Coinciding with the 5th World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, which will bring thousands to Knock for the National Grandparents Pilgrimage on Sunday, the Catholic Grandparents Association celebrates their 25th anniversary.
The Catholic Grandparents Association is the organisation responsible for the creation of the World Day. Speaking on the importance of grandparents and their influence on family faith, Catherine Wiley, Founder of the Association said “it’s always good to be incredibly welcoming” to the youth.
“It’s very easy to be disappointed as a grandparent or a parent when their lives don’t turn out the way you expect them to, when they don’t live up to your expectations,” she said.
Ms Willey said the youth are having to deal with the influences of individualism and secularisation of the world, which can influence on how they interact with faith. “You’re not their best friend, you’re the grandmother or the parent.” It’s the family role to pass down the faith.
In a world of social media, “you’re the influence, grandparents are influencers. They [the grandchildren] only think of celebrities as being influencers. [But] the grandparents might look at yourselves in the role of influencer,” Ms Wiley said grandparents must “see just how much you influence your families physically, spiritually, emotionally, financially, and timely… The grandparents are the glue.”
Ms Wiley said the idea to create a world day for grandparents was born “with a simple pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock.” She noticed then that “grandparents all over were suffering from what I was suffering from, a sense of failure, that we weren’t passing on our faith to our grandchildren as we should be doing.”
As a result, the Association contacted Pope Benedict XVI who wrote a ‘Prayer for Grandparents’ in 2008. It was at the 2017 National Grandparents Pilgrimage to Knock Shrine that the formal appeal to Pope Francis for a World Day for Grandparents was launched, which was established in 2021.
