Fortifying families and Church during confusing times

Parents:

1. See persecution as a grace from God for being purified and strengthened.
2. Root yourself in the Catholic faith through study of the catechism.
3. Protect your family’s integrity above all else.
4. Catechize your children as your first duty.
5. Pray with your children daily.
6. Turn your home into a domestic church.
7. Withdraw your family from a parish spreading error and attend a faithful parish, even if you have to travel far.
8. Withdraw your children from a school if they are encountering moral danger in “sex education”.
9. Fight for parental rights using available democratic tools.
10. Build up a wide-reaching crusade of prayers among Catholic families and lay faithful, priests, and bishops under the protection of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and holy angels. This will defeat the attacks of the unbelieving world.

Laity:

1. Implore the end of the crisis in the Church and a divine intervention, through intense, persevering, and confident personal prayers, and united in a world-reaching prayer crusade.
2. Engage in diligent, zealous study of Catholic truths according to proven catechisms, especially the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the Baltimore Catechism, which are surer and clearer in their content.
3. Give personal witness in professing and spreading those truths which, in our days, are mostly denied and distorted.
4. Support theological, pastoral, and liturgical conferences and symposiums in which the clear and perennial truths of the Catholic Church are stated, explained, and defended.
5. Give public manifestations, such as marches, processions, and pilgrimages, in order to proclaim the integrity and the beauty of the Catholic faith.
6. Offer acts of reparation and expiation for sins against the Catholic faith and for sins against the divine commandments, especially the following sins:

Against the First Commandment (“Thou shalt not have strange gods before me”), because of relativism and indifferentism regarding the uniqueness of the faith in Jesus Christ. Against the Fifth Commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”), because of the horrendous machinery of mass murder of unborn and newly born children, and the killing of sick or elderly people through so-called euthanasia. Against the Sixth Commandment (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”), because of the epidemic of divorce, the social and governmental propaganda [promoting] degrading sexual immorality such as homosexual acts and pornography, and moral corruption of innocent children through a cruel sexual education and indoctrination with anti-natural gender theory.

7. Offer acts of reparation for the most grievous […] evil of our time … the horrendous sacrileges, desecrations, and trivializations of Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament.

Excerpt by Bishop Athanasius Schneider with Diane Montagna, from Christos Vincit: Christ’s Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2019), from Chapter 17 “Advice for Families and Laity,” p. 283-84. angelicopress.org

BISHOP ATHANASIUS SCHNEIDER is auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, and author of two additional books on the Holy Eucharist. DIANE MONTAGNA is an American journalist based in Rome.