Should I move my family to a more Christian environment?

[taylor2]

We have a dilemma. We live and I work in a place where there are liberal Catholics and lots of ecumenism. Also, we believe it is not a great place to bring up a family because this city (a well-known and popular tourist city) is full of prostitutes, crime, drugs, nightclubs, and generally a lot against Christianity and our beliefs as Catholics. We are only here because of the job.

We are generally worried for our only child’s soul. He is 8 and very naive and good-natured. Even my side of the family with cousins the same age as our son are not Christians, thereby having different morals to us. We do not want to bring our son up in this environment. Should we stay and fight the fight as best we can, or should we go to where my wife is from – a quieter, traditional Catholic city where I will not have a job possibly for a while, but we are able to live with her parents, which we have done before reasonably successfully with a home/granny situation? Are we doing the right thing by wanting to remove our son (and his soul) from an environment that we feel is dangerous, and we are uncomfortable with to try in an area that we feel would be better, hopefully, or should we just stay and carry on?

It would be a huge sacrifice to leave a well-paid job to go to nothing. We think it might be worth this sacrifice to try to help “save” our son and put him in a better environment. Any advice would be helpful.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

Giving up a well-paying job in order to move your family to an area where they will be better able to live out their Christian commitment is very noble. I would only recommend two things: One, you should resist the temptation to believe that doing so will “save” your son’s soul. While living in a more Christian environment can make living a Christian life easier, it does not guarantee that a person will ultimately choose to do so. And, two, you should not do anything that will make your family a burden on your wife’s parents. You and your wife are responsible for caring for your family; while loving grandparents can help out, they should not be asked to take back in adult children (and spouse, and their children) who should have long since become fully independent. If you want to move to this city, by all means start looking for work there, but don’t seek to move there until you can support yourself there entirely on your own.