‘Praying and Learning con la Familia’ program a timely initiative in children’s ministry

For the last few years, the U.S. church has fostered ministerial formation through classes and university programs to prepare the Catholic leaders of tomorrow, who go on to focus on a variety of areas, including the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, parent ministry and youth ministry, to name a few.

But while many are quick to place youth ministry and children’s ministry under the same umbrella, it is initiatives such as “Praying and Learning con la Familia” of the Mexican American Catholic College in San Antonio that emphasize the latter’s need to be treated as a separate entity — one that can have its own leaders, resources, time and space.

“I am, totally, a promoter of investing in children,” Montserrat Baños, MACC’s director of children’s initiatives, told OSV News.”In the National Plan, we can make a call to look at the children. Let’s invest a little more in children, our preparation, and the formation of our ministers, and we will see how it’s worth it,” she added, referencing the National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic/Latino Ministry that was approved by the U.S. bishops last year.

Investing in this young population by offering training for priests, deacons, women religious and laypeople who, as their ministers, aim to form their faith and enrich their spiritual lives is precisely what MAAC is doing with the $1.2 million grant it received from the Lilly Endowment Inc., through its Nurturing Children through Worship and Prayer Initiative, in 2023.

Aside from the Archdiocese of San Antonio, other Texas dioceses would benefit from the grant, as well as dioceses in the neighboring states of Oklahoma and Arkansas. A description of the program stressed that beneficiaries will include “rural congregations with limited resources and families with children with disabilities.”

With a structured plan and funding, Baños joined the MACC in August 2023 to set the “Praying and Learning con la Familia” program in motion. The timing was perfect for Baños, a Mexican mother of six and a professor with a doctorate in philosophy looking to rejoin the workforce after her family’s move to San Antonio three years ago.

When she was offered the director of children’s initiatives role at MACC, “I said to myself: ‘Wow, God is good! He is giving me an opportunity better than the one I was looking for,” she recalled.

Striving to approach, encounter and serve children where they are — in the stage of development in which they find themselves — and without trying “to make them adapt to our expectations or conditions,” Baños said the “Praying and Learning con la Familia” initiative welcomes everyone interested in guiding children in their spiritual growth.

“Everyone can get some help, some resources, some skill, some training from it,” she noted.

The initiative encompasses three principal strategies designed to cater to the diverse needs and challenges of ministering to children of the region: the first regional Encuentro on Children’s Spirituality; a Children’s Spirituality course; and workshops to share best practices and strategies for parishes, schools and communities.

Miroslava Vargas, the director of sacramental preparation and adult faith formation at the Diocese of Laredo’s Pastoral Center in Texas, said she was determined to attend the program’s first Encuentro in San Antonio when she saw the “caliber of speakers that they had brought together.” Assembling a team of four — a catechist and a parent working with children with disabilities, a recently ordained priest and herself — she set out to the MACC campus on the weekend of April 26-28 to a gathering that exceeded expectations.

“I’ve been to many conferences, and one of the things that I absolutely saw that was distinct was that they offered some of the sessions, they had the same topic, but then they had a room that was designated for those that chose to listen to the English presentation …. and then, another room in Spanish,” she said to OSV News.

“They gave people a choice, which was, I thought, brilliant,” Vargas added.

Speakers at this inaugural Encuentro, which was titled “The Child and the Lamb,” included Mary Mirrione, the national director of the United States Association of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, Charleen Katra, executive director of the National Catholic Partnership on Disability, and Father Matthew De Leon, a young priest who supported the Uvalde, Texas, community after a May 24, 2022, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School took the lives of 19 children and two teachers.

Vargas was struck by how Father De Leon “brought out the voice of a child” into his presentation as he recounted how they reacted immediately after the incident. “The parents were praying and saying, ‘How could this happen?’ But then, he said, the children were saying, ‘Can you help my friend?'”

“They were thinking about their classmates — that’s what the children were thinking about,” Vargas said.

Following this gathering, MACC has been holding bimonthly sessions with participants in order to continue to assist them in developing child-focused strategies to implement children’s spirituality programs in their communities.

In addition to the regional Encuentro, the second strategy the program is implementing involves a bachelor’s and master’s degree in pastoral ministry from MACC, in which students can take a course in children’s spirituality from the “Praying and Learning con la Familia” program. With themes ranging from parenting and catechesis and child theology and disability to trauma-informed care, Baños is aware of the unique and innovative content of the course, as it is already a “success to notice the need to implement the ministry of children better, according to the children, not the adults.”

Responding to Pope Francis’ call to “go where they are,” Baños revealed that both of MACC’s degrees in parish ministry will soon be also offered in Spanish, fulfilling the institution’s “commitment to empowering, embrace and support the ministry and the service in the church of the minorities.”

While the workshops — that are part of the third strategy, which aims to share and spread the research done for the academic course, as well as the outcomes of the annual Encuentro — are geared more toward catechists, Baños said volunteers and parents also take part. Some of the topics the workshops include are theology of the child, adaptive catechesis and emotional connection with children, and liturgy and community.

Without losing momentum, Baños is already looking ahead, planning future annual Encuentros to continue developing the study of the burgeoning science behind children’s ministry.

“Our next Encuentro will talk about children between 9 and 12 years old. Then, the next Encuentro, in 2026, will be from 6 to 9. And then, the next one will be from ages 3 to 6,” Baños said.

For her part, Vargas is already seeing the impact of the initiative, saying that the first Encuentro called participants to “view children in a different light.”

“We must bring children up to the spotlight,” she said.

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