Read the Catechism in a Year image
Read the Catechism in a Year

Day 261 - The Fourth Commandment

The Fourth Commandment: Honor your father and your mother.
To whom does the Fourth Commandment refer, and what does it require of us? 
The Fourth Commandment refers in the first place to one’s physical parents, but also to the people to whom we owe our life, our well-being, our security, and our faith. 
What we owe in the first place to our parents—namely love, gratitude, and respect—should also govern our relations to people who guide us and are there for us. There are many people who represent for us a God-given, natural, and good authority: foster or step-parents, older relatives and ancestors, educators, teachers, employers, superiors. In the spirit of the Fourth Commandment we should do them justice. In the broadest sense, this commandment applies even to our duties as citizens to the State. 
What place does the family have in God’s plan of creation?
A man and a woman who are married to each other form, together with their children, a family. God wills that the love of the spouses, if possible, should produce children. These children, who are entrusted to the protection and care of their parents, have the same dignity as their parents.
God himself, in the depths of the Trinity, is communion. In the human sphere, the family is the primordial image of communion. The family is the unique school of living in relationships. Nowhere do children grow up as well as in an intact family, in which they experience heartfelt affection, mutual respect, and responsibility for one another. Finally, faith grows in the family, too; the family is, the Church tells us, a miniature church, a “domestic church”, the radiance of which should invite others into this fellowship of faith, charity, and hope.  (YOUCAT questions 367-368)
Dig Deeper: Corresponding CCC section (2196-2206) and other references here.