Today's family sets sail on stormy social waters but the church can help

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 4, 1998 by Arthur Jones

Today's family sets sail On stromy social waters, But the church can help

Today's Catholic families are being battered by modern society's successive waves of trivial values and violence, insidious materialist preoccupations and blatant sex-as-a-social pastime ethos, vacuous media and vulgar language, and the nation al emphasis on the individual over family and community.

But just when families are most in danger of drowning, help is finally at hand.

The slow-but-steady U.S.S. Church has lately been throwing life preservers labeled "Family Friendly" to American parishes. Urged on by examples from family ministers and bishops, youth ministers and publishers, program developers and parish teams, the church as an entity has geared up for action.

"Life is tougher for families than 20 years ago," says Winnie Honeywell, family life director for the Galveston-Houston diocese. "The context is so much more pressured and stressful. So many competing forces.

"The Internet is a scary, scary thing for parents. I could name names and tell tales of good, solid families having a terrifically hard time with preteens because of the Internet," Honeywell said.

American families can no longer count on the social supports that once existed. Children come home to empty houses on empty streets where once, even when mothers worked outside the home, there were relatives and neighbors nearby. On top of this today are the tremendous pressures of the workplace. It is an enormously difficult struggle.

To gain a sense of how well Catholic parishes are doing in helping families cope, NCR talked to concerned and involved Catholics around the country, seeking out clues to the best that is going on.

Look at today's Catholics, says pollster George Gallup, "and you're looking at America." Ask today's Catholic families what they most want -- as the Christian Family Movement recently did -- and they reply "time."

That's Honeywell's take, too. "Families today all need time," she said. "It's always at the top of the list -- more so than money. Time for family relationships, time for marriage relationships."

To help with time management, she says, parishes ought to be asking Catholic families, "Are these the programs you need?" Good parishes, she said, try to make their programs "family friendly." Because time is so precious, Catholic families have to create church in their home, racing against the clock.

There are forces working against this effort. Msgr. Arturo Banuelas of St. Pius X Parish in El Paso, Texas, explained, "Families are struggling because of globalization, which competes with gospel values. Globalization is telling families they need to be much more upwardly mobile. So the people are struggling, trying to keep the family together while society wants them to compartmentalize."

Meanwhile, from a Hispanic perspective, he said, the Hispanic family has found in the church "a place of tremendous support that complements the home training in terms of their Catholic traditions and values, of seeing life as sacred, seeing the values in everyday relationships, in extended family relationships."

"It's why," he said, "even though we're on the border, we still have a somewhat lower rate of gangs than elsewhere. The church is a strong supporter of families."

In the Catholic lexicon, "family life and ministry" includes young singles, like those at St. Jude Church, Boca Raton, Fla., who now have their own parish directory (the better to recognize and get to know one another). Family life and ministry includes young adult parents, said Paul Mach, youth and young adult minister at Holy Rosary Church, Redmond, Wash.

It includes toddlers in the Young Family Program at St. Joseph's Parish, Manistee, Mich., the parish lending library at St. George's Parish in Worcester, Mass., and programs for divorced and separated persons in many parishes.

Family life and ministry includes the elderly in Holy Family Parish in South Pasadena, Calif., which has a full-time gerontologist on staff. They, too, are welcomed and drawn together to ensure that the Catholic parish is intergenerational. It means the pregnant mom or the one who has had a miscarriage being visited by the "Elizabeth Ministers" of St. Cecilia's Parish in Houston.

The social pressures on young families seem to worsen by the decade.

In the nuclear family, says Honeywell, a major stress for parents is that everything is competing for their children- the media, school, church, sports, the computer. Compared to many other religious groups, the Catholic church is late into the fray.

Said Diana Gaillardetz, family life minister in St. Cecilia's Parish -- one of only two parishes in the Galveston-Houston diocese with full-time family life ministers -- "I was not raised Catholic but in several Protestant denominations. I get frustrated because when I was a child many of these `new' programs were already being offered by the Protestant churches.

"That's how far behind we are as church," she said, "though we're going in the right direction."