text: "Dad was hardly around."  
  
  My experience was different.  My father was around and knew his faith very well.  His generation and older were around and knew their faith.  But for the past fifty or so years, we've become weaker and weaker in our knowledge of and commitment to the faith.  Increasingly, fathers are not around because families have been broken, first because of divorce, and then even no-fault divorce.   Catholicism cannot be expected to thrive in this environment.