Notes from the 2016 Notre Dame Symposium 1: Parents Matter

CHRISTIAN SMITH & JUSTIN BARTKUS:  "From Generation to Generation: How American Catholic Parents Today Approach Passing on the Faith to their Children"

Parents are the biggest influence on American teenagers. The predicted religiosity of young adults can be identified by age 15. Parents who attend religious services regularly have teens whose religiosity is stable- high. Other factors don't have quite as much effect. The most powerful factor is parents who talk about faith at home.

Studied 245 parents 73 were Catholic from upper, middle & lower classes. Personal in depth interviews

The household is a culture in miniature a meaning-making project. It is fundamental to children's existential initiation. It is permeable to other cultures - sports, faith, etc.

Parental transmission of faith is a cultural project
Catholicism is a lifelong commitment
Success happens when maturing children see that Catholic commitment = success.
Failure happens when maturing children see that Catholic commitment = failure.

Children must perceive intrinsic value to religious commitment. They easily see inauthenticity when they see gaps in modeling or elevation of other priorities.

Parents are "arch-celebrities" in their household by power of personality practices and way of being - they model & generate culture of household. they are the dominant influence.

Many Catholic parents outsource religion to the parish program.

Interview with mother of 3 teens who is personally devoted to faith.. has the intention to transmit, but her religiosity is thin. So sends them to religious ed.

Any household that intends to transmit faith has to have

1. narrative of motives
2. degree of conscious intentionality
3. parents supplying religious content
4. enacted interpretation of intended religiosity at key moments in family life

Common motives:

• Dogmatic
• Individualistic
• Morale boost
• Ethnic -family identity 
• Formational
• Moralistic

Many are inarticulate/ineffective

Key question is there gap between motive and commitment?

When parents reflect on their motive there is coherence
Frequent, repetitive and participatory

Religious content takes several forms:
Practices
Relationships
Volunteering

Institutions and programs are secondary to parental modeling.
Failure is not because of bad programming but failure of parental modeling
Effective households reflect inter penetration of church & home
Religious content is not in itself enough

Enacted interpretation:

• Conversations in household
• Parental explicitness about transmission
• Outward manifestation of parental conversion
• Substantial processing of religious motives in life experiences I the household

Spiritual personality of parents is single most powerful force. Possible only if they intend transmission

Parents and churches both need to understand centrality of parental role. Faith cannot be seen as belonging only to parents.Parents are Gatekeepers, Sponsors, Interpreters of Catholicism to their children

Q & A
Who is the carrier of Catholic faith now? The old carriers in our culture don't carry any more. The challenge is for parent and churches to be reflexive now.

Empower parents to share faith, don't shame them.


NEXT NOTES: 2 - "Digital Media and the Liturgical Capacity of the Christian"

It's Simple: If Parents Want Kids to Be Catholics, THEY Need to be Catholics!

Marc Cardonarella boils it down to its essence: kids are disengaged and leave the Church after Confirmation because many parents are doing it wrong. Expecting the local parish religious education program to turn their kids into lifelong Catholics in one hour a week (or a Catholic school to do it when the parents don't practice the faith at home) is futile.

In his new book,  Keep Your Kids Catholic: Sharing Your Faith and Making it Stick, Cardonarella, a parent and religious educator who himself was missing from the Church between Confirmation and late young adulthood, lays it on the line for parents:  "Your actions are an education for your children. How you live your life will significantly influence who and what  they become. So, if you want them to be religious, you need to be religious yourself."  This is the heart of what we need to say to parents.

Cardonarella doesn't stop with saying it. He leads the reader through a process of self-evaluation of relationship with God, prayer life, liturgical life - and more - and lays out a plan for parents to learn and grow in the faith.

His analysis of how typical catechesis is failing to engage young people, based on the wisdom of Cardinal Newman, hits at the heart of how that, too, needs to change. In Chapter 3, he notes:

Teaching that come solely from a textbook creates a merely notional assent, passive involvement, and a distanced and indifferent religion. Thus, students' lives are never touched by the real and personal. They remain unchanged by their religion because the religion they experience is bland, weak and unspectacular....Human persons are moved to action not by intellectual abstractions, but by personal influence and powerful example, as well as by engaging their imagines with the concrete realities of life. When we interact with others personally, we open ourselves to deep encounter and change. Without that engagement and interaction, Catholicism is just a bunch of words and listless actions. To some, it will be logical, reasonable, even interesting, but will remain just one theory among many. Faith itself becomes notional - abstract and distant - rather than real.

 So, beyond laying out a path for parents, he challenges religious educators to reconsider how they are delivering the faith.  Recently he presented a webinar on just that topic:

Keep Your Kids Catholic is a real page-turner, filled with stories, personal witness and a concrete plan for change. It is must-read for parents, but also for religious educators.  Highly recommended.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy at no charge in exchange for an honest review. 

Helping Young Children Appreciate the Mass

All of us have seen families who struggle to keep their young children "under control" at Mass. It's not pretty. Although this is understandable with children from birth until age 2-and-a-half, setting an early basis for a child's full participation at Mass not only helps them get through the experience with fewer tears, it can yield a big payoff when the child is older.

  photo from http://catholickey.org/ )

I have seen children as young as three who can lisp Mass responses, sing acclamations and familiar songs, and stand, sit and kneel when everyone else does - all because their parents participate in the Mass and expect that their children will too. These are the same little ones who remain reasonably quiet during the homily, perhaps while looking at a children's Bible or board-book about the Mass or the saints or while playing quietly with a Jesus or saints doll.

Sadly, most parishes are not helping parents with this piece. Interaction with parents of young children after baptism is one of the most-neglected areas of ministry in parishes today. The basis for young children's participation and understanding of the Mass actually begins with liturgical catechesis for youth, young adults and candidates for marriage. If parents participate fully in the Mass and make the effort to teach their children to do so as well, it makes a difference - for the experience of both parents and child.

Failure to do that is possibly one of the biggest reasons families don't go to Mass. Although we tend to blame it on the culture, sports and other distractions, many parents admit it's because they don't want to fight with their kids about going to Mass. Of course Mass is "no fun" when you sit on the sidelines and only marginally understand what is going on and why. Some families go anyway, but don't seem to be fully present. As a cantor facing the assembly, I have seen quite a few families in which neither parents nor teens sing, say responses or do anything other than sit, stand and kneel, all while staring straight ahead with a bored expression. (Happily most at least do the Sign of the Cross, say the Our Father and participate in the Sign of Peace.)

More than simply helping kids to participate, though, helping then to make real-life connections so they understand the meaning of the Mass is even better. (File this under things I wish I had understood better 25 years ago!)

Dan Gonzalez, a father of two, creator of The Mass Explained app for iPad and author of The Mass Explained blog has just posted this great explanation of what he is doing with his own children. He has also posted the priest paper doll for learning about vestments, the first of 10 art and activity lessons for young children on the Mass, to which he will add to each week of the summer.

http://www.massexplained.com/kids-mass-crafts-3/ 

If you think about it, Jesus didn't just suddenly walk into the Temple at age 12. He had been raised to participate in worship by Mary and Joseph. When my own boys were young, they went to Mass every week, and learned to sing and respond because I helped them follow along in the missalette and hymnal. While they may not go to Mass as often today as I would like, now that they are 29 and 31, when they do, they participate fully - because that was what was expected of them from the beginning. That's how it works.

The Wisdom of Catechists

Yesterday at my parish, we had a morning-long meeting.  About 25 of us were present - for a time of prayer and sharing. It was a time to bring catechists from both the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking cultures together -  most present preferred to speak Spanish at their tables, but there were two tables of us consisting of bilingual Hispanics and some Anglos.  It was truly a case of discerning the wisdom of the community - and there was a surprising amount of agreement.

After some quiet personal reflection on how well we were doing with such things as understanding, living and sharing the faith and listening to our students, we were asked to engage in small group process on two questions:  "What do you need to work on?" and "What do you need?"

For the first question, the two goals named most often were obtaining a better knowledge of the faith and learning who our students are as young Hispanics living in the American culture. Scripture study and a better knowledge of the Catechism were named for the first. On the second point, we named a real need to listen, to explore and to understand the variations among our students (Spanish-speaking at home or not, born here or not, first or second generation here, etc.) We agreed that most of our students prefer Spanish Mass and when they know their prayers it is more often in Spanish, even when students are fluent in English. The difficulties they described pretty much can be summarized simply: not all students in their classrooms participate in the two cultures in quite the same way. Several of the Hispanic catchists very eloquently named that it was important to show teens that faith is not just fiction.

As to the second area - what they need, catechists asked for Bible study, formation, parent meetings and parent formation or more closely mandated parent contact with the catechists. It was suggested that perhaps we have a parent conference night when catechists can interact with the parents. There was an energetic discussion of the failure of parents to assist catechists - and the prevalent attitude that parents seem to have that they are relying on the religious education program to form their children in faith - while most families fail to practice that faith, do not go to Mass, or teach children the prayers they should know. The consensus was strongly that more parental involvement on all fronts is needed - and that perhaps more contact with parents or parent formation would help.

Strange, but this sounds a great deal like what parish directors of religious education (a group I am normally  with on a more regular basis through regional cluster meetings)  name whenever they are asked what they need: formation for themselves, and strategies for more catechist and parent formation.