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I can only imagine the anguish devout Catholic parents must feel when their child, be they adolescent or adult, moves away from God. They stand sadly by, hoping and praying that their offspring will return to the loving embrace of their heavenly Father.
Hope and prayer, the mainstay of our Christian Faith, is the only answer in such a situation, since we cannot force God on anyone.
I have noticed that people who receive a solid foundation in their Catholic upbringing eventually come back to their childhood faith despite many years, even decades, of religious estrangement.
This is exactly what happened to my uncle. He had been away for over sixty years, but at the eleventh hour, he reconciled himself wholeheartedly to God. As a child, he was pious. He once told me that at the age of eight, he had seen a beautiful lady in blue on a little hill at the back of the family farm; he had run towards her but could not reach her in time; she had disappeared. As he grew older, he forgot about this childhood episode, but remembered it near the end of his life. He wondered if he had been graced with a fleeting vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary when he was still an innocent child or if it was a dream…
Despite estranging himself from God and from the Church, my uncle had retained his love for Mary. Unbeknownst to most people, he kept a foot-high statue of Our Lady in his workshop in the basement. A few months before dying, he feared that the life he had chosen to lead was unworthy of heaven, so he would sit in front of the statue and pray to the Mother of God to help him. One day, he asked me to send him a priest, which I did. My uncle had time to confess six decades worth of sins and receive the sacraments shortly before his death. His childhood belief and love for the sacred had saved him in the end; he repented of his sins and came back to God.
My own husband came back to the Church after being away for a very long time. Like many people who distance themselves from the Church, it was due more to indifference than outright rebellion or unbelief. When one is surrounded by agnostics and non-practicing friends and family members, one’s faith is far from being nourished or encouraged. As it turns out, he started coming back to church after meeting me, a devout and practicing Catholic. He made the choice to come back to his Catholic roots. Fast forward to the present, we have built our marriage based on God’s love and commandments, and on the Church’s teachings, with no regrets.
In both cases, my uncle and my husband had been firmly grounded in their faith as children, by their devout mothers, and they had both been altar servers as young boys. Even when they drifted away, God was still in their souls, by dint of their baptism and their religious upbringing.
One must remember that baptism is an indelible, eternal seal. People who talk about “un-baptizing” themselves are not fully cognizant of revealed truth. Even if a baptized person rejects God, they still have the permanent mark of baptism forever etched in their soul. It is not something they can get rid of, neither in this life, nor in the next. This being said, the baptized must nourish their faith in order to maintain and increase the divine indwelling initiated at baptism, for it can be lost, and, through God’s grace, can be regained as long as there is still life in our bodies.
In fact, as Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P., a Dominican Friar of St. Joseph and teacher at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. explains:
One of the reasons why mortal sin is so horrific is that the gift of the indwelling which is given to us at our Baptism is destroyed. It is called “mortal” sin because it kills that Divine Life surging within us. It’s not that God dies, but it deals a death blow to God’s Life in us. But a good Confession will restore Divine Life to the soul.
This underscores the need to pray for those who have left the Church; in love and charity, we do not want our children and loved ones to separate themselves from their Creator. We hope that they will find their way back to God, through God’s grace.
While we cannot force anyone to believe in God, we can still hope and pray. Faith is a gift from God. Only God reads our soul. God will call each person to Himself in His own good time and will use any means He chooses. For some people, surviving an accident serves as a wake-up call; for others, meeting the “right” person is the catalyst. For others, it can be a work of art, a book, or a hymn, which lights a spark in their soul. For some, God intervenes directly, such as happened to the French atheist writer André Frossard, whose faith was given directly by God in one, illuminating moment when he entered a church for the first time. Whichever way God chooses, it is up to us to respond accordingly.
There is always hope. Parents must keep praying for their children, just like St. Monica prayed for her son Augustine, who became a saint and one of the Fathers of the Church. St. Ambrose of Milan, the holy bishop who helped and encouraged her, can also be included in the prayers for a return to the Faith. In other words, parents, do not lose hope; trust in God and remain steadfast in prayer. May God bless parents and instill in them the virtue of hope.
Photo by Tá Focando on Unsplash
