6 Gestures that can help families pass on the faith: Pope Leo
Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass before about 2.5 million people in Buenos Aires, his largest congregation so far as pope. His homily described St. John Lateran as a sign of unity and communion among Churches worldwide. He urged families to nurture faith at home through prayer, forgiveness, Sunday Mass, and sharing faith across generations. Leo encouraged Argentine families to take a leading role in evangelization and support the local Church’s pastoral mission.
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Pope Leo XIV urged families to make faith part of everyday home life, naming six simple practices that can help pass it on. Speaking at a Mass in Buenos Aires, he also called families to take an active role in evangelization and parish life.
The gestures Pope Leo listed were:
He described the family as a privileged place to encounter Christ, where faith is handed on through ordinary gestures and alongside life itself. He encouraged parents to speak naturally with their children about Jesus and to keep their homes close to Christ.
Leo called on families in Argentina to support bishops, priests, pastoral workers and catechists. He said families who pray together and proclaim the Gospel help renew the Church and make family life a path of faith and Christian formation.
The Mass was celebrated on November 9, the feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, with about 2.5 million Catholics gathered in Buenos Aires. Leo described the basilica as a sign of unity and communion among the world’s Churches.
The article also recalled Leo’s recent teaching that families are a “privileged place of prayer,” and his appeal to revive shared prayer at home and participation in Sunday Mass. It noted that, the previous day in Uruguay, he had spoken about the pain parents experience when their children stop practicing the faith.
The family’s role in transmitting faith across generations
The family is the first and most essential setting for handing on the faith: children encounter belief not only through explanations, but through the love, prayer, worship, choices, and stories that shape ordinary family life. This responsibility belongs especially to parents, while grandparents, godparents, the wider family, and the Church support and share in it. Faith is God’s gift, not something parents can manufacture or guarantee; their task is to witness to it and help it grow.
The Bible presents faith as something entrusted from one generation to the next. In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis points to the Passover tradition, in which parents explain the meaning of the celebration to their children, and to Psalm 78’s call to tell the next generation of the Lord’s works. The family is thus a place where children learn both the story of faith and how to live within it.
The New Testament gives a personal example: St. Paul recalls the sincere faith that first lived in Timothy’s grandmother Lois and mother Eunice. Faith is not merely inherited like a family custom, but the witness of one generation can help the next come to know and embrace it.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith describes family transmission as taking place “in dialect”—in the familiar language of home: a parent’s words and gestures, a grandparent’s story, shared prayer, and the love with which people treat one another. Pope Leo XIV’s words in the same document stress that parents are the first catechists because children first learn to speak and relate in the home. This does not mean that family life replaces formal teaching. Rather, parish catechesis can develop and explain what children have begun to encounter in the life of their family.
Parents teach the faith explicitly when they speak about God, read Scripture, answer questions, and explain Christian feasts and practices. But their witness also comes through ordinary conduct: whether they pray, seek forgiveness, show mercy, keep Sunday holy, and care about people in need. The Ukrainian Catholic Catechism likewise describes parents as children’s first catechists through both the example of their lives and the words of their prayer.
This makes authenticity important. Parents do not need to pretend they have never struggled or made mistakes. Pope Francis emphasizes that passing on faith involves sharing the lived history of faith honestly, including received blessings and failures that need to be repaired. Such truthful testimony can show children that Christian life is not a claim to perfection, but a continuing response to God.
The task is demanding, and families may have little spare time amid work and the pressures of daily life. Amoris Laetitia acknowledges these difficulties while insisting that the home should remain a place where children learn the beauty and meaning of faith, prayer, and service. It also notes that parents’ own trust in God matters: children are more readily invited into a faith that their parents themselves seek to live.
There is no single family routine that fits every household. The point is to make space, in ways appropriate to a family’s circumstances, for shared practices that turn attention toward God and neighbor. The Dicastery’s document names examples such as personal or shared prayer, reading the Gospel, participating in Sunday Mass, giving thanks before meals, remembering the saints, honoring Mary, caring for the poor, and preparing a Nativity scene at Christmas. These small, repeated practices can help faith become part of the family’s common life rather than something confined to classes or occasional ceremonies.
Baptism gives this responsibility a particular shape: parents bring their children into the Church’s life, and then help them grow in the faith received as a gift. The Church and family have a shared role in this formation; the Dicastery emphasizes their cooperation, especially as children are introduced to Christian life and later strengthened through Confirmation. Pope John Paul II also describes the family as the “domestic Church,” a place of family prayer and sacramental life centered on Christ and nourished by the liturgy.
The transmission of faith is not only a parent-to-child responsibility. Grandparents can give children a sense of continuity by telling the story of their own faith—how they experienced God’s help, where they failed, and what they learned. Pope Francis calls attention to the value of listening across generations, describing faith as passed on through familiar speech and lived experience. The wider family, including godparents, can also support a child’s growth in faith and sense of belonging to the Church.
Nor should families be expected to carry this mission alone. The Church supports them through worship, catechesis, sacramental preparation, and the example of the Christian community. At the same time, family life is not a one-way lesson: a family that shares the Gospel can also be evangelized by its children and become a witness to other families.
The Dicastery notes that in many places the handing on of faith within families has been interrupted, so that younger generations no longer receive it “automatically.” That observation cautions against assuming that children will absorb faith simply because their family identifies as Christian or attends a particular event. It calls for intentional witness, conversation, prayer, and support from the Church.
But parents are not responsible for controlling another person’s faith. Amoris Laetitia says that faith is God’s gift and that parents serve as means through which it can grow. Its image of the mustard seed helps put parental effort in perspective: the seed’s eventual growth may exceed what anyone can see or measure at the time. The family’s vocation, then, is to offer a genuine, loving witness and to entrust what it cannot control to God.