Train your child (and self) in the way of the Lord.

Fathers are the lightning rod for faith. Churchgoing fathers keep the faith alive for they create faith-practicing kids. What use is a dad if not to lead the children to holiness? To heaven? This is a fundamental catechism that parents should know. You create your child's body, but God entrusted you with their soul. Where it ends up, the parents will witness and suffer or rejoice over it as they have been the main contributors to it. This was vividly described by Gloria Polo in her hell-and-back testimony.

The danger of non-churched fathers is they create lost children. The children of the speaker, mentioned above, stand to be lost and angry and prone to rebellion to various institutions.

A parent depriving himself and his children holiness follows this decline, writes Fr. Ivan Kolodiy in the Philomena newsletter: if we allow the supernatural life to languish, it doesn't assert itself (unlike bodily starvation). It simply yields to the starvation and that yielding is progressibe...the less spiritual nourishment we receive, the less desire.

What do we do if the parent in our family or the husband deadens instead of enlivens the faith? This is why spiritual direction, frequent confession and formation is critical. One cannot give what one cannot have. And if you only give the pittance--physical provisions--you might as well not start a family in the first place.

One dad I know was so preoccupied with making money and at being a great businessman, that he didn't know he was channeling such a deadening energy to his children, particularly the eldest who had turned to acting up to express his dismay at his dad's values. His dad, not knowing any better, just tried to pile on forceful threat after forceful punishment to make the son conform to being the A-1 kid he wanted. No one in the family was able to make the change needed until the husband and wife went to a Life in the Spirit Seminar and discovered they were living in such terrible dysfunction. because they do not have the Lord in their lives as number one. When they revised their values and lifestyle, the family dynamic improved and now they all minister to other families together.

The dad was so in a materialistic mode and thought he was doing right because he was a provider. But research after research show, how better it is if the dad had become the true spiritual leader in his family, not simply on his own assessment, but by being under spiritual direction, being part of a community and a constant learner of the Word and a partaker of the Sacraments, especially Communion and Confession. It is a good dad who leads the family in prayer especially the rosary. It is a deadbeat husband and dad who lets his wife do the prayers alone, which is as worse as an absentee dad chronically away for economic or physical reasons.

People deprived of the knowledge and relationship with God, which is Love of the unconditional caliber, is a tragedy beyond compare. To have the faith, and not be nurtured by those who supposed to safeguard it, means that they have lost that primacy and it would be better off to seek it. What use is a parent who advocates abortion like the mothers with young daughters who was told that they are their for women's rights.

The child growing up in this error, and commits the same mistake around it, will cause further punishment to the influencer in eternity. It is no joke that "it is better to be thrown to the sea with a millstone around the neck than to lead these little ones to sin".

People who cause scandal and discouragement to those who walk in the faith are to be shunned by the ones they attack for their own salvation.

As to parents who are suffering now from whatever antics of their children--feminism, homosexuality, serial marriages, rebellion of rightful authority, addictions--will see with discernment that it is related to their own mistakes. It is not rocket science but logic. One child is anti-sanctity of marriage because the parent was one as well; a flirt, because the parent encouraged it, one is a workaholic because the parent modeled it for them, etc.

It becomes a challenge of the child to break free from the bad influence of the errant parent, which becomes easy as long as you realize that God should have more influence over you than any person, and guess what? It is a mortal sin--against the first commandment--if you let another person over God influence your life.

This means something crucial. You have to form yourself, as soon as you receive reason, to godliness, so you know the wheat from the chaff, so if you belong to an incorrigible dynasty like the murderous Ampatuans or the plundering Marcoses, you can decline their general direction.

So there, in a nutshell, fight for your faith because your soul requires it.

A man I visited in a nursing home was recently baptized into the faith, and though his stroke-slurred speech, he proclaimed about the joy in getting the Eucharist, "Everyday is like a party in my heart!" He then exclaimed that before all he had in his heart was "money, money, money". (His speech was slurred that I almost heard "mourning, mourning, mourning". But it is true! Money is emptiness.) Despite his businesses, plantations, companies which later ended up failing, his avarice for money gave him ultimately nothing. Only the Lord would satisfy and now, poor as a rat, he thinks of his past ambitions as a child's attraction and rejoices so much in the Lord who completes him. I am happy for him; many other patients in nursing homes lose their minds before making that conversion to the Lord that they would wander in the halls prodding strangers and nurses to do their taxes, to check their millions, to call their accountant. Their mind has been frozen in where it has been fixated.

There is no shortage of worthy role models for men--God the Father, St. Joseph, Jesus. There are women counterparts too. If you are a child (or any person for that matter) and your conscience alerts you to the lukewarm, wishy-washy or outright swarthy morality of an elder figure, excuse yourself, warn others and truly have no part in their counsel. One mother has never learned to say sorry. The family culture is content in the shadows; it is stagnant.

Faithful people or those desirous for life-giving guidance will seek a priest as spiritual director, not just anybody.
Dads, moms, wisdom figures will only be the blessing they want to be if they are connected deeply to a source other than their own limited, liberal or church-suspicious cred. Be it for their own souls or for their children's, they should love their souls enough to see the full flourishing, not the tragic failing.