Supporting the interchurch family

Oct 10, 2014

By Daniel S. Mulhall
Mr J was a pillar of the Catholic community. For years he attended Sunday Mass with his family. No one seemed to notice or care that he never came forward for Communion. He was at every parish event and volunteered to work at most of them. He even was elected to the parish pastoral council and served as chairman for several years.

While Mr J was well known and well liked, few (except the pastor) knew that he was a Methodist and that each Sunday after Mass he would stop for breakfast with his family, drop them off at home and then catch the last Sunday service at his Methodist church.

Interchurch families come in all shapes and sizes, and one approach to support and encourage them will not work for all. With more and more Catholics marrying other Christians, it is important that Catholic communities understand what they can do to support these families.

Lauri Przybysz, coordinator for marriage and family life for the Archdiocese of Baltimore and a national leader in the Christian Family Movement-USA, spends a lot of her time addressing this topic. Her article, Every Marriage Is a Mixed-Religion Marriage, is posted on the US bishops’ website For Your Marriage (http://www.foryourmarriage.org/every-marriage-is-a-mixed-religion).

Przybysz says that the starting point for parish ministry to interchurch families is to remember that these are Christian marriages. She cites Pope John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, to support this opinion.

She notes that it focuses on the important tasks that take place within all Christian families, including those that are interchurch. Among these tasks are “the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love” and to be a “living reflection of and a real sharing in God’s love.”

The text says that all families are responsible for forming community, serving life, helping to develop society, and sharing in the life and mission of the Church. Przybysz says that a family can accomplish this “by showing their children a model of life based on truth, freedom, justice and love, and by becoming actively involved in social causes and by supporting groups that work for such issues.”

According to Przybysz, it is important to remember that the interchurch family remains the domestic church, the presence of the Church within the home.

She encourages parishes to look for ways to support and strengthen these families by focusing on activities that can be done within the home, which is common territory, rather than activities that take place at church facilities, which may feel like foreign soil to one of the spouses.

For example, activities such as book clubs, discussion groups and groups that do works of justice and mercy can involve both spouses.

Przybysz suggests that parishes give people chances to use their talents, so a carpenter from another church could help build the sets for the parish play, while a person who loves to knit or sew could create items to sell at the parish bazaar. “These types of activities help to build the togetherness of the family,” Przybysz says.

There are many other things the parish can do to promote interchurch families. For example, it can encourage families to pray together with sacred Scripture or the Lord’s Prayer, prayers common to all Christians.

Because the Mass can be a point of division between Christian churches, it is probably best to avoid activities that require Mass attendance. The parish can also encourage interchurch couples to develop family religious customs and traditions that are meaningful to both traditions.

This can start during marriage preparation by helping the couple to value the gifts of their common baptism and to find common ground among their faith traditions.

Przybysz notes that when we make these opportunities, we are helping interchurch families fulfill their baptismal call. She recommends Fr Rob Ruhnke’s excellent webpage on this topic http://marriagepreparation.com/page/?pg=50.