Faith Transmission Quotes

Our Holy Father... is very clear that, of course, the teachings of the Church must be preserved and passed on. However, we need to do this in a way that the Holy Father says is creative. We need to do it in a way that we look for new strategies that address the hearts of people.

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents' value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings

When fathers are tongue tied religiously with their offspring, need they wonder if their children's hearts remain sin tied?

In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term.

There is nothing more important than parents passing on a generational legacy of faith and values to their children.

I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.

How precious is the family as the privileged place for transmitting the faith.

I never lost my faith...But like all modern Catholics, I felt for a time that I had outgrown the church. Now it is a bone of contention in my soul that I did not share my faith with my kids, as my parents did with me. It was a source of grace when I needed it. I have been greatly nurtured and inspired by my faith.

My grandmother went to church, but my mother had been inundated with church and decided that when she had children, she would not push church or God on her children.

Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.

It occurs to me: why is it mainly women, who to pass on the faith? Simply because the one who brought us Jesus is a woman. It is the path chosen by Jesus. He wanted to have a mother: the gift of faith comes to us through women, as Jesus came to us through Mary.

Every first Friday, my father would go to confession, and he took very seriously the faith he would someday transmit to us.

Traditional Judeo-Christian values literally hang in the balance in America. They can be 'forgotten' in a single generation if they are not taught to children and teenagers... It could happen here if we don't defend what we believe.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'

There are some things we really need to take care of: the children, and grandparents. Children, whether they are young or older, they are the strength that moves us forward. We place our hope in them.Grandparents are the living memory of the family. They passed on the faith, they transmitted the faith, to us.

God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. It's the same in religion.

Religion is caught, not taught.

Faith is not imparted like secular subjects. It is given through the language of the heart.

At some point, some of these people are going to wake up to find that the great secular assault they see on their children was, in fact, a bogeyman created to hide their own bad parenting. If they can't convince their own kids of the appropriateness of their religion and values, then the religion, the values, or the convincing, must not have been very good.

There never yet was a mother who taught her child to be an infidel.

Religion is fire which example keeps alive, and which goes out if not communicated.

Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

When you are giving people the gospel, you are giving them something to believe, and you have to set the stage for that. You don't just drive up and dump the truck and drive off.

I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.