Commentary: We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know

Thomas Aquinas laid down a truth so simple it is easy to miss: nothing is loved unless it is first known. You cannot love a stranger whose name you do not know. Love requires an object, and the object must first be encountered, understood, received.

Apply this to God, and to the Catholic faith as the ordinary way most of us come to know Him, and something quietly devastating becomes clear. If we were never taught the faith, never given the Catechism in any depth, never introduced to the treasury of Catholic prayer, doctrine, and spiritual tradition, then we were kept at a distance from the very God who was offering Himself to us. We did not stop loving God. But we may have been loving a God we only partially knew. And partial knowledge produces a partial love.

Those who grew up Catholic in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s received their faith during one of the most disorienting periods in the life of the modern Church. The Second Vatican Council had just closed. Its documents were profound, but what filtered down to parishes and schools was often not the documents themselves but a spirit of clearing away and letting go. Religious education shifted from catechesis, the systematic handing-on of what the Church believes, to something more experiential, more vague.

Many Catholics of that era attended Mass every Sunday and could not have told you what was happening on the altar, or why. The Incarnation, the Real Presence, the theology of grace, the lives of the saints: these were either absent from their formation or presented so tentatively as to leave no lasting impression. The result was not a generation of bad Catholics. It was a generation of often deeply faithful people who were handed a map with the center torn out.

It is worth saying clearly: growing in the Catholic faith is not primarily an academic exercise. It is not about accumulating facts or winning arguments. It is about forming a heart that knows God intimately, loves Him genuinely, and serves Him faithfully in the ordinary moments of daily life. The intellect matters, and it matters deeply, because we cannot love what we do not know. But knowledge that does not descend from the head into the heart has not yet completed its journey.

This is why the call to grow in faith never ends. Whether you are twenty or seventy, newly confirmed or returning after decades away, the invitation is the same: go deeper. Read. Pray. Ask questions. Sit with the mysteries. The faith is not a body of content to be mastered and set aside. It is a relationship to be lived, tended, and deepened for as long as we draw breath. And every stage of life, including the later ones, brings its own capacity for understanding things that could not have been understood before.

At the same time, those of us who have been given more must hold it with great gentleness. The generation that received so little was not negligent. They were not indifferent. They were faithful with what they had, often heroically so, and they deserve to be met with the same patience and mercy that God has always extended to them. Formation is not a competition. It is a gift to be offered freely, without judgment, to anyone willing to receive it.

The board members of Catholic Parents Online share one desire: that every person who encounters this CPO would come to know, love, and serve God more deeply. That is not a slogan. It is the reason we exist. We are not here to scold or to point fingers at what was lost. We are here because the faith is worth knowing fully, and no one should have to find their way back to it alone.

What the Catholic Church holds is not simply a set of rules or a cultural inheritance. It is Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in their deepest and most inexhaustible form. Truth: a coherent account of who God is, who we are, and why any of this matters. Beauty: a tradition of prayer, art, music, and liturgy that has moved human hearts for two thousand years precisely because it participates in something beyond itself. Goodness: a moral vision that does not merely manage behavior but forms persons, families, and communities capable of genuine love.

That is what was lost in the decades of thin formation. And that is what Catholic Parents Online exists to restore, one reader, one family, one article at a time.

Something amazing has been happening in Catholic life over the past two decades. A younger generation, often the children and grandchildren of those who received so little formation, has discovered a far richer inheritance. They have found the Catechism and read it. They have encountered the writings of the great mystics and the intellectual tradition of Catholic philosophy. They are devoted to the rosary, they wear medals, they fast, they make pilgrimages. They speak of their faith not as a background cultural identity but as a living relationship.

To the generation before them, this can feel unsettling. Are they hiding me? Where did this come from? Why do they know things I was never taught? The answer, given with all gentleness, is this: because they were given what you were not. And that is not your fault.

The Catholic tradition has always understood that God writes straight with crooked lines. Consider what it means that your granddaughter prays before a meal with words you barely recognize. Consider that your nephew can explain what Catholics believe about the Eucharist, and does so with a joy that makes the doctrine feel alive. Consider that they look at you with love, not condescension, when they speak of their faith. Consider the joy they have when they can pray a decade of the rosary with you. This is the hand of God, extended again, with the same offer it has always carried: Come. Know me. And in knowing me, love me.

It is never too late to receive what was not given. The Catechism is not only for the young. The Mass yields more to those who approach it with decades of lived experience. Augustine did not find God in his fullness until midlife, and he became one of the greatest teachers the Church has ever known.

It is precisely this hunger, in parents, grandparents, and the children they are raising, that Catholic Parents Online exists to answer. You cannot give what you do not have. And so CPO provides what so many Catholics of the post-conciliar decades were never given: resources, formation, encouragement, and the practical tools to live an authentically Catholic life. From Fr. Robert Altier’s daily homilies to articles on marriage, family, and faith, everything CPO offers is ordered toward one end: helping Catholic families know their faith more fully, so they can love God more completely.

Carley Sonnen

Catholic Parents Online Board Member