No parent can guarantee the eternal fate of his child; every child must choose Heaven or Hell by his own free will. That being said, it is a parent's duty to do all in their power to form the souls of their children and instill in them the primary duty of knowing, loving, and serving God. This is our vocation.
We live in a culture that is utterly oriented to "knowing," "loving," and (above all) serving oneself. We are none of us immune to the wiles and zeitgeist of our times. Who among us could look one of the men of the Vendee, much less one of the early martyrs, in the eye and not feel utterly inferior? There is a reason that Holy Mother Church, before the dark times, used the early martyrs literally as measuring sticks of the value of an indulgence. They, like us, lived in a nihilistic and bestial society, utterly opposed to our Blessed Lord and His Holy Church. Unlike us, they actually knew what it means to be in the world but not of it. We must recapture some of their zeal for purity and detachment. All of us must struggle constantly against the flesh and the devil, and against a world that is saturated with sin. We may not always resist temptation, but we must always strive, and our children must see us strive, they must see us reject the bad and love the good.
No man can serve two masters, and children are extremely adept at sniffing out hypocrisy. If the life of our household is not totally centered on God, if we as Catholic parents do not make our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ the center of our family as He was of the Most Holy Family, if we make allowances and exceptions for the world, we will lose our children. They will see through the game, for game it is when we reduce our Faith to an external play that we put on to deceive our children into behaving. No amount of good intentions can cover for the lack of a true, pious relationship with our Holy Saviour and His Most Blessed Mother. No lecture on devotion to the Sacred Heart, no book, no video, can teach your Children to want to make sacrifices and offer them up to God. Only your fervent example can do that.
Parenting is, perhaps, the touchiest subject (excepting perhaps women's clothing) to discuss. Without good Catholic parenting, however, the Restoration will come to naught. It is our grandchildren, or at best, our children who will have a chance to live a holistically Catholic life, steeped in tradition – the kind of life many Catholics lived before the twentieth Century. We must give them that chance. It is especially hard for those of us like myself and W, who were not brought up in a trad household. We are left to find our own way back to the traditions that should have been handed down to us, before we can even begin to hand them on to the next generation. We must focus on the here and now, concentrating on giving our kids a love of Christ and His Holy Church, and we must always keep before our eyes the goal of every Catholic parent: to raise up Saints for God.
Posted on the Feast of St. Philip Neri, a.D. MMVIII
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