Family life: The ultimate school of faith and holiness

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 25, 2025

I have been discussing how to draw others to Christ and the Church, but when it comes to forming people as committed Catholics who will devote themselves to doing God’s will throughout their lives, nothing beats the family. It never fails to astonish me how frequently Catholics tend to ignore this fundamental factor in the salvation of their children. The Catholic family is the ultimate school of holiness for any and all paths in life, and young people who start life without a solid formation in both love and grace suffer an enormous disadvantage when navigating the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. The family is by God’s own design not only the ultimate but the most intimate school of love, grace, trust in God, human stability, and well-being. And this sort of family begins with the marriage of two highly-committed and well-developed Catholics.

Perhaps the first and most common mistake we tend to make in forming families today is the separation of the idea of family life from the idea of romance. From the very first “date”, young men and women should be asking themselves whether the person with whom they are risking romantic involvement would make not only a good life-long partner but a good father or a good mother—and that begins with a shared Faith. Every marriage involves risk, but the odds of success diminish dramatically if the young man and the young woman are not at least consciously on their way toward becoming serious Catholics with a deep spiritual life that they can share. Parents are not only raising children for “success” in this world; far more importantly, they are raising children for eternal life and, indeed, so that the parents themselves will become ever more deeply oriented toward eternal life with God themselves.

Of course, every married couple starts out afflicted by some degree of immaturity, including spiritual immaturity. Marriage is—and is intended to be—its own school of holiness, its own union with the sufferings of Christ, its own path to obedience and closeness to God. Therefore, for the well-being of both spouses and children, a fundamental commitment to this vocation ought to be present from the first—or if not present, there is a fundamental urgency to adopt this understanding and commitment as soon as possible. This is especially important for the raising of children, as a married couple cannot communicate a deep relationship with Christ to their children if they do not have it themselves.

An ongoing occasion of grace

An authentic family life is, of course, an ongoing occasion for grace and growth into the larger and deeper family of God. Children must see in their parents a strong commitment to both the sacramental life of the Church and a familial and personal life of prayer and devotion to God. Fr. Patrick Peyton, the so-called Rosary priest, coined the now famous saying: “The family that prays together stays together.” Even more importantly, the family that prays together has a far greater chance of having each member of the family, and especially each child, develop his own close relationship with God, marked in time by his own patterns of personal prayer, and constant personal awareness of God’s presence.

Moreover, each family is a magnificent school of Christian service. As husbands care for their wives, and wives their husbands, and, if they are blessed with children, both husbands and wives care for and serve their children, so too must the children be gradually introduced to the responsibility of caring for and assisting each other, and even their parents. Along with regular daily prayer and the assignment of “chores” which introduce children to the responsibilities of family life, the constant attention of the older and more capable to the needs of the younger and less capable becomes not only part of the familial vocation of love but an outstanding training in selflessness and service.

Moreover, everything in the family should be done in gratitude to God and for His glory. Given the presence of both prayer and service in the family, this does not need to be done ostentatiously; it simply needs to gradually become a way of life—a habitual practice of putting others first as something pleasing to God and good for all. This grace-filled attention to the needs of others is not a matter of ostentation but an awareness of the imperative of being helpful to others. And families must not forget that this helpfulness applies not only to material things and material tasks, but to spiritual perception and spiritual growth.

Good parents, of course, will not over-burden their children with spiritual exercises, such that they become dreaded duties or impositions. At the same time, the “natural man” will frequently rebel in their children just as it has so often done in themselves. Here, as in every human task, spiritual structure, good example, and exemplary patience are the key elements in play. In addition to a deep participation in the life of the Church and the sacraments, many, including myself, have recommended the daily Rosary. Little children can even join in this practice, with considerable leeway in terms of their attention spans—and to the frequent delight of their elders.

Perhaps above all, children should be well aware that their parents spend time each day in prayer.

Education

Of paramount importance in raising a family is the proper Catholic education of children. It is almost always literally worse than useless to send our children off to secular schools, and even secular universities, which are in our days effectively designed to destroy in their students any belief in God, commitment to truth, or life of prayer. Fortunately, there are many options now for combining home-schooling with limited co-op schooling of various kinds involving deeply committed Catholics who regard knowledge of God to to be an important part of both education and formation.

The problem remains difficult, of course, for those who are on the lower end of the socio-economic scale, and far more could be done to ensure a deeply Catholic education to all children. But huge numbers of parents do have legitimate options commensurate with their means.

As the Catholic Church has taught, parents are the primary educators of their children. As such they cannot delegate that responsibility to the point at which they are no longer have effective control over it. Still less can they, in effect, wash their hands of it, as if the proper education and formation of their children is not one of their most fundamental responsibilities. It is horrifying to see nominally Catholic parents fail to raise their children through a deep experience of mutual love and learning rooted in Christ. To speak frankly, parents will have to make up for their failures in this area with constant prayers for their wayward adult children—or they will have to answer to God for their failure to fulfill their most important marital responsibility for spiritual care.

But I emphasize that the primary feature or experience of family life is not supposed to be a sense of restriction or burden. The combination of love, responsibility, mutual care and ever-deepening personal growth in the family is supposed to be inextricably connected with our love and praise of God, and our rejoicing in the gifts He has bestowed upon us. Where genuine love exists, a deep and genuine joy is also present. But in our secular world, it takes the sacrifice of a whole host of desires to form family members (including ourselves) so they can experience an ever-deepening joy and a secure recognition that this path has been the best path of all for their family life.

And so I must bring this back to the larger point of this brief series of posts on the ways in which we can attract others to Christ and His Church. For a good Catholic family life is by far the most effective of these ways. Indeed, a good family life reaches beyond the family members to attract and begin to form friends and visitors. If we fail in this through our own refusal or carelessness, we will have much to answer for. At the same time, if we awaken to our failures, we can make up for them be resorting to constant prayer for our adult children, begging Our Lord and our Lady to care for them better than we did ourselves. In any case, this question of family life lies at the core of the problem of how to draw people to Christ and His Church. The secret, in the end, is to love others properly, and to enable them to experience that love—which will be the final theme in this brief series on how to draw others back to God.

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