In December we will celebrate the Feast of The Holy Family and families are an important factor in all our lives. Parents love their children and children look to their parents for guidance and example.

Sometimes, when parents fail to do this, the whole of world history can be changed, as today’s little story will show:-

In 1828 a young Jewish boy was growing up in Germany, he was a boy who had great admiration for his father, who made sure that their family life revolved around their religion. Each week he would take his family to the synagogue to pray and to worship God, as his Jewish faith demanded. Then, in the boy’s late teens, disaster struck when his father lost his job and the family were forced to move to another town which unfortunately was without a synagogue. Still unable to find work, his father who was a lawyer eventually managed to set himself up in his own law firm. The only church in the town was Lutheran and all the best and richest people belonged to it. Then, one day his father suddenly announced that they were all going to become Lutherans, as this would be very good for his business. Bewildered and angry at his father’s betrayal of their Jewish religion, the boy left Germany and travelled to England where he continued his studies. Each day found the lad at The British Library formulating his own ideas and researching for a book he was writing, which was eventually published in 1864 and was entitled “Das Kapital.”

In that book he introduced a new world order and conceived a movement that was destined to bring hardship and misery to the lives of countless millions of innocent people.

The boy’s name was of course Karl Marx, the founder of communism and history was forever altered by a father who sold out his religion and principles in the name of profit.

“The day a child realises that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent.”
“The day when he forgives them, he then becomes an adult.”
“The day when he forgives himself, is when he becomes wise.”