"Our love for one another in the home and beyond is the prayer of our lives."

Over thirty priests and people from thirteen parishes of Wrexham Diocese gathered at Loreto Retreat Centre in Llandudno on March 27^th 2007 for an evening with Michael Quinn, founder of The Family Caring Trust. The event was organised to introduce Home is a Holy Place in the diocese. In welcoming everyone Bishop Edwin Regan pointed to the importance of the home as the heart of faith in God.  “The ordinary things in life are not banal, mundane or without meaning,” he said. “They are shot through with God’s love.”

Parents of seven, Michael and his wife Terri, are authors of ‘What Does God Expect of Parents’, a three week programme for parents and children preparing for Confirmation. Michael used extracts from the course to illustrate the ‘little church’ spirituality at the heart of the programme, pointing out that this important idea is still relatively unknown and unexplored. "What most people don’t realise," he said, "is that this idea of a family being a little church actually offers a very rich blueprint for family living that has been little explored. It has really not filtered down to families over the past 45 years since the Vatican Council. So families are still by and large being fed a diet of limited and not very relevant spirituality. They’re being sold short, with an almost exclusive diet of prayer and religious practices and the ‘me and Jesus’ spirituality, not the community spirituality, not the Body of Christ spirituality. Vatican II tells us that we are saved not so much as individuals but as a people, that we’re saved as families, as people in relationship. So little Church is a very important emphasis. Our love for one another in the home and beyond it, is our deepest and most important prayer, it’s the prayer of our lives."

Debby Jackman of Our Lady & St James Parish in Bangor was one of several parents present who expressed appreciation afterwards. “It gave me confidence. In making holiness relate to real life, it brought it closer to home, made it manageable.” “We all have small children and full-time jobs,” said another mother. “So it’s reassuring to know that all we do and take for granted are part of the holiness of the home.” Bishop Regan identified opportunities for the future. “The next step is to look at how to feed these ideas into existing groups. The groups that gather to prepare for baptism, first Holy Communion and confirmation seem to be a good way forward.”