For most families planning a vacation, the first questions are usually about hotels, restaurants, or sightseeing. For one Catholic family in South Korea, the first question is always the same: where is the nearest church? That small, consistent habit, repeated across decades, has quietly shaped three generations of faith within a single family, offering a striking, real-world answer to a question troubling parishes across the aging Catholic world: how does faith actually get passed down when family life is busier and more fragmented than ever?
Meet the Hwang Family: Three Generations, One Living Faith
At the center of this story are Jo Gi-sik, 69, and Lee Seung-jin, 74, grandparents rooted in Gongdeok-dong Parish in the Archdiocese of Seoul. For them, attending Mass while traveling isn’t an inconvenience to work around; it’s simply part of how a trip is planned in the first place. That consistency has left a visible mark on their grandsons, Hwang Si-won, 11, and Hwang Ye-chan, 8, who grew up watching faith woven naturally into ordinary family life rather than treated as a separate obligation.
Si-won, the older of the two boys, now prays the Rosary regularly, makes the sign of the cross before and after meals at school, and recently spent a month attending early morning daily Mass in preparation to become an altar server. He has said simply that watching his grandparents pray made him want to follow their example. That quiet transmission continues through his parents, Lee Yeon-ji, 44, and Hwang Jun-hyeop, 44, who belong to Jichuk-dong John Parish in the Diocese of Uijeongbu and have leaned on the grandparents for both practical childcare support and, more significantly, spiritual formation.
Why Faith by Example Works Better Than Instruction Alone
What stands out most about the Hwang family’s approach is what it deliberately avoids: pressure. The grandparents don’t lecture their grandsons about religious obligation; instead, they simply ask what the boys prayed that week, whether they attended Sunday Mass, and how they tried to help others, treating small acts of kindness as worth noticing and encouraging. The emphasis falls on consistent presence rather than persuasion.
That same principle has reshaped the boys’ father as well. Recognizing that he couldn’t credibly ask his children to pray while neglecting his own spiritual life, Hwang Jun-hyeop enrolled twice in the Mother and Father School, a faith formation program run through the Archdiocese of Seoul’s Sunshine Pastoral Center, and later joined Chiro, a program that lets parents and children learn about the faith together rather than separately. When his son attended a month of daily Mass to prepare for altar serving, Hwang accompanied him, later reflecting that he found himself learning from the experience more often than teaching. Faith, in this family, has clearly moved in more than one direction.
Why This Story Is Significant for the Church Today
This account carries genuine significance for the Church. It offers a practical model for one of Catholicism’s greatest pastoral challenges: sustaining faith transmission as busy parents have less time for religious formation. In South Korea, the Catholic population now exceeds six million, yet Mass attendance has fallen and nearly a third of Catholics are 65 or older—a trend mirrored across Europe and North America. The Hwang family’s experience shows that grandparents may be one of the Church’s most valuable and underused resources for passing on the faith.
At the same time, an honest reading of this moment invites a more cautious observation. The very fact that grandparents have become such a central pillar of faith formation partly reflects a structural strain within modern Catholic family life, parents working demanding schedules with limited time for their children’s religious formation, rather than a fully intentional pastoral strategy. That reality raises a legitimate question for parish leaders: what happens to this pathway of faith transmission in families where grandparents are unavailable, geographically distant, or not practicing Catholics themselves? The Hwang family’s witness is beautiful, but it also quietly points to a gap the wider Church still needs to address more deliberately.
An Ancient Pattern of Faith Passed Through Grandparents
This story echoes something Scripture describes nearly two thousand years earlier. In his second letter to Timothy, the Apostle Paul reminds his young protégé of the sincere faith that first lived in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice before taking root in Timothy himself, a direct, named acknowledgment that faith often travels through family relationships long before it becomes a personal conviction. The Hwang family’s story is, in many ways, a living continuation of that same ancient pattern.
Pope Francis’ establishment of the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly in 2021 was built on precisely this insight: that older generations serve as living bridges, carrying faith, memory, and wisdom forward at a moment when that transmission can no longer be assumed to happen automatically. The Hwang family did not set out to make a theological statement; they simply lived their faith consistently in front of their grandchildren. Yet that consistency turns out to be exactly what pastoral leaders have identified as the most effective form of faith formation available to any family.
Spiritual Resolution
The deeper spiritual resolution in this story is simple, even if it is not always easy to live out: faith is transmitted far more effectively through consistent example than through instruction alone. Children absorb what they watch their parents and grandparents do far more readily than what they are told to believe. A grandparent who prays visibly, attends Mass without treating it as optional, and quietly notices a grandchild’s small acts of kindness communicate something no formal lesson can fully replace.
For families anywhere, regardless of culture or country, this resolution offers something immediately actionable without requiring any special program or resource: faith takes root most naturally when it is simply lived, openly and consistently, in front of the people who are watching, especially the youngest members of the family who may not yet have the words to ask about it directly.
A Small Family, A Larger Lesson
The Hwang family’s story is not built on dramatic events or extraordinary achievements; it is built on decades of quiet, consistent witness, checking for a nearby Mass before checking into a hotel, praying together as a matter of habit rather than obligation. In doing so, three generations of one Korean Catholic family offer a meaningful answer to a challenge facing Catholic communities everywhere: faith endures not because it is forced, but because it is lived out loud enough for the next generation to notice. Coverage of stories like this one, including from platforms such as EWTN Asia Pacific News, continues to help families around the world see what intergenerational faith transmission can look like in practice.
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