What do I do about my anti-Catholic daughter-in-law?

[dorris]

I have a very anti-Catholic daughter-in-law. I pray for her but she only seems to get more distant. She doesn’t want anything to do with our family but the very minimum contact to satisfy our son and to not feel guilty because she professes to be a Christian. We are not allowed any contact with the grandsons unless they are present. We are invited to school activities so we can observe them but we can’t have contact with them to develop any kind of relationship. We can’t take them anywhere because I suppose she’s afraid we’ll have a Catholic influence on them. How can anyone be so hateful? It’s so heartbreaking.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

I am very sorry that your daughter-in-law is so anti-Catholic and that she has prevented you from having a relationship with your grandchildren. I wonder though if you have neglected to assign sufficient blame to your son for allowing this to happen. Your daughter-in-law’s moral culpability might be mitigated if she is acting out of conscience, however malformed her conscience may be in its understanding of Catholicism. Your son, on the other hand, who was presumably raised Catholic by you, married an anti-Catholic woman and has allowed his wife to treat his parents with anti-Catholic bigotry and to prevent them from having a relationship with his children. He has been satisfied with “very minimum contact” between his parents and his family. If there is to be any kind of resolution to this heartbreaking set of circumstances, your son will have to be the one to meet his responsibility of respect and honor for his parents by insisting that his wife and children treat his parents and family with the dignity and courtesy they are due. If he refuses to do so, it is he who should bear the brunt of your parental displeasure.

Recommended reading:

God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts by Gregory K. Popcak
When Difficult Relatives Happen to Good People by Leonard Felder