Parents must see to it that their children learn the Catechism. Wilfull ignorance of the Catechism is a mortal sin. Sending children to Protestant schools is a serious sin because it endangers the faith of the children, risking the souls of the children to indifferentism or to apostasy.

RESPONSIBLE PARENTHOOD

THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY

"The family" says Pope Leo XIII in one of his great encyclicals, "is the cradle of civil society, and it is largely within the confines of the domestic hearth that is prepared the destiny of nations." By raising marriage to the dignity of a sacrament Christ also sanctified the family, made it the Christian family.

Atuhority in the family is vested in the parents
The husband is the head of he family, the wife is its heart and soul. It is only in the Christian family that the wife enjous that dignity and respect which God originally intended her to have when He made her the companion and helpmate of her husband, not his slave.

The duties of parents to their children are embraced in the word education. "Education means training, that is, instruction by word and example, by suggestion and direction, by encouragement and repression, by reward and punishment. It means a progressive and well-ordered development of man's three-fold powers, physical, intellectual, and moral. It means the proper formation of the whole man - body, mind, and will." Hence parentsare bound
a) to love their children and to support them until they can support themselves;
b) to instruct their children in all that is required to enable them to be a success in this life and in the next;
c) to give them good example by leading a good Catholic life themselves;
d) to send their children to good Catholic schools and, if circumstances oblige them to send them to non-Catholic schools, to safeguard their faith and to see to their religious instruction.

WHAT AM I LIVING FOR?

WHAT IS THE MEANING AND PURPOSE OF LIFE? This is the all-important question for every human being; for what wil all the world beside profit us if we miss the whole purpose of our existence, if we fail to attain our true destiny?

Both reason and revelation tell us that God is the author and the last end of our life. Being creatures of God, the work of His hands, we belong to him asolutely. "In Him we live and more and are" (Acts 17, 28). The last end of man can be nothing else but God from whom he came, "for of Him, and by Him, and in Him are all things (Rom. II, 36). Hence the purpose of our life is to do the will of God, as it iswritten in indelible characters in every human heart, as it was proclaimed on Sinai and on the MOunt of the Beatitudes, as itis manifested in the duties of our state and calling, and as it is made known to us by those who share in God's authority here on earth in the family, theState and the Church.

But our submission to God's holy will must not be founded on servile fear; it must be voluntary, loving and generous self-surrender to His will. Our service must be the service of a soldier who unhesitatingly carries out the commands of his general; but also the service of a child that sees in God his loving Father and his greatest benefactor.

"We are in this world to do the will of God and thereby to gain everlasting happiness in Heaven."

Fr. John Laux, M.A., "Catholic Morality".