If you have been a regular reader of Fatima Family Messenger, which has been around since 1986, you have often read Fr. John Rardon’s prediction that only Catholic families willing to suffer martyrdom would long survive as Catholic and that “ordinary Catholic families will not survive.” The survival of Catholic families will demand families coming together from time to time with other good families to pray and share their values such as promoted by the Charter of the Fatima Family Apostolate and other sound Catholic Family movements. This can require driving some distance at least once per month.
More ideally, other Catholic families are finding it necessary to move into close proximity of each other. There are, on a small scale, here and there, Catholic families building homes in the same area. They build beside, or near to, Catholics with the same Catholic values. In this way their children mix with other children who are being taught in the same Catholic principles of faith and morals. The parents, living side-by-side, meet, talk, pray, support and encourage one another.
It is wonderful for youth to have this experience. But more wonderful is for good Catholic parents to live in close proximity where they support other Catholic parents who take their faith seriously and where their children can mix freely with each other. That’s why some parents have judged it necessary – in order to save the faith of their children and remain strong themselves – to move to areas where they are supported by other good Catholic families.
It is wonderful for youth to have this experience. But more wonderful is for good Catholic parents to live in close proximity where they support other Catholic parents who take their faith seriously and where their children can mix freely with each other. That’s why some parents have judged it necessary – in order to save the faith of their children and remain strong themselves – to move to areas where they are supported by other good Catholic families.
Families to Families
Call these communities Catholic ghettos, if you will, but those parents willing to protect the faith of their children by forming such “families to families” Catholic communities should have our highest admiration so long as they remain loyal to the Magisterium of the Church and in union with the Holy See and avoid extremes. Their family, and the salvation of each member comes, first. Heroic Catholic parents who take these steps can expect criticism from Modernists and other “Catholics” whose minds have been drained of true Catholicism often without their realizing what has happened.
Catholic parents who move to areas where there is a more simple life and where they will find Catholic support from other families admit at times to forging a less affluent lifestyle. They have had to use their creative abilities, have vision, even create jobs, so to speak. They may have less income “but,” they say, “we now have treasures that are eternal, and this no money can buy.
These kind of families have moved away from the spirit of consumerism of the modern world from that which Pope John Paul II says is destroying individual and family values. With courage and trust in God, and what some call a “risk in faith” they have done so because they considered it their duty.
