May is a time of graduation for many families. Kindergarten, eighth grade, high school, college. This month’s weekends are often filled with ceremonies and parties celebrating these milestones. Viewing these events through a parent’s lens can fill us both with pride in our children’s accomplishments and sadness as they grow older and further away from us. 

 

Parents know that our children are meant to become self-sufficient adults, but as Catholic parents, we have an ultimate destination in mind for our entire family: Heaven. How do we get ourselves, our spouses, and our children there? 

 

The Church teaches that, as Catholic parents, we should form our family into a domestic church. “A church in the home,” Pope St. John Paul II described it during his 1995 apostolic journey to New York.

 

He characterized this home church as one where, “God is honored, His law is respected, prayer is a normal event, virtue is transmitted by word and example, and everyone shares the hopes, the problems and sufferings of everyone else.” With these words, he described a beautifully ordered way to achieve holiness and the eternal banquet! In fact, he continued on to describe this way of living the domestic church as a “return to the roots of human development and human happiness!” 

 

Still, as families we struggle with time, priorities, money, emotions, dinner — the list goes on. Each family lives the domestic church with differing areas of success and shortcoming. 

 

In holding up this characterization of domestic church to my own family, my heart alights on the phrase “prayer is a normal event.” I am convicted! As a person who prays daily and tries to maintain daily Mass going, I humbly admit that prayer in my family “as a normal event” has gotten harder as we have grown older. Here is one example.

 

Fondly, I recall my son’s bedtime routine that included bath, brushing, footie PJs, story time, and prayer time. Routine helped sleep to come eventually to him. And what is prayer but routine and habit? The “habit of being in the presence of the thrice-holy God and in communion with Him,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (CCC 2565). 

 

Our family’s nighttime prayers proved powerful. When my son was five or six, he had nightmares that would leave him terrified. In an act of inspiration, my husband and I focused his attention on a small St. Michael the Archangel statue in his room. We began praying with him the prayer to St. Michael:

 

“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits prowling about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

 

One morning, we discovered St. Michael on the floor with his sword broken off. None of us doubted the battle that was fought on our son’s behalf as his nightmares gradually receded. 

 

At some point, though, between elementary and high school, the habit of us parents leading our family’s nighttime prayer ended. Evening prayer has now become hit and miss for all of us. As a family, we need to work on this. There is no graduation from the habit of prayer!

 

I encourage your own self-assessment on the health of your domestic church. This assessment can be done whether your family is under one roof or many. 

 

Repeating Pope St. John Paul II’s words: the domestic church is one where “God is honored, His law is respected, prayer is a normal event, virtue is transmitted by word and example, and everyone shares the hopes, the problems and sufferings of everyone else.” 

 

Which phrase convicts your family to build a holier domestic church?