106. Teaching Children to Speak to Elders and Priests: Reverence, Courtesy, and Truthfulness

"Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and shalt honour the person of the aged man." - Leviticus 19:32

Children should be taught how to speak to elders and priests because speech reveals what they believe about authority, age, office, and holy things. A child who speaks to everyone in the same tone may seem confident, but he is often being formed in flattening familiarity. A Catholic home should teach courtesy, reserve, truthfulness, and reverence in speech.

This is not social polish for its own sake. It is moral training. The child learns that father and mother are not merely larger companions, elders are not decorative background, and priests are not religious functionaries like any other public figure.

Courtesy is often treated as optional charm. In reality it is closely related to justice. It renders to others what is fitting in speech, posture, and manner according to their age, dignity, office, or weakness.

Children should therefore learn that they do not address grandparents, visitors, priests, and older persons with the same loose tone they use in play. Difference in address helps teach difference in station.

Children should be taught to greet elders, answer them respectfully, listen when spoken to, and avoid the slouching indifference that modern life often treats as normal. They should not interrupt constantly, perform boredom openly, or answer in clipped and careless fragments.

This does not require stiffness or fear. It requires reverence. The child should know that age deserves regard, that experience should not be mocked, and that weakness in the old should not become an occasion for impatience.

Children should also be taught that priests are to be approached with a distinct reverence. This is true not because every priest is personally admirable, but because the office is holy and the priest stands in relation to sacrifice, doctrine, and sacramental care.

Children should therefore learn:

• to greet priests respectfully;
• to answer plainly rather than flippantly;
• to avoid joking familiarity in sacred contexts;
• to keep posture and tone more guarded in their presence;
• to speak truthfully in confession and in ordinary dealings.

This forms the Catholic instinct that holy office is not common.

Children should not be trained into mere performative politeness. A smooth tone joined to lying, evasiveness, or manipulation is not virtue. Reverence must remain truthful.

So the child should learn both to answer respectfully and to answer honestly. Courtesy should not be a mask worn over bad faith. It should be the ordered manner in which truth is spoken.

Many bad speech habits appear small at first: rolling eyes at older relatives, addressing a priest as though he were simply another casual adult, half-listening while answering, joking during serious exchange, or speaking in public with domestic roughness. These habits should be corrected early.

If they are laughed off as personality, the child slowly loses the instinct of reverence. Later it becomes harder to teach respect for age, office, and the sacred.

Children hear how parents speak to grandparents, priests, the elderly, and guests. If parents are abrupt, mocking, casually familiar, or coldly utilitarian, children learn more from that than from lessons on manners.

If parents are respectful without being servile, warm without being coarse, and truthful without being rude, children begin to absorb a Catholic style of speech.

Teaching children to speak to elders and priests is part of forming reverence, justice, and truthfulness. It helps the child recognize difference in dignity and office without fear or pretense. A house that teaches this well gives children one more protection against the flattening spirit of modern life, which wants everything familiar, equalized, and casually handled. Catholic life teaches something cleaner: speak truly, respectfully, and according to what is owed.

See also Holy Old Age: Prayer, Counsel, and the Vocation of Elders, How Parents Should Speak to Children: Commands, Explanation, Praise, and Correction, Ordinary Conversation Under Truth, Charity, and Restraint, and Fatherly Authority as Service, Judgment, and Protection.