The Catholic Church has had a long and winding history. At times the Church has thrived and been at the center of great wealth, military power, and political superiority. Other times have seen the Church poor, persecuted, or its members confused about doctrine. It has been long observed, however, that at every stage, be it a time of excess or a time of want, God provides exactly what we need. The nascent Church needed credibility and evangelical energy, and God provided St. Paul. The early Church needed to overcome persecution so she could freely grow, and God provided for the conversion of the Roman Emperor. There was Athanasius as a response to Arius, Dominic for eradicating the Albigensians, and, within a geo-political context, John Paul II for playing an integral part in defeating the atheistic communism of the Soviet Union.
In our current time, we are in the midst of an unprecedented corruption of marriage and the family. Our culture is profuse with the results of this corruption. Despair, crime, lagging school performance, economic stress, and so much more have been proven time and again to be exacerbated by the problems at the heart of the family.
But just as in other moments in the history of the Church, God has been providing. Famously, Sr. Lucia, one of the Fatima seers, prophetically wrote in a letter to Cardinal Caffarra that “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about marriage and the family.” God, in his providence, guided the Second Vatican Council to revive a theological truth about the family which was first articulated by the Church Fathers St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine—that the family is a Domestic Church.
In considering this truth of the Christian family, Pope St. Paul VI reflected that “this means that there should be found in every Christian family the various aspects of the entire Church” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 71). If we take this statement seriously, we begin to see how striking a claim it turns out to be. This means the family has an ecclesial structure, mission, and sacramentality. The implications of this could fill volumes and we need more theologians exploring just what this term “Domestic Church” means for the theology of the family.
One area where the structures of the Church could help inform the family is the unique role families have in raising and educating children. Again, from the Second Vatican Council, we read, “parents…are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators” (Gravissimum Educationis, 11). This teaching about the foundational role of parents doesn’t seem too radical a position to take. However, in today’s context, many parents of young children are asking, “How and what do I teach? Show me what to do!”
Recently, many different sociologists, demographers, and news agencies have started to notice a kind of Catholic revival taking place in parts of the United States and Europe. People are either embracing the faith for the first time or returning to familial roots with which they had little experience previously. This stands as a bit of a shift in the trajectory of trends in place since, at the very least, the mid-20th century when the world experienced a collapse of a Catholic ethos in the culture and in our homes. This means that, for several generations now, children have been growing up in homes where the faith wasn’t practically lived. Consequently, these newly fervent Catholics have neither their own experience, nor even the experience of their parents to fall back on when desiring to form a more Catholic environment in their own homes as they raise their own children.
Ordered to the Holy
Enter Father Carter Griffin and his recent book Forming Families, Forming Saints. Father Griffin is the rector of the St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington, D.C., and while he opens his book admitting that it may seem odd for a celibate priest to offer advice to parents on raising their children, his role as a seminary rector gives him keen insight into the task of forming human beings. The wisdom of the Church in these matters may be of some use to Catholic parents who are raising children. Additionally, he gives four reasons being a seminary rector prepares him to give advice to parents.
First, the seminary and the Catholic family have the same aims, to form disciples and send them out on apostolate. Ordination and Matrimony are two sacraments the Catechism describes as being ordered to the salvation of others. John Paul II called the family the “first seminary” for those called to the priesthood. Secondly, the family and the seminary have a broad approach to the formation of the person. The formation of the whole person is the aim of both institutions—the person as body, mind, heart, and soul. Thirdly, as Father Griffin states, “our increasingly secularized environment calls for more intentional family formation, the kind of formation that goes on in seminaries” (4). He points out that parents need to be ever more intentional about their mission as formators because in our media-saturated society, so many influencers have the attention of our children. Finally, he points out that seminaries can provide a “fairly clear benchmark by which to gauge what does and does not work in formation” (4). Since seminaries have as their task the formation of a vast variety of men from all manner of family origins and life experiences, the principles of formation used in the seminary can be a reliable means for many families to rely on in their efforts to form their children. For these reasons, Father Griffin makes the case that the seminary can give insight to families on how best to form their members into the kinds of missionary disciples that can go out into the world and transform the culture for Christ.
Having made his case that the mission of the family and the mission of the seminary are similar and that the seminary has a certain expertise in the training and sending of disciples, Father Griffin then proceeds to spend the rest of the book applying the four pillars of seminary formation to the life of the family. First systematically articulated in the 1992 post-synodal apostolic exhortation of St. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, and then later adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Program for Priestly Formation, the four pillars include the main elements of the makeup of a person: human, intellectual, spiritual, and pastoral formation.
This structure not only provides a comprehensive personal formation, but it also guides the structure of the book. Father Griffin divides the text into four sections, each dedicated to one of the pillars and within that section has chapters dedicated to the various topics—such as applicable virtues—within that pillar of formation. Each chapter is also similarly arranged with the bulk of the chapter dedicated to explaining the highlighted topic, then two “sidebar articles”—one which highlights additional voices on the topic, such as a saint, or a married couple’s testimony, and the second which gives very practical methods of promoting the subject of the chapter within one’s home. Each chapter concludes with a brief life of a saint who exemplified the topic of the chapter. This not only provides a saintly model to imitate, but also gives the reader a heavenly intercessor to call upon for aid. The consistent arrangement of each chapter makes reading easy and helps when the reader wishes to go back to review what was read previously. The reader is also then given the choice to read the text straight through or focus on a specific topic. I found myself easily locating the practical advice in a specific chapter when I was attempting to apply Father Griffin’s wisdom in my own household.
Homing in on Virtue
Right out of the gate I found advice I could incorporate in our home. The first chapter of the very first pillar on human formation was about the need for order in our lives and in our homes. Father Griffin convincingly describes the role order plays as the foundation for every other aspect of formation. Without order, one struggles to put first things first and lacks the necessary peace to build all other elements upon. But before one thinks that the author is recommending military seriousness, he argues that order, rather than eliminating spontaneity or fun, actually provides the preconditions to freely enter into play because one is unencumbered by the uncertainties of time or responsibility. In the practical sidebar, Father gives good advice on how to plan one’s time with very practical explanations on how to order and plan the various responsibilities of one’s week.
Each chapter is filled with nuggets of wisdom—for example, ideas to practice mortification in our daily lives. I have certainly considered getting up early to be a mortification, but never have I thought about going to bed on time as something I could do to put to death my unruly heart! And his practical advice on developing the virtue of prudence by cultivating in my children a sense of the moral life that is positive, a living for something rather than a practice of avoidance, sparked in me new ideas for encouraging discipline in my children. Finally, concluding the book with a chapter on hope was wise. So often, in my conversations with other parents in my parish, I discover we all carry a certain anxiety about our children. The world they are growing up in is so much more antithetical to the Christian faith than the one we grew up in. Parents need to be reminded that hope is a theological virtue we can ask for and live from as sons and daughters of God.
The text can get somewhat repetitive as Father Griffin follows a very strict pattern for each chapter. It can also be a bit overwhelming to see all the virtues listed and realize how much needs to be done in our families. A good recommendation would be to read the book more as a manual, where one first consults the table of contents, then picks and chooses what section of the book to read and implement in one’s family. If one wished to use the text for discussion in a small group of families, where multiple families or parents are meeting, the discussion questions included in each chapter may not be helpful, as they are decidedly directed at individuals or couples. The text itself, however, provides plenty of content for a group discussion and so one shouldn’t be dissuaded from using it in such a context.
Leave the Light On
We live in an age of moral decay, confusion of what it means to be a man or a woman, secularization, and abuse of the poor and marginalized. The structures which have upheld human society for ages appear to be crumbling around us. Men and women have given up on the hope of entrusting themselves to each other in holy Matrimony. Marriage and the family are considered by far too many to be a risk too great for a reasonable person to take. And yet, as parents of children growing up in this world, we have not been left as orphans (cf. John 14:18). God reminds us that our homes are churches as well, and therefore we have a divine blueprint for how to place our lamp on a stand so that it gives light to all about us. As domestic churches, families pray together, learn from one another, and serve one another. Gifted through his experience of forming priests to lead the Church, Father Griffin has aided us in reading that divine blueprint for forming the next leaders of the Domestic Church. “The night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Romans 13:12).
