A new study from CARA has some insight.
From OSV News:
The study found that participants from these families generally described their households as “warmer and more affectionate than the average family.” Most of the participants also indicated “very good communication” within the family.
Another shared thread among those interviewed was having rituals of meals eaten together and prayer, with most indicating that faith was a part of family routines regardless of the routines themselves.
Additionally, all participants emphasized the importance of weekly Mass attendance and nearly all participants reported doing service work and giving to charity, with many doing so through their parish or a church organization.
Mark Gray, director of CARA Catholic Polls, co-wrote the study along with Greg Popcak, co-executive director of the Peyton Institute for Domestic Church Life. Gray told OSV News that while the findings from these qualitative interviews were not meant to be taken as some sort of “checklist” of things to keep one’s child Catholic, parents could gain insight from the common responses.
For these families, he said, “their faith wasn’t just something that they went and did on Sunday morning; their faith was present in the household. It was present every day. It came out in conversations about the faith, with prayer, with things that are in the home.”
He also noted that when children would come to the parents with doubts about the faith, most of the parents “went on a journey with their children and said, ‘Well, let’s see why the church teaches this,’” as opposed to strictly shutting down questioning of the church’s teachings.
“It’s a lot of discussion, working through things, thinking about things rather than being this overbearing parental force,” he said…
… Focusing on the 51% of U.S. adults who were raised Catholic and had remained so between 2010 to 2018, there were some commonalities. Among weekly Mass attendees who had remained Catholic, 81% were “more likely to have been living with both parents at age 16” compared to the 72% who attend Mass less often than weekly or the 63% who left the Catholic faith.
Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash
