REGINA: Can you suggest ways to make Catholic tradition more accessible to youth, especially in families in which the parents are new to it as well?
DR. KWASNIEWSKI: Nothing can replace ongoing education. It used to be taken for granted that Catholic families would read lives of the saints and things like Gueranger's Liturgical Year (as the family of St Therese of Lisieux used to do). Homeschooling families have an easier time of it, because the children tend to be low-tech and addicted to reading books anyway. In our family we have read hundreds of books out loud, taking a half-hour to an hour each evening for that purpose. But any family can get used to some reading in the evenings. If this is in place, one can read a book together like Fr. James Jackson's Nothing Superfluous, which is such an interesting and well-written account of the rich symbolism of the old Mass. It will definitely help the older children and the parents themselves.
REGINA: So then, reading aloud to kids, as opposed to burying oneself in electronics.
DR. KWASNIEWSKI: Really, the Catholic Faith is immensely beautiful in every detail of it, and it is the loss of knowledge more than anything else that has doomed us to what seems like an enormous rut of mediocrity.
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