Relationships stabilized by love…and prayer…and grace

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 12, 2026

As part of his apostolic visit to Spain, Pope Leo took questions from young people at a gathering in Barcelona. One young woman whose father was imprisoned for attempting to murder her mother, and whose mother, after becoming addicted to drugs, was removed from her home, explained the situation and asked, “How can I forgive my father for almost leaving me without a mother? How can I truly be reconciled with God?” Perhaps nothing illustrates more clearly the disastrous impact which serious marital problems have on children. And yet huge numbers of children grow up without that protective atmosphere of love and peace which characterizes a stable family.

Indeed, one of the most consistent messages from the opinion-makers in the dominant culture today is that a stable family is irrelevant to human happiness, an attitude which (I suppose) is based on the mistaken belief that happiness depends upon each individual pursuing his or her immediate desires. Of course, even a moment’s familiarity with our own desires ought to be enough to teach us how wayward they can be, and how unlikely they are to lead to happiness unless they are formed and disciplined. Moreover, clearly it is the most vital purpose and indeed the proper character of family life to shape each person to strengthen and pursue only those desires which are good—good, that is, in the sense of fulfilling not our transitory attractions but rather the genuine purposes of our lives.

To discern these genuine purposes, rather than resorting to a long philosophical disquisition, perhaps we might instead resort to an old question from the Baltimore Catechism: “Why did God make you?” The answer is that “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.” Or as I seem to remember it from my first formal religious instruction, “to know, love and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”

Now note this well: For children, the most important element in learning this initial lesson quickly and easily is a stable family life rooted in Christ.

Human love and its limits

There is, of course, a natural goodness in the family, for it is within this reality that the human person was designed to develop and grow. For this reason, a stable family anchored in the love of the husband and wife for each other, and the parents and children for each other, is both the ordinary way and the best medium, if you will, for the conception, bearing, nurture and formation of children. At the same time, however, both the vagaries of human life and the waywardness of human persons render the human family very vulnerable. It is vulnerable both to circumstances beyond anyone’s control (such as death, illness, severe poverty, war, and depredation of all kinds, whether material or spiritual) and to the moral failures of the family members themselves, particularly of the parents, who are to be the formators of their children.

The young woman who presented her question to Pope Leo realized that her family situation had been abusive, and that she had been deprived rather obviously by her father of her mother’s love, or what we might describe less personally as the normal familial context of human growth and development. Under such circumstances, most of us would have either a strong “angry” gene, or a strong “worthless” gene. Moreover, we would very often have a tendency to look for happiness and security in all the wrong places.

Unfortunately, a great many children, even in otherwise stable, capable and supportive families, are raised by parents who simply pay little or no attention to God or Jesus Christ or the Church, and so grow up without even realizing that they have been spiritually abused. That is often not so much traumatic as spiritually stultifying, for the natural human elements which support marriage and family may well be largely intact. Nonetheless, the lack of respect for the supernatural dimension of human life takes its own toll—by making it easier to fall into sin or despair, and harder to realize the way out.

Spiritual healing

I do not wish to minimize the difference in moral responsibility between overt abuse and a spiritually tepid or ignorant failure to focus the family on God through Jesus Christ. But in most cases, the lack of a living Faith in parents is the cause of considerable harm to their children, and that lack of Faith also tends to allow the parents’ natural deficiencies, and certainly their particular sins, to play a far greater role in their children’s upbringing. (If even those of us who strive for life in Christ make significant mistakes in parenting, how much must these mistakes deepen and multiply without Christ’s help?) One inescapable problem is that the children do not have the chance to learn to trust in God, to recognize that God loves them and has given them purpose, and to understand that they can draw close to him even under the very poor conditions in which they find themselves.

This makes a huge difference to what we call quality of life, which at its root is spiritual. When we are estranged from God, even through little fault of our own, we are deprived of the opportunity to develop a relationship with Him, to understand the nature and importance of love, and to rely on His grace to make up for so many deficiencies in the circumstances of our lives. The non-believer will scoff at this, perhaps even pretending to be offended by a worthless God who does not immediately set things right. But that is not the experience of those who suffer trials with an attitude of closeness to God, and certainly not the experience of those who, through their own openness, are touched by the grace of the Cross. To assure a troubled soul of the certainty of God’s love, and to demonstrate that love coursing through our own actions, is the best sort of lifeline for friends in need and especially for our own children. And it is the lifeline most likely to give those who have been neglected or abused new hope for their own fullness of life.

In the last analysis, God can always do more for our children, not to mention our friends and acquaintances, than we can do ourselves. Our greatest sin, therefore, is to undermine God’s own efforts to touch and heal our children, other family members and friends. Rather, we ought to mirror God’s love and generosity, especially in the home, and especially with those whom we have a God-given mission to form. Our greatest mistake is to fail to recognize our own spiritual need and and so fail to allow ourselves time for prayer and worship, so that we can grow in our ability to cherish our spouses and raise our children well. As both spouses and parents, we will certainly make mistakes, and some of these will also be sins.

But our greatest possible failure occurs when, through our own spiritual indifference—that is, our own destructive example—we fail to open our children, and even our spouses mutually, to both the love and the interior growth that come to us by prayer and grace. For the best way for all of us to become capable and even rich is through a genuinely human love regenerated and even divinized by Jesus Christ, through the Gospel and the sacraments of His Church.