Published on Commonweal Magazine (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org)
'Be Who You Are and Be That Well'
Part 5 of 'Raising Catholic Kids'
Peter Leibold and Liz McCloskey November 25, 2013 - 2:39pm
[1]
When we were
dating as college students in the 1980s, we would occasionally have
philosophical discussions about our Catholic faith and about the
differences in how our families lived that faith. Peter was at Haverford
College, and he was seriously considering leaving the church and
becoming a Quaker. Liz was at the College of William and Mary studying
religion and history, active in the Catholic Student Association, and
fully committed to remaining Catholic. Settling how and where we would
worship together if we were to get married and have children was
terribly important to us.
We made a decision together (says Liz, who won the
debate) to remain in the Catholic Church. Our backgrounds were
different, but our Catholic identity ran deep, with Irish-Catholic roots
spreading in almost every direction. Liz’s uncle, a Jesuit, and Peter’s
cousin, a Franciscan, concelebrated at our wedding. We wanted those
roots to be the foundation for our family.
[Editors' note: Go here to see all of the stories [2] we've posted as part of the Raising Catholic Kids symposium.]
We started our two sons in a parochial school when they
were kindergarteners, but soon decided to move them to public school.
The tipping point came when Liz attended a school Mass on a Marian feast
day. The homilist told the children they should be perfect as Mary is
perfect. On the way home, Liz asked our first-grader, “What does it mean
to be a Christian? Does it mean to be perfect, or to be forgiven?” When
our seven-year-old son’s immediate response was “to be perfect,” we
knew the school was wrong for him.
Since then, we have home-schooled our three children at
certain times in addition to sending them, as appropriate, to public
school, a nondenominational Christian school, an all-girls Salesian
school, and an all-boys Jesuit school. Through it all, we have sought
environments and experiences that help each child grow toward
completeness, toward becoming the person he or she was born to be. That,
to us, is the essence of raising our kids in the Catholic faith. Our
job is to help them find a spiritual home in the church, a home where
their individual gifts, disposition, and way of engaging the world are
recognized and nurtured. Rather than “be perfect like Mary,” the message
we try to pass on to our children is St. Francis de Sales’s
encouragement to “be who you are and be that well.”
Aside from weekly Mass, we have tried to make prayer
part of our family life. In this regard, the Franciscan, Jesuit,
Salesian, and Benedictine spiritual traditions have provided
inspiration. Early on, we established a pattern of morning and evening
prayer, which admittedly did not always go smoothly—or at all. David
Robinson’s book The Family Cloister: Benedictine Wisdom for the Home (Crossroad)
helped connect our prayer with the practice of the liturgy of the
hours, and identified principles such as hospitality, community, and
growth that we wanted to emphasize in our family life. A visit to Assisi
brought the Prayer of St. Francis into our home (and his statue into
our garden). We offer family prayers and Celtic blessings on first days
of school, before trips, before athletic competitions, and when other
challenges arise. Liz’s Jesuit uncle celebrates informal home Masses
when the extended family gathers, and has done so for fifty years.
We have also made a point of not avoiding difficult
doctrinal issues. If, for example, one of the children asked us why the
church teaches that Mary was “ever virgin” yet also teaches that within
marriage there is a sacramental dimension to sex, we would explain the
doctrinal argument for Mary’s perpetual virginity, while also
acknowledging that, to us, the idea that Mary remained a virgin does not
seem very plausible. We have always been honest about our own doubts,
hoping that if our children continued to practice the faith, they would
do so thoughtfully and with humility. We wanted them to know that having
doubts and questions is not inconsistent with developing a mature faith
life. We hoped that by walking them through the arguments, we would be
raising children who, in the words of John Paul II, use reason and faith
as “the two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation
of truth.”
Given our own hesitations, some might ask why we have
raised our children as Catholics and not in some other Christian
denomination. Why not join a faith community where women can be priests
and gay and lesbian people do not need to hide their relationships? Why
did we continue in the Catholic Church after the pedophilia crisis
revealed that those in authority lacked the basic moral instinct to
protect children? Why have we stayed even when the church’s righteous
indignation over abortion has too often drowned out other Catholic
social teachings that are also rooted in a commitment to the dignity of
every person?
We can only offer a classic Catholic response: Faith is a
mystery. Whatever the church’s shortcomings—not so different from those
of any other religious institution—we want to pass on to our children
the Catholic mystical and spiritual tradition. Karl Rahner once said
that either Christians of the future will be mystics or they will not
exist at all. Raising our children as Catholics has meant hoping they
would blend a healthy skepticism with a feeling of being at home in the
mystery of the church. Part of that mystery is the frank acknowledgment
of the fact that the founders of the spiritual traditions that have
nourished our family were also profoundly imperfect people.
Each of our children seems to be identifying with the
spiritual traditions that best fit his or her own temperament. For
Brian—a twenty-two-year-old who has spent two and a half years away from
college traveling, volunteering in the national parks, living in
Alaska, and writing—the wisdom of the desert fathers, the simplicity and
passion of Franciscans such as Richard Rohr, and the searching social
criticism of Thomas Merton have been inspirations. He is not in the pews
every week. Instead, he says he plans “to take what’s sacred and
worthwhile in the Catholic Church and leave the rest. That probably
means I will not be a practicing Catholic. I’ll keep practicing though,
practicing something…trying to get somewhere.”
Collin—a twenty-year-old student and distance runner at
Georgetown University who is studying biology and theology—has found
particularly compelling the Ignatian values of “being men and women for
others” and caring for the whole person. He attends Mass and says he
continues to “identify as a Catholic.” Each year, he has inspired and
sponsored a fellow member of the track team to join the Catholic Church
at Georgetown’s Easter vigil.
Nora—a junior at an all-girls Salesian high school that
encourages its students to “Live Jesus”—is discovering her gifts and who
she will become. She says that because she has had a firm faith-based
upbringing, it is second nature for her to look to Catholicism in
everyday life: “My faith is especially prevalent when I find myself in a
situation where I need to make a difficult decision. As I continue to
grow, I will combine my strong personal convictions with the beliefs I
have grown up with to create an even stronger, lifelong faith.”
Our hope is that their Catholic spiritual roots run as deep for them
as they have for us. Like Karl Rahner, we believe that if our children
are to remain in the Catholic Church—or even the Christian tradition—it
will be because they have tapped into a particular vein of its mystical
and spiritual traditions and made it their own.[Editors' note: Go here to see all of the stories [2] we've posted as part of the Raising Catholic Kids symposium.]
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