habit 41 – Perform Corporal Works of Mercy).
Add a Catholic “+one” into the weekly family calendar – To build a more robust Catholic family culture, add at least one (“+one”) faith building/celebrating activity each week; for example: having a family bible-study; studying the Catechism; going to Adoration or Stations of the Cross; holding a regular Catholic movie night; reciting Morning and Evening Prayer; praying the Angelus; etc.
For more ideas on adding a Catholic “+one” to the weekly calendar to help the family grow in understanding and love of the Catholic faith, see Major Habit 11 – Evangelize and Catechize your family.
Build the family calendar upon the Liturgy – For two millennia, the Catholic Church has built upon the example of Jesus Christ and developed a holy way of living based on the Liturgy (ie. public work) of the Church. The public devotion of the Church includes daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual actions and which sets the rhythm and pace of Catholic family life. Plan ahead to include key celebrations (e.g. anniversaries of baptisms, confirmations, patron or special saints, etc.) into the family calendar. For more, see Habit 10 – Center your life on the Liturgy.
Make the home obviously Catholic – Across the history of the Church, cathedrals and parishes have been full of Catholic symbols (e.g. Crucifix, icons, stained glass depicting the life of Christ or the Stations of the Cross, statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and the Saints, candles, incense, etc.), which have played a central role in passing along the faith to each generation for 2000 years.
To build a robust Catholic family culture in the domestic Church consider:
Decorating with sacred art throughout the home – Incorporate many symbols of the faith throughout the home (e.g. Crucifixes, pictures and statues of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, the Saints, etc.) and add sacredness by regularly lighting candles at night/prayer times, etc. Add to seasonal festivities by decorating for Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.
Make sure each child from an early age has a crucifix, religious art, books, and a rosary for his or her room.
Make and use a family shrine – Set aside a special place in the home which is peaceful and can become a focal point of family and individual prayer and devotion; include a Crucifix, bible, statues and icons, religious medals, candles, rosaries, prayer books and cards, etc.
Build a Catholic family library – Have a special place in the home (perhaps the family shrine) to build a Catholic library which includes bibles, catechisms, lives of the Saints, Church history, etc.; be sure to have many books which are age-specific for children which help them recognize the beauty, truth and goodness of their Catholic faith.
Listening to sacred music – Turn away from solely listening to secular music (much of which opposes holiness) and begin to play sacred music (e.g. Gregorian Chant, classic Catholic hymns; classical Catholic orchestral music, etc.).
Listen/watch Catholic media – Faith-enhancing Catholic media is becoming more available; find media which can help the family grow in the faith (podcasts, courses, shows, etc.).
Regularly use Holy Water in the home – Holy Water is a sacramental which reminds of the waters of Baptism and is a real means of sanctification (CCC 1668); have a supply of Holy Water at home and regularly bless each person and things (e.g. computers, TVs, etc) with Holy Water.
Invite a priest to the home – Invite the parish priest to formally bless the family home to the service of God, especially during Epiphany; also periodically invite the priest to eat with the family.
Protect against infiltration of the poisonous modern culture – The modern media corrupts children. For example: children are routinely exposed to pornography as early as elementary school and exposure often occurs at elementary school when a child with a mobile phone shares pornographic images; “gender confusion” among children/young adults has dramatically increased based on promotion of various sexual identities in social media, etc.
For a father to build a robust Catholic family culture, he must be vigilant to eliminate/avoid the undermining influences of the perverted modern culture through media (see Habit 43 – Limit and Monitor Media) and bad influencers who oppose, subvert and seek to indoctrinate children (see Habit 44 – Guard against bad influencers) and the damaging effects of government schools (see Habit 40 – Send your children to faithful Catholic Schools).
This week’s questions
Here are a few questions to meditate upon:
How might I, my wife and children benefit if I more consistently work to build a robust Catholic family culture?
What ideas listed above could have the most immediate impact on my family?
This week’s commitment
Making a habit a reality requires commitment to concrete action. Here is this week’s challenge:
Reflect upon Habit 31 with your wife and identify a few ways to more consistently work together to build a more robust Catholic family culture.
Don’t forget to pray with the ECM Daily Gospel Devotional each day.
Consider listening to the EveryCatholicMan.com Gospel Devotional Podcast to be better prepared for Sunday Mass.
Daily Prayer
During the week, pray this short prayer, or one like it, to build a robust Catholic family culture:
Blessed Trinity, help me to understand my sacred duty to provide my family with a pure and holy Catholic experience in the home and help my wife and me build a robust Catholic family culture which honors You and secures my family in the Catholic faith. Amen.