The home plays a key role in discipleship, sanctification, and holiness and the first and best teachers of children are their own parents who pass on their faith.
The role of the family in our faith is so important that the Catholic Church describes it as the domestic church.
The smallest and most natural gathering of believers is a husband and wife and their children.
Most Catholics began their faith formation in their own home with other family members.
The Church in miniature:
There are different levels of the Church:
In our own time, in a world often alien and even hostile to faith, believing families are of primary importance as centers of living, radiant faith. For this reason the Second Vatican Council, using an ancient expression, calls the family the Ecclesia domestica. It is in the bosom of the family that parents are “by word and example . . . the first heralds of the faith with regard to their children. They should encourage them in the vocation which is proper to each child, fostering with special care any religious vocation.”
Catechism of the Catholi Church 1656
It begins in the family:
The home can be a little sanctuary:
Start in your own home:
One cannot fail to stress the evangelizing action of the family in the evangelizing apostolate of the laity. At different moments in the Church’s history and also in the Second Vatican Council, the family has well deserved the beautiful name of “domestic Church.” This means that there should be found in every Christian family the various aspects of the entire Church. Furthermore, the family, like the Church, ought to be a place where the Gospel is transmitted and from which the Gospel radiates.
Pope Paul VI, Evengelii Nuntiandi, December 8, 1975
The building block of society and of the Church:
A foundation built on love:
And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once, with all his family. Then he brought them up into his house, and set food before them; and he rejoiced with all his household that he had believed in God.
Acts 16: 31-34
The beauty of the family unit:
The heart of God revealed:
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
What is a Catholic?:
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