“No Contact” has been getting a lot of attention lately. This is where adult (Millennial) children cut off their “toxic” (Boomer) parents. It’s making for a tidy “generational warfare” headline farm, and Catholics in a rough spot with family may be tempted to try it.
Those Catholics will need to confront the tension between two seemingly competing goods: how can you obey the Fourth Commandment—“honor your father and your mother”—and also maintain healthy boundaries?
Let’s go through some of the questions I’ve noticed popping up and see where we land.
Aren’t you supposed to respect your parents? Can you completely cut them off while still respecting them?
The answer to the first question is yes. The second is no.
“Obedience toward parents ceases with the emancipation of the children,” the Catechism says, but “not so respect, which is always owed to them. This respect has its roots in the fear of God, one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit” (2217).
There is a wide spectrum of how to treat people between “you can do anything you want to me and mine” and “no contact whatsoever.” Good Catholics who follow the Fourth Commandment have to live somewhere on that spectrum.
So what is the bare minimum for respect? To keep the lines of communication open.
But my mom is a drug addict, my dad throws punches, my parents are in prison. As with divorce and abortion, it’s tempting to use exceptional cases to unravel the Church’s teaching. But neither the Catechism nor the Pentateuch provides a “heroin exception.”
Does this mean you must open yourself up to abuse? Of course not. Keeping the lines of contact open means being willing to talk. It may be restricted to sending a card for birthdays and Christmas. And if even sending cards will lead you into sin or grave harm (indulging hateful thoughts, manipulation by a wily drug addict), then you may have to avoid even those.
The distinction is in the mindset. If you intend to honor the laws of God, then “I’m never speaking to my parents again” can’t be part of your vocabulary. Closer to the mark is “I have to avoid them today, and let’s see what tomorrow brings.” We don’t get to write off even terrible parents.
Nor do terrible parents excuse our own faults. I can’t fix Mom’s drug addiction, but I can work on my own people-pleasing love of human respect and set better boundaries. I can’t reform Dad, but I can reform myself out of hating him and write him a birthday card. As we protect ourselves, we must also improve ourselves.
What if my parents never took accountability for how they hurt me as a child? Am I just supposed to forgive and forget?
Forgiveness is hard when there’s no repentance. Maybe your parents feel justified in their bad behavior. Maybe their behavior was actually not that bad. (We have to be honest with ourselves about this!)
Regardless, forgive them. Jesus begged his Father to forgive his unrepentant torturers (Luke 23:33-34), and he exhorts us to be like that same Father (Matt. 5:43-48).
Forgiveness doesn’t mean you let your parents do whatever they want. On the contrary, keep your boundaries strong. Don’t “forget”; set up boundaries that make sure “the thing” doesn’t happen again. But don’t simmer in resentment. This is a mercy to your parents, even if they complain about it, because it will protect them from re-offending.
What if my parent always brings up politics whenever I’m around, because he knows we disagree? Should I avoid family gatherings because I feel disrespected?
I know a guy who struggled to spend time with his father-in-law because of the constant disagreements over politics. His wife offered a gentle suggestion: “What if you just stop arguing?”
It worked. When the father-in-law brought up politics, the guy responded with only a few polite words. He employed phrases like “I don’t have much to say about that.” He changed the subject. There was no longer fuel for the fire, and the problem faded away.
Another anecdote: A woman decided not to attend a big upcoming family event. It went over extremely ill with her parents. Every visit turned into a screaming and yelling match.
Yes, she felt disrespected. But the bigger problem was the sins of wrath she was committing, regardless of anyone else’s behavior. She had to work on that, not her feelings—while still respecting her parents.
So she cut back on visiting. She stuck to phone conversations, where she could control herself better. She orchestrated her interactions to make respect for both her parents and her conscience possible. The event came and went, and her parents eventually cooled down, in part because she had cooled herself down already.
In neither case did the kid cut off his parents. Both increased their shows of respect even as they reduced contact without killing it. And both have more honest relationships with their parents now.
What if my parents undermine or attack my faith?
The particulars will depend on your state in life. Some of us have only ourselves to watch out for. Others have children to protect.
Maybe your parents mock the Catholic Church, or Mom trivializes her divorce, or Dad wants your kids to call his “new wife” their grandma. These are all real possibilities, and we have to grapple with them, whether we have children or not.
If you have a problem, the mercy you offer your parents is to make them aware of it. “I’m reluctant to come over again because last time, you said [X specific thing] about my faith.” (Not “You always attack my faith.”) Assess how they respond. If they don’t think they did anything wrong, maybe you visit less going forward. Maybe you resort to my beloved Christmas and birthday cards for a while. But “No Contact” requires you to think soberly about what would justify your breaking the Fourth Commandment.
Also assess yourself. If we think we’re entitled to a life free of criticism, Jesus has bad news for us (see John 16:2-4). If we swallow some mockery or invective, we can take comfort that we’re following our divine exemplar (see Isa. 53).
The bottom line: don’t let anyone scandalize your kids, and don’t let anyone scandalize yourself. But even in fraught cases, refusing ever to see or talk to your parents again rubs uncomfortably against the Decalogue.
Is it fair to deprive my children of their grandparents? What if my parents treat me poorly even as they dote on my children?
Back to definitions—what does it mean to “deprive them of their grandparents”? It can’t mean “my household is subordinate to my parents’ desires.” Honoring your parents does not mean surrendering your children.
Here, the object to consider is the children’s good. It is good for kids to have a relationship with their grandparents, so you should pursue that.
I don’t mean to be dismissive here. By now, I have heard many Millennials lament how their parents blow by them to obsess over “the grandchildren.” The term “gamete donors” gets bandied about. This is rough. It’s easy to see as a betrayal.
But remember that your kids are innocent of all that, and it’s a grave move to take away the grandparents altogether. God has given you a lot of power over your children’s lives, including the power to shape how they understand grandparents. You must exercise it—not wimpily, by letting your parents guilt you into endangering your kids’ bodies and souls, and not tyrannically, by intentionally withholding your kids to “punish” your parents when they get on your nerves. The more virtuous work—and it is hard work!—lies in managing the relationship between kids and grandparents. That includes frequency of visits, quality of visits, and the level of supervision. It can’t be done passively.
How do I discern if I am acting for the sake of charity versus self-centered reasons?
You remember that “always” and “never” are God’s domain, not yours. (So is vengeance!) “I’m never speaking to them again” should not be part of your vocabulary. This means regularly assessing and reassessing your relationships. Make sure your principles are solid, and check in with yourself frequently to apply them to your behavior.
If something merely annoys you—for instance, Mom singing the same song a dozen times in a row—ask yourself if it’s more charitable just to tolerate it. When it imposes on your boundaries, charity demands that you intervene. “No, Mom, all religions are not basically the same, and we’re going to stop talking about that around the kids.”
One of the best books on marriage I ever read begins this way: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We could multiply the “what ifs” infinitely here, but I think the above suffices to get the point across: “No Contact” is almost always going to be a non-starter.
It is exceedingly difficult to “honor your father and your mother” when they have objectively failed you as parents. This is a heavy cross to bear, and those who bear it deserve our sympathy. But it is not heavier than the cross of Christ, who was more innocent than any one of us.
“No Contact,” by contrast, is not heroic. It is often the easy way out, and out with it goes the Fourth Commandment. If respect for our parents is rooted in fear of God, then “No Contact” is like sedevacantism, where we avoid a “bad pope” by insisting there’s no pope, or like a petulant breed of atheism that insists God is too mean to exist.
Even the most reprehensible parent can be talked to—maybe only once a month or twice a year, and maybe with much guardedness. But it must be done—conscientiously, resolutely, with unwavering attention to self-protection and protection of the innocents under our authority.
We’re not insular Jews or Amish. Our faith is contact. If we shun it in our own families, we’ll falter in it everywhere else.