Celebrant: Are you ready to help the parents of this child in their duty as Christian parents?
Godparents: We are.
(The Rites of the Catholic Church)
Most of those promises made by well-meaning godparents at the baptismal font are more often than not left at the door of the church. Friends of mine tell me that they rarely have contact with their godparents. Some don't even know where they are, or...
It seems that not a week goes by that we at Catholic Answers do not hear from parents who are having second thoughts about the appropriateness of a godparent of one of their children. See if you can pick out a common thread in these tales of woe:
My wife and I have best friends that recently separated. One has lost contact for over two years with our children and he was a godparent. As we have not had any contact, birthday cards, or even a phone call, I am in no position...
I firmly believe that, sooner or later, each and every convert to the Catholic faith—whether that person chose to become Catholic as an adult or was brought into the faith as a baby by his parents—is going to have to face the scandal that the Church is not what he believed it to be when he signed up. The test will be whether he will persevere because he knows it to be the Church Christ founded, or whether he will fall away because he...
A textbook used for confirmation preparation in a parish in California teaches students that the sacrament of confirmation “only came into existence in the third century” and that “there was no sacrament of penance in the early church”. I suppose such sacramental ignorance is not surprising given that a deacon who instructs catechists in the same diocese teaches that at one time there were only two sacraments and, at another time, twenty two.
The Church teaches very clearly that the...
The next best thing to sitting next to my husband at Mass is our drive home. We typically chat about the usual stuff: our breakfast plans, our Sunday to-do list, and, of course, how cute our grandbaby Gemma Rose is. Then we'll have a conversation about Mass—more often than not we talk about the homily, then maybe we'll discuss the music, and so on. It's a sweet exchange.
But it wasn't always like this. For many years my car ride to and from church was a lonely ride. It was just me and...
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