J. Peter Nixon in the first in our series: "I have tried to live my faith in a way that would make it attractive to my children. Now and then I feel it’s working."

We are that family, the one with the very young, very active children who decided to come to your quiet, even somnolent Mass. We did not sit in the crying room.

To put it in Vatican II terms, our vocation is to help our children discern their vocation.

The spirituality at the heart of each child cries out to be nourished; helping children develop their sense of wonder through play will go far in this regard.

Our backgrounds were different, but our Catholic identity ran deep, with Irish-Catholic roots spreading in almost every direction.

Every poll shows the nonreligiously affiliated—now called “nones”—increasing in number. That number includes all my grown children. But it wasn’t always this way.