Young Adult
I am a millennial who was raised Catholic and continues to actively practice her faith as an adult. In fact, I am the oldest of six and, at the time of writing, my youngest sibling is 21, and all of us are still active in our Catholic faith. The specific statistics vary depending on the source and the year, but generally that seems to put us in the minority.
As parents look for ways to provide their children with the formation they need to remain in the Church, I hope they don’t look for silver bullet formulas such as “input a daily Rosary and output a fully formed Catholic adult.” I don’t think that’s how it works. Listening to people’s stories and ideas should be material for prayerfully discerning your own family culture based on your own specific children and their specific needs. At the end of the day, children should and do have free will; there is no way to force the outcome, only ways to set them up well. Most basically, my parents loved us, and they loved their Catholic faith, and they were able to share that love as love instead of as a set of rules.
So, as I share a very few of the things from my Catholic childhood that helped me to embrace my faith as an adult, please take it as a story, not as an answer. There are plenty of specifics from my childhood to choose from, but this is a column not a book, so I chose to highlight three:
- Not being required to attend daily Mass
We were required to attend Sunday Mass but not weekday Mass. There were a couple of exceptions — Thanksgiving, sometimes a feast day that was important to our family — but for the most part, my siblings and I were never required to attend daily Mass. When we were all little, daily Mass was often not practically feasible. But when I was in high school, my mom started attending much more regularly. We were always invited and never pressured to join her. For me, that meant that I didn’t always go but that when I did, it was because I had chosen it. There was a deep wisdom in this, that what was required of us in the practice of our faith was largely the same as what the Church required of us. We had more requirements as children than the baseline requirements of the Church, but not a lot more. That gave us the freedom to choose the devotions and optional practices to which we were personally drawn. We began taking personal ownership of our faith from an early age, and from an early age the expression of our faith involved a lot of freedom. We prayed together almost every night as a family, but it was a relatively short set of prayers, constantly influenced by the specificity of what we were drawn to. So, when the time came to decide whether we wanted to practice this faith for ourselves or if it was only something that had been required of us, we were already well on our way.
- A house full of books, especially “The Lord of the Rings”
It sounds strange, but I’m not sure I would still be Catholic without the influence that J.R.R. Tolkien has had on my life. There are a lot of components to this but most basically, I encountered beauty in “The Lord of the Rings” that completely captivated me, and, between the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien and my parents, I managed to internalize the reality that this beauty belongs to God. Other beautiful stories and experiences certainly set me up for this, but it was in the context of “The Lord of the Rings” that this truth became part of my personal understanding of the world. The deep desire kindled by beauty was not something separate or in conflict with my faith, it was a part of it. This reality set me up to understand that my loves and desires needed to be well-ordered and that ordering could demand sacrifice and suffering. But that idea was always in the context of the first — that everything good, true or beautiful really is a pathway to God.
- Being around non-Catholic people and things
The specifics of this list could get really long: We played with the neighbor kids and we watched secular movies and (when we were a little older) we were allowed to read Harry Potter. My siblings and I were homeschooled, but my parents were very clear that they were not trying to keep us in a safe and sterilized Catholic bubble. I don’t remember a time when our Catholic upbringing did not involve non-Catholic things viewed through a Catholic lens, and consequently, I was always used to seeing goodness in the world and knowing that that goodness was created by God.
These specific examples highlight three aspects of love that I think were particularly important and influential to my Catholic childhood: freedom, beauty and integration. While there was a central core of things that were required, my parents gave us freedom anywhere they could. They filled our house with places to encounter beauty, allowed us to discover them for ourselves and made it clear that this beauty was all a reflection of the God we met at Church and in prayer. And they were able to present us with an integrated worldview, where the non-Catholic world around us was not something to be feared, but something we could make sense of and see the good in, knowing that God who created it was always to be found.
Jacinta Van Hecke spent most of her childhood with a book in her hand and always wanted to become a writer. She has been the Young Adult columnist for the Milwaukee Catholic Herald since 2022.
Columnist Jacinta Van Hecke, shown at about age 8, says reading helped her to come to know that everything good, true or beautiful really is a pathway to God. (Submitted photo)
