{"id":43618,"date":"2014-01-30T06:45:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T12:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.austincnm.com\/?p=43618"},"modified":"2014-01-30T11:02:23","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T17:02:23","slug":"four-attitudes-evangelical-parenthood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atxcatholic.com\/index.php\/2014\/01\/four-attitudes-evangelical-parenthood\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Attitudes of Evangelical Parenthood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pope<\/a><\/p>\n

Parents are called to evangelize their children – to be evangelical parents. \u00a0Yet, all too frequently many of us fail to answer the call to share the “Good News” with them because we never preach the Gospel to our children. \u00a0We leave that to the priest in the Sunday homily or the religious education teacher or the youth minister. \u00a0We turn it over to someone else. \u00a0We do not take responsibility for delivering the message. \u00a0While we do not diminish the seriousness of this failure nor do we wish to forget to ask parents in this category to step up to the plate and accept this God-given vocation, we primarily want to address those parents who do desire with all their heart to be God’s messenger.<\/p>\n

For those of us who attempt to answer this high calling and attempt to deliver the message, we fail as our children’s first and primary evangelists because we, as Pope Francis points out, do not have “certain attitudes which foster openness to the message” (Evangelii Gaudium, 165). \u00a0<\/em>In his recent Apostolic Exhortation\u00a0Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel)<\/em>, Pope Francis gives all evangelists (and therefore all parents) a list of attitudes we must cultivate within ourselves if we hope that our children will be open to the Gospel. \u00a0Hopefully, this column will serve as a kind of “examination of conscience” for those of us who are evangelist “want-to-be’s”, for those of us who take seriously our call to be our children’s “first heralds” of the Good News, the Gospel contained in the words, “Jesus loves you”.<\/p>\n

For us and we hope for you, this list will be a call to further conversion – a call not to merely deliver the Gospel to our children but also a call to change our attitudes towards them and towards the message, helping foster an openness in them for the most important of all messages. \u00a0Bottom line, if we strive for these attitudes and rely on the grace provided us by God, we will move closer to fulfilling our vocation to evangelical parenthood. \u00a0We’ll lay these attitudes out in this column. \u00a0We’ll also provide some questions to help us examine those attitudes in ourselves. \u00a0Then, over the next several weeks, we’ll lay out some practical ways of realizing these attitudinal changes in ourselves. \u00a0Here you go, compliments of Pope Francis, the four attitudes of Evangelical Parenthood:<\/p>\n