Growing up in Waterford, Michigan, north of Detroit, I was the eldest of ten children, writes Bishop Earl Boyea in the National Catholic Register. Dad worked in an auto factory. Mom ran the home. Despite what were limited financial means, we found our basic needs met. And our parents always prioritized prayer and Sunday Mass.
Looking back, Mom and Dad were always striving to foster a faithful “domestic church.” Although they would have been unacquainted with the term, it’s an expression that’s as venerable as Christianity itself.
“Henceforth, make your home a church in order to put the devil to flight,” advises the Church Father Saint John Chrysostom in his Homilies on Genesis, written in the late fourth century. Inspired by this ancient injunction, last month witnessed the Diocese of Lansing launch a Year of the Family.
Why? Because the family is the foundation of society. It is the first, best, and cheapest department of health, welfare, and education. It is also where vocations to marriage, the priesthood, and consecrated life most often take root. Hence, we posed the question: How can we best help our families grow in holiness and, thus, happiness?
The prayerful result is a new weekly catechetical series entitled Bishop Boyea’s Year of the Family. Every seven days, subscribers receive a short film, introduced by me, showcasing a family from somewhere across the Diocese of Lansing. Each featured family shares how they are striving to live the Catholic faith more fully in their daily lives. Throughout the year, the series will explore family prayer, education, liturgical living, hospitality, discipline, and works of charity.
So far, we have spent time with the Jobst family as they explain the importance of family meals that begin and conclude with prayer and are shorn of any mobile devices. We’ve met the Angus family, whose young son, Dillon, told us how serving others for the love of Christ has seen his “normal-sized heart” get “bigger and bigger and bigger.” Then there was the Vermeulen family who, heroically and cheerfully, have read from the Holy Bible every day for the past six years.
Importantly, none of these families sell themselves as saccharine saints. Real holiness is for real families with very real lives.
“It’s always a sacrifice to try and do anything as a family,” admitted Colleen, one of the featured moms, who describes the Vermeulen clan as a “very, very chaotic family of four high-energy, very talkative boys.”
“It doesn't matter if you're trying to eat dinner, if you're trying to get everybody to clean up a room, and prayer is no different,” said Colleen. “So, some nights we cannot make it happen. Not everybody is going to be quiet. We have to just do a really quick prayer and move on, because people need to get to bed.”
“But we trust that the Bible is the book that is inspired,” she added. “It’s the words that, in and of themselves, have the power in the Holy Spirit to transform and not just inform, and so, if we get close to them, the Holy Spirit will work.”
Amen, mom.
Already, we have over 50,000 subscribers to our Year of the Family, who each receive this weekly communication via text or e-mail.
But why have people signed up in such numbers? For that answer, we need to be “scrutinizing the signs of the times” (Gaudium et Spes, 4).
To borrow an apt expression from the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, there is most definitely a “Catholic moment” afoot. In the Diocese of Lansing alone, the number of Easter converts and adult baptisms is at a 20-year high. Sunday Mass attendance has been up year-on-year since 2020. Meanwhile, our diocese is currently blessed with 31 young men studying for the priesthood, with last year’s ordination class being the largest in nearly half a century. Elsewhere, enrollment in our Catholic schools is up by approximately 600 students over the past six years.
As one of my close collaborators commented recently: “Aslan is on the move.” Thanks be to God.
As our pastors often testify, the cultural quid pro quo of all this is that an increasing number of our families, in this present moment, are eager to pursue a familial life that is ever more convincingly and coherently Catholic.
This is particularly true of our young families. They seem tired of the attractions of today’s culture. Instead, they want to build wholesome, holy, and happy homes. As for teaching, they want meat, not milk toast.
The stumbling block, however, for many of those who desire to establish a healthy domestic church is that faith-filled experiences may have been lacking in their own youth. They aren’t always quite sure what a domestic church looks like, smells like, feels like, or sounds like.
Even when family breakdown wasn’t a factor, many grew up in homes — even Catholic homes — where the transmission of traditional Christian customs had broken down.
Hence the apparent desire to observe and imitate those families featured in our weekly Year of the Family films.
Reassuringly, our apostolic approach in these matters seems to find an endorsement in the public pronouncements of Pope Leo XIV. In an address to families delivered during last year’s Jubilee Year of Hope, the Holy Father urged those present to rediscover the authentic Catholic practices of previous generations as a path back to Christ-centered living, true joy, and resilience amid modern challenges.
The Jubilee, he said, invites people to return “to the faith we received from our parents, to the persevering prayer of our grandmothers counting the beads of the rosary, to their simple, humble, and honest lives which, like leaven, sustained so many families and communities.
Thus, said Pope Leo, modern families can rediscover that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that “in Him we find our true joy: the jubilation of knowing we are at home, in the place where we are meant to be.”
Life wasn’t easy for mom and dad, but they always tried their best for all of us ten kids. I’m grateful to this day for all that they did.
Today’s families also face many challenges. The wisdom of Jesus Christ and His Holy Church, though, remains more than sufficient to transform our homes into little churches capable of putting the devil to flight.
Our Lady, Queen of the Family, pray for us.
* To sign up for Bishop Earl Boyea's Year of the Family go to https://www.dioceseoflansing.org/family