St. Monica Project Helps Parents Whose Children Left the Catholic Faith| National Catholic Register
About 15 years ago, Father Jay Buhman had a middle-of-the-night discussion with an elderly man that tore him up inside.
The man, about 80, had come to the Cathedral of the Risen Christ in Lincoln, Nebraska, for his regular hour of Eucharistic adoration, which began right after the priest’s hour ended.
The man spoke about his adult daughter who had stopped practicing the Catholic faith and who had recently railed against the Catholic Church online.
It’s a common situation for Catholic families in the United States, where about one-eighth of all adults in the country identify as former Catholics, according to a Pew Research Center survey published earlier this year. The well-known phenomenon is the subject of heartfelt conversations at parish churches and has spawned prayer groups and support groups.
“He basically just broke down right there in the main aisle of the adoration chapel,” Father Buhman told the Register, “in that you could really see his deep love for the Eucharist and Our Lord, and his daughter, as well, but really his lament that she didn’t see what he saw.”
Father Buhman didn’t know what to say.
“The response ‘Just keep praying’ seemed really shallow and empty,” he said. “In the context of it all, it just felt inadequate.”
A few years later, the priest hit upon an idea: a devotion meant specifically for Catholics pining over a family member who has strayed from the faith.
The St. Monica Project, also known as “Masses and Tears,” is named for the fourth-century North African woman whose years of praying for her wayward son led not only to his baptism but also to his becoming a priest, bishop, theologian and doctor of the Church.
St. Augustine, who famously spent much of his adolescence and young adulthood in sexual immorality and philosophical drifting, described his eventual conversion to the Catholic faith (in his book Confessions) as coming “out of my mother’s heart’s blood, through her tears night and day poured out.”
For the devotion, Father Buhman commissioned an artist to make an image of St. Monica catching tears in her hands and giving them to God. He wrote a prayer for the reversion of fallen-away loved ones and for those who long for them to return, and he also encouraged people to have Masses said for those who have strayed.
“I was just looking for something that would encourage their perseverance, to be filled with trust and confidence that God is working,” Father Buhman told the Register.
Common Problem
About 43% of Americans raised as Catholic “no longer identify as Catholic,” according to a February 2025 survey by Pew Research Center. And while some dioceses are seeing large numbers of converts, as the Register reported earlier this year, those figures aren’t keeping up with the number of adults leaving the Catholic Church.
“For every U.S. adult who has become a Catholic after being raised in some other religion or without a religion, there are 8.4 adults who say they were raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer describe themselves as Catholics,” the Pew survey found.
One of the largest demographic groups in the United States is ex-Catholic.
“Everybody has some in their family,” said Alison Schieber, of St. Joseph, Missouri, who has two young-adult sons who are away from the Church. “Which is sad. We’re bleeding out.”
Schieber is one of the founders of her parish’s St. Monica Club, which meets two Mondays a month at 6:20 p.m. at St. James Catholic Church in St. Joseph.
Another founder, Sarah Murray, who is praying for a relative who has been away from the faith for more than 20 years, said the group prays the Rosary together for their loved ones and for priests, who they hope will reconcile their loved ones to the Church sometime in the future.
She said similar groups have begun in Kansas, Iowa and Kentucky.
“And it is beautiful because it’s timely, it’s urgent, and it’s epidemic,” Murray said.
Schieber said she knows of comparable associations of practicing Catholics who are worried about their lost-sheep loved ones that consist of book clubs and discussion groups.
“But I’m done discussing this. I just have to pray,” said Schieber, who belongs to four prayer groups for this intention and whose daily routine includes Mass and all 20 decades of the Rosary. “Because I’m not bringing my kids back. God is.”
Healing for Those Praying
Catholic clerics who spoke to the Register described a range of emotions that parents dealing with fallen-away adult children go through, including guilt (“What should I have done differently?”), blame (“What should the Catholic school I sent my kids to have done differently?”), and frustration (“Why is it taking so long for my kids to come back?”).
“Father Buhman’s program doesn’t answer the question why it happened. I think he’s just reaching out in a very loving, pastoral way to offer comfort and spiritual consolation to parents that have children who have drifted away,” said Bishop James Conley, who leads the Diocese of Lincoln, which includes Father Buhman’s current parishes, All Saints in Holdrege and St. John in Smithfield.
“Obviously, it’s a devastating thing for parents to live with. But ultimately God is in control. And we have to have hope, and we have to pray that God will call them to himself in the end. And it’s perhaps our prayers that will make that happen,” Bishop Conley said. “We have to have confidence that God hears our prayers and pray with confidence that he will take care of his children and our children.”
Sondra Jonson, the artist who made the St. Monica image using about 15 colored pencils, told the Register she has also prayed the devotion. She has three adult sons, including one who was away from the Church for more than a dozen years before he came back.
When Father Buhman called her to ask her to make the image, she was immediately drawn to his emphasis on having Masses said for the lost sheep.
“Who are you going to turn to? It’s close to impossible to convince a child who has turned away from the Church. You’re just going to drive them further away if you argue,” Jonson said. “When you have a Mass said for them, you really put them in God’s hands.”
She said praying for personal conversion is essential when praying for someone else’s conversion.
“You are the one who can change. You can’t change anyone else,” Jonson said. “You do tend to obsess when you know somebody else is going in a direction that’s probably going to get worse and worse. Putting this in God’s hands is probably one of the best things you can do.”
As for the image, her favorite part is the rays from the Eucharist that envelop St. Monica while she is looking downward at her hands trying to catch her tears.
“I like the idea that she’s covered in light that emanates from the Blessed Sacrament, but she doesn’t know it, and nobody else probably could see it,” Jonson said. “I think it’s a good message: that sometimes when we feel God is farthest away, he’s actually holding us.”
Opportunity, Not Disaster
Father Buhman said he encourages parents to think of their fallen-away children’s situation not so much as a burden but as an opportunity, just as he sees St. Monica not as a saint who also had to deal with a family heartache, but as a woman who became a saint because of the way she dealt with the family heartache.
“When we don’t have a proper understanding of unanswered prayers, that actually gets in the way of our own relationship with the Lord,” Father Buhman said.
“I would argue that Monica’s sainthood actually came out of her prayer for Augustine. Monica is just an ordinary wife and mother who became extraordinary through this process: God actually sanctified her through this process,” he said.
A key fruit of the prayers of the St. Monica groups is the effect on the people saying them, most of whom are already practicing Catholics but become more aware that they, too, need healing.
“We realize it was a way that God was working to soften our own hearts, to draw closer to him even as we were working to bring prodigals home in our families,” Murray said.
“I think of Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry his cross. So we’re not just praying for the prodigals and their priests. We’re praying for those people who are hurting that their loved one is away, and we’re supposed to be Simon of Cyrene to them,” Murray said.
Baby Steps
On the third Wednesday of the month, churchgoers at Holy Angels Catholic Church in Basehor, Kansas, are encouraged to write the names of fallen-away loved ones in a book on the ambo in front of the altar. Special prayers are offered for them during the 8 a.m. Mass and afterward, said Father Richard McDonald, the pastor.
“We all have family that we love that for whatever reason are dissociated from the faith now, and other friends for whom the light of Christ has gone out,” Father McDonald told the Register by telephone.
He said he has seen the prayers offer “a real sense of peace” to people who come to the Mass.
“For them, it’s like, ‘I’m not the only one praying,’” Father McDonald said.
At a parish in Falmouth, Maine, Lisa Agren was shocked when 35 women showed up for a new stand-alone St. Monica Club she organized in December 2023 — reluctantly, since speaking in public and running a meeting are far from her comfort zone.
About 20 ladies now come every month for an hour-long meeting that starts with prayer and a reflection from St. Augustine’s Confessions, followed by the Rosary and a chaplet to St. Monica. Each participant is invited to write down prayer intentions on a piece of paper, which are then put in a hat for each woman to draw out and pray for that intention during the following month.
“The ladies really like that. They feel that they have more direct connection with each other,” said Agren, who lives in Cumberland and volunteers at Parish of the Holy Eucharist, which encompasses four churches in the area.
At the end, participants are invited to share any good news they have on the spiritual front.
The generational decline in engagement with the Catholic Church can be seen in Agren’s own family.
She grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, one of seven children, all of whom still go to church. But of her own five children, all in their 30s, only one is currently practicing the faith.
Agren, who prays for her children and for her non-Catholic husband, said she hasn’t seen conversions yet, but she has noticed some movement since she began the St. Monica Club.
A non-practicing son who is divorced reacted positively, not angrily, when she gently suggested that he pursue a declaration of nullity from the Church, which would free him to marry in the Church in the future.
A non-practicing daughter expressed astonishment when she found out her mother had started a group to pray for the conversion of her children and asked if the next time she is in Maine she can come to a meeting.
“I have seen a few changes within my family,” Agren said. “I have to keep reminding myself that it’s God’s time.
“Which I’m not good at,” she said. “I have to work on patience.”
