Spaghetti, Shoelaces, and the Shema: Why Catholic Parenting is the Wildest Joy on Earth
Parents, beloved exhausted saints, you are in the thick of it—the kneeling, the shoelacing, the laundry, the asking for mercy and patience and forgiveness for the hundred millionth time, and the gentle utterly heroic attempts to teach a wild young soul about God by living a life leaning always homeward toward wonder and grace and the rare radiant moments when silence arrives and you listen for the music of the Lord with your children. You are not alone, you who duck beneath the tidal wave of secular everything and try, by your small daily acts of silly love and pointed correction, to raise tiny Christians whose eyes (one day) might see a little more clearly the wild and extravagant love that once broke into this world on a star-bruise night in Bethlehem, and never, ever left.
There’s something sharp and urgent in the way the old book says it, isn’t there? “Keep repeating them to your children. Recite them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, New American Bible). Teach the Shema, teach love, teach longing—these commandments, these soul-murmurings, they’re not meant to gather dust in the attic of memory. No, they are to be woven into bedtimes and breakfasts, shoe-tying and sorrow. Scripture casts parents not as bureaucrats of belief but as the first poets, prophets, and teachers of their children’s hearts; the home itself throbs as a sanctuary, a catacomb of grace.
St. Monica, dogged and prayerful, weeps ceaselessly for her son, Augustine, willing him to heaven on the arm-wrestle of her prayers and steadiness. Augustine’s Confessions is more a song of gratitude for his mother’s sturdy faith than a mere spiritual memoir. Families have been little monasteries for centuries—Benedict and Scholastica deepen each other daily, brother and sister vying not for worldly position but to see who could love and learn God’s heart more ardently. The Church Fathers, the mystics, they’d clap shoulders with exhausted parents today and say, stay sturdy—the slow drip of prayer and sacramental life remakes worlds one child at a time, even behind messy doors.
Vatican II knew this truth and said it loud: “Parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children” (Gravissimum Educationis, 3). The Catechism thunders with tenderness—parents are not temporary stand-ins but living fonts of faith, stewards of the domestic church (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2221-2231). St. John Paul II turned the pages back to the ancient song: “Their role is primary; it is also irreplaceable and inalienable” (Familiaris Consortio, 36). Our Church holds up the family not as mere machinery of the faith, but as messy, miraculous gardens where saints might spring.
And still here you are—parents bewildered, sometimes battered by the relentless tide of a culture run ragged with screens and shrill noise and the gentle mockery of things held sacred. But don’t buy the lie of your loneliness in the vocation. Mother Teresa and St. John Paul II, saints with battered hands and huge hearts, insisted over and over that it is essential for families to form consciences, to pray for one another, to be hope in the world. Pope Francis leaned into it: “God did not create us to live in sorrow or to be alone;” family is his joyful intent for us.
Choose to make prayer more rhythmic than the heartbeat; invite God into the daily spinning and spilling of life—the meals, the tired laughter, the awe when a child prays for the first time out loud. The sacraments are not ceremonies to be checked off but deep groanings of the Spirit that root the holy into the ordinary stuff of Tuesday afternoons. Bend low, whisper grace, live forgiveness, tell ancient stories with fresh wonder—the Eucharist shivers in the breakfast table as surely as in the sanctuary.
You, dear parent, are living a vocation grand as the sunrise, enormous as Easter joy, tender as a child’s sigh in sleep. The Church cheers not with judgment but with hope. Raising faithful children is not only responsibility—it is a privilege shot through with hidden whispers of holiness, a ladder reaching toward heaven rung by rung.
Go, then—grace is in your shoes.
References
United States Catholic Conference of Bishops. (2024). Deuteronomy, chapter 6.
Second Vatican Council. (1965). Gravissimum Educationis.
Pope John Paul II. (1981). Familiaris Consortio. Vatican.va.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. (1992). Vatican.va.
Cora Evans. (2019). Saints who were family.
Knights of Columbus. (2021). The Family Fully Alive.
National Catholic Register. (2024). Mother Teresa and St. John Paul II: A Look at Their Holy Friendship.
USCCB. (2013). Sacraments and Social Mission.
The Catholic Thing. (2021). Parents’ role in education.
Catholic Culture. (2015). The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and Contemporary World.
