Families are both “a gift and a task” according to Pope Leo XIV, who was speaking Sep. 19 to participants of a Jubilee Meeting organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM) on the future of the family.
Leo said the Jubilee invites people to think about their roots: “The faith received from our parents, the persevering prayer of our grandmothers reeling the beads of the rosary, their simple, humble and honest life that, as leaven, sustained so many families and communities.”
“In them we learned that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. In him we find our true joy: The joy of knowing that we are at home, in the place where we should be,” the pope said.
“We must not fall into the danger of basing our lives on human securities and worldly expectations,” he added.
The pontiff looked at the words of Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati, who he canonized on Oct. 7. The saint – who died in 1925 – spoke about the temptation to “go pulling” when faced with the temptation to falling into the danger of basing our lives on human securities and worldly expectations.
“We are also aware that today there are real threats to the dignity of the family, such as problems related to poverty, lack of work and access to health systems, abuse of the most vulnerable, migration, and wars,” Leo said.
He said public institutions and the Church have the responsibility to seek ways to promote dialogue and strengthen the elements in society that favor family life and the education of its members.
“In this context, we can understand the family as a gift and a task. It is crucial to promote the co-responsibility and protagonism of families in social, political and cultural life – promoting their valuable contribution to the community,” the pope said.
“In every child, in every wife or husband, God entrusts to us his Son, his Mother – as he did with Saint Joseph – to be, together with them, the basis, leaven and witness of God’s love in the midst of men,” he added. T
He said families need to be “a domestic Church and a home where the fire of the Holy Spirit burns.”
Leo then turned to his predecessor of the 1960s and 1970s, Saint Paul VI who called on people to follow the example of the Holy Father when he was in Nazareth in 1964.
Pope Paul called on families to supporting others in silence, in work and in prayer, “so that God may carry out in them the plan of love that he has reserved for them.”
This is the love that is incarnate in every life born to faith from baptism and anointed “to proclaim this year of grace” to all, which will encounter Jesus in the Eucharist and in the sacrament of forgiveness, which will follow him in the mission as a priest, as a Christian father or as a consecrated person, until the definitive encounter, to the goal of our hope.
Pope Leo was echoing comments he made in an interview with Crux’s Elise Ann Allen, published on Thursday.
“Families need to be supported, what they call the traditional family,” Leo said in July.
“The family is father, mother, and children. I think that the role of the family in society, which has at times suffered in recent decades, once again has to be recognized, strengthened,” he continued.
“I just wonder out loud if the question about polarization and how people treat one another doesn’t also come from situations where people did not grow up in the context of a family where we learn – that’s the first place you learn how to love one another, how to live with one another, how to tolerate one another, and how to form the bonds of communion. That’s the family. If we take away that basic building block it becomes very difficult to learn that in other ways,” Leo said.
In his conversation with Allen, who spoke about his “wonderful relationship” with his mother and father.
“They had a very happy married life for over 40 years. Even today people comment on this, even with my brothers. We’re still very close, even though one is far on one end politically, we’re in different places. In my experience, that has been an extremely important factor of who I am and how I’m even able to be who I am right now,” Leo said.
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