Parents’ Sacramental Program

“Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children.  They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule.  The home is well suited for education in the virtues.  This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery-the reconditions of all true freedom.  Parents should teach their children to subordinate the ‘material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.’  Parents have a grace responsibility to give good example to their children.  By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them.”  (CCC 2223)

At baptism, parents ask the church to receive their child as a part of the family of God and commit to their child to help him/her become part of the community of faith.  Parents have the responsibility to “make it their constant care to bring up their child in the practice of faith.”

Parents are the primary catechist of their child.  It is the family, called the domestic Church that is the first place where a child experiences love, kindness, forgiveness and mercy.  It is only through the witnessing and examples of parents that a child learns how to live a Christian life.

As such, the church supports parents by providing tools and methods to equip themselves in laying a solid foundation in the faith formation of their children.  Topics on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, church history, moral issues, and social teachings are covered in this program.

Classes for both English and Spanish are offered to parents during the religious education sessions of their children.  This is mandatory to parents with children preparing for their First Holy Communion (Eucharist).