EWTN host offers help to parents at Catholic Radio Dinner

Marcus Grodi, the host of EWTN’s “The Journey Home” and “Deep in Scripture,” speaks about how parents can keep their children Catholic during the sixth annual Catholic Radio Dinner, a fundraising dinner for WSPM, Catholic Radio Indy 89.1 FM. About 250 people attended the April 8 event. (Photo by Sean Gallagher)

By Sean Gallagher

People involved in Catholic radio know from experience how it can be an effective tool of evangelization.

Marcus Grodi has seen this during his 13 years as the host of “The Journey Home” program broadcast on the Eternal Word Television Network and EWTN’s radio service and, more recently, as host of “Deep in Scripture,” which is broadcast on EWTN radio.

Grodi also knows that evangelization needs to happen from person to person, especially in families.

He knows this as the father of three sons, but also from overseeing The Coming Home Network, an apostolate that gives spiritual support to Protestant Christians considering coming into the full communion of the Church.

Grodi was a Presbyterian minister before becoming Catholic in 1992.

He was the main speaker at the sixth annual Catholic Radio Dinner, a fundraising event for WSPM, Catholic Radio Indy 89.1 FM, held on April 8 in Indianapolis, which was attended by nearly 250 people. (Related: Despite shaky economy, donations to Catholic Radio Indy are increasing)

In his presentation, Grodi shared seven ways for parents to make sure their children remain Catholic.

First, he said, parents need to make sure that they themselves are truly Christian and have a deep relationship with Christ.

“The danger of our faith is that we can look great on the outside as Catholics. But what’s on the inside?” Grodi asked his audience. “We can go to Mass every Sunday and say the beads, be baptized, confirmed. And yet have we surrendered to Jesus Christ?”

To build that relationship with Christ, Grodi suggested prayerfully reading from the Gospels every day.

Next, Grodi said that parents should be consciously Catholic Christians, and help their children know not only what the Catholic Church teaches but why.

Grodi emphasized the importance of this task because he said that, as a Presbyterian minister, he often led people out of the Catholic Church because of their lack of catechesis.

“One of the ways that I would pull Catholics out of the Church was challenging them on their faith,” Grodi said. “Catholics would give me what they believed. But if I pushed them, they often couldn’t go beyond what they had memorized, especially teenagers.”

So he challenged his audience.

“When your children look at you, will they see what it means to be Catholic?” Grodi asked. “Do you know your Catholicism? Are you Catholic out of habit because you inherited this faith? Or do you know it? Do you understand it?”

In order to grow in that understanding, Grodi suggested reading short sections from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on a daily basis.

Grodi told his listeners that, in order to pass on the faith to children, you need to be open to life.

“We can be blind to the ways in which we have adopted our culture’s pro-choice values,” Grodi said. “We can believe that really 1.2 kids is just enough because there’s a danger of a population explosion, which is a myth.”

Grodi said parents need to be active to make sure their children are truly Christian, and that they have a growing and deepening relationship with Christ. They should not presume that priests, religious, and parish staff members and volunteers will take on the whole of this task that belongs first to parents.

“I believe that what God is calling us to do is to basically share with our children what we know of him,” Grodi said. “It’s hard. And I’ve failed at it.

“It’s just taking time to sit down with our children and say, ‘I need to talk to you about the most important person in my life.’ Can we do that? Can we talk to them about Jesus? They need to know our Lord or else none of the other things in the Church are going to make sense over time.”

The fifth point that Grodi made was similar to his second point. Parents need to make sure their children are Catholic Christians.

“I want to make sure that my children not only know Jesus, but know him correctly,” he said. “And to do that, they need the Church and the graces of the sacraments. That’s why we need to make sure that our children experience all that, of course, but [also] understand it.”

Despite parents’ actions to ensure their children’s faith, Grodi said, their efforts are not a fail-safe guarantee of success.

“We can plant seeds,” he said. “We can nurture the soil. … But, in the end, we have to let them go. But my main warning is don’t let them go without prayer.”

Parents must pray for their children, Grodi said, which is absolutely essential.

“We think we pray for our kids all of the time, but do we really?” he asked. “Honestly, and I’m talking to me, the greatest sacrifice that we can make on a day-by-day basis for the rest of our lives, next to loving them, is praying for them.”

The last way Grodi proposed that parents can help make sure their children remain Catholic was to make the Church better for their children than it was for them.

“God has called every one of us and given us gifts and the means to help the Church where we have been planted,” he said, “because the Church that we leave into our children’s hands is part of our responsibility.”

Catholic radio, Grodi said, can be an effective means for people, including children, to learn more about the faith and grow closer to Christ.

“They turn on the radio and, all of a sudden, they hear about Christ,” he said. “They hear about the Church. They hear about the importance of life. And even our children, when they turn on the radio, will discover Jesus and his Church. The radio can teach people how to pray.”

Kristen Riley, a member of St. Simon the Apostle Parish in Indianapolis, attended the dinner and talked to The Criterion about the importance of Catholic radio in her life.

“You hear about the new Catholic media, and I think it’s very important,” she said. “I’m a person who doesn’t have time to sit down and read and study the way that I would like to. I think that listening when you can, when you’re in the car or to podcasts, is very helpful to me. I can learn a lot, a lot of things that you wouldn’t just find on your own.”

Riley, who has a son in the first grade at St. Simon the Apostle School and is caring for a niece who is a sophomore at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, said Grodi’s suggestion that parents speak about Christ to their children challenged her.

“That’s something that I’ve been shy about, I guess,” Riley said. “I think that’s something that I’m really going to go home and try to do.”

(To learn more about Catholic Radio Indy 89.1 FM or to listen to it online anywhere, log on to www.catholicradioindy.org. For more information about the Coming Home Network, log on to www.chnetwork.org.) †