By Sue Schulzetenberg
The Visitor
8/27/2010

The Catholic Church stresses that parents are the first and most important educators of their children.

However, educating children about the faith can be challenging for many parents.

Church resources can be difficult to understand, and parents and their children live busy lives, says Bill Huebsch, director of the online Pastoral Center at Twenty-Third Publications and author of numerous books.

Huebsch, a member St. Mary Parish in Mora, will provide tips and insights for overcoming these challenges during a talk at 7 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Holy Angels Performing Arts Center of Cathedral High School in St. Cloud. The event is free and open to the public.

All Are Welcome What: “What Does It Take to Help a Child Grow Up Catholic?” Presenter: Bill Huebsch When: 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 15 Where: Holy Angels Performing Arts Center, Cathedral High School, 312 7th Ave. N., St. Cloud For more information: Call Brenda Kresky at 320-251-0111. This is a FREE event.

Huebsch spoke to The Visitor regarding his upcoming presentation and how all Catholics can be involved in the formation of younger generations.

Q. Can you give a brief summary of what you will be speaking about Sept. 15?
A. I’m going to open with a conversation about what role parents should play in the faith formation of their children. Then I’m going to talk about what the church itself expects.

[Church] documents have been very clear that parents play the primary role in the formation of children. My point is, yes, that’s true, but as we all know, parents don’t actually play the primary role; their parish does. My question is going to be what can we do with that? What are the possibilities of that? How can we help shift that so we have parents playing a greater role?

I’m going to say a little about how we got into this situation. In the 1950s, parents did do the formation of their own children. In the Catholic home at the time, we orientated ourselves around the parish. We had holy water jars on our banisters and we had statues glued to our dashboards. We lived in sort of a Catholic culture.

That has changed, so there isn’t a Catholic culture in the home. Many parents aren’t active in their parish. And they drop their children off at religious ed. and hope against hope the child will get something out of it. We have to partner with these parents to coach them to form their kids.

Q. Can you talk  more about why this is so important?
A. Every leading indicator of what makes an adult Catholic active points to parents. A few Catholics come in as adults. [But] almost every adult Catholic is Catholic because their parents formed them in some way. . . . The idea is to reorient ourselves around this.

The reason to do this is very simple: we hold the secret to eternal life. We Catholics have a special understanding of that so let’s pass that on to our kids. It’s promised to us by Jesus. He said, “I give you the secrets of the reign of God, the secrets of eternal life.” That secret is very simple: If you’ve ever been in love or in a close friendship, you know we have to die to ourselves in love for others. You donate yourself in love and that’s the secret.

How you make amends when you go wrong, how you celebrate it in community at the Eucharist, how we celebrate it in marriage at matrimony — all of the sacraments orient around preparing us to do that.

Q. How can parents of grown children or individuals without children help young people grow in their faith?
A. The Sunday liturgy is the most important thing we do together as Catholics; the second most important thing we do is feeding the poor and reaching out to the sick and the rejected and creating the community: That’s caring for the body of Christ. The whole parish models this for these kids.

On their own, my parents couldn’t have raised me Catholic. It had to be Lenten devotions of the parish, the visiting after Mass, the parish dinners. It was parish life. That takes the whole parish community. No parents could do this without the parish.

Help create the community that the kids are going to grow up in. That’s the community you’ll remember as an adult. It’s building the parish community that the child will flourish in.  It’s being at the liturgies, contributing and coming to the events.

Q. What can parents do if their adult children turn away from Catholicism?
A. Keep loving them. Keep welcoming them back. Don’t condemn. In the end, it’s a heresy to think that we give people faith. Hold on to the belief that God is acting in their lives. God never, ever walks away from someone.

For years, I was involved in Central Minnesota TEC; I would see young adults who hadn’t been active in the church for a long time and here they were. The Holy Spirit was touching their heart again, and who knew the timing of that? Even if the child drops away, the parents shouldn’t be hopeless. Keep the invitation there and the welcome. Keep forgiveness running. Then you have a chance of that child ultimately coming back and seeing in you the faith that they hope to have for themselves.