Parents: Prepare Your Children for Eternity

PARENTS FOR ETERNAL LIFE

So the litany of secularism goes on. Its most principal target is our children.

This then brings us face to face with the gravest duty of believing Catholic parents. They must be convinced that their primary responsibility as parents is to prepare the children that God gave them — for eternal life.

Yes, parents are the primary teachers of their children in all that pertains to the children's lives here on earth. But that is not all. That is not primary!

What is primary? The parents' most fundamental duty is to prepare their children for eternity.

• Parents must, and the word is must teach their children from birth on that God created us to know, love and serve Him in this life in order that our souls may reach heaven.

• Parents must teach their children that everything in this life is to be only a means of leading us to our heavenly destiny.

• Parents must teach their children that while everything in this life is intended by God to lead us to heaven, not everything is to be used in the same way

— Some of the persons, places and things in our life are to be enjoyed,
— Other persons, places and things are to be endured,
— Other persons, places and things are to be removed. Why? Because they lead us to sin.
— Finally, there are persons, places and things that God asks us to surrender. It is an invitation from God to sacrifice what we like in order to express our greater love of God.

• Parents must teach their children that they have a fallen — I like the term "falling" — human nature. We are not naturally prone to do what God wants but what we want.

• Parents must teach their children that if they are going to cope with their natural tendencies to pride and lust and anger and envy and greed, and avarice and gluttony — they need the constant help of God's grace.

• Parents must teach their children that to obtain the necessary light and grace to know God's will and the necessary strength to do it, they need to pray and receive the sacraments.

All of this is locked up in the simple statement that parents are parents for eternal life. God gives them children in this world, but not for this world.

Parents, in God's plan, are to conceive and give birth to, and nourish and educate their children for life after bodily death. After all, the only purpose that God has in having parents here on earth is that they might raise families for everlasting life in heaven.

By Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.