Several weeks ago, I had the inspiring experience of being a delegate to the World Meeting of Families in Rome.
Instituted by St. John Paul II and held every three years, this gathering joins Catholic leaders from all over the world to lift up marriage and family as the domestic Church and as the sacred sacrament of Christ’s union with the Church.
Through prayer, formation, conversation, testimonials, and celebration, we listened to many voices of experience and learned how to better serve and support engaged and married couples, as well as families in all of their beauty and diversity.
The United States delegation consisted of 16 families with children, one priest, and four bishops.
We stayed at the Casa Bonus Pastor, a Catholic guest house only a 15-minute walk to the Vatican.
Building a domestic Church
The World Meeting of Families began with an opening ceremony on a Wednesday evening in the St. Paul VI Hall, just off St. Peter’s Square.
Il Volo, a very popular Italian music group performed (to the great delight of the Italians!), Pope Francis arrived, and five families from different parts of the world gave testimony about their joys and sorrows, experiences, and struggles of marriage and parenting.
The evening highlighted the challenging but good tension of striving to live the Catholic ideals of family life while acknowledging the limitations, frailties, and difficulties all of us face in this lofty vocation.
The following three days were an intensive round of presentations from Catholic laity who are living out marriage and family ministry in an astounding variety of contexts and situations.
Many speakers expressed the need for mentor couples and families to accompany, support, and evangelize their peers within the parish and the community; this theme led me to think of our Go Make Disciples Phase II, in which we asked each parish to do just that, to form and equip individuals, couples, and families to befriend, mentor, and walk with others in a deeper embrace of Christian discipleship.
One couple from our delegation offered a compelling presentation on the family as the domestic Church.
Since every Christian family is indeed a small but essential communion in Christ, the parents are called to pray, form, love, and lead each other and their children into a profound, practical, lived experience of the Trinity.
Just as God in His very nature is communal and relational, as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit perfectly and fully give themselves to each other in love, so too the family, in a life of charity, faith, forgiveness, service, support, and prayer both experience and express the interior nature of God Himself!
This spiritual vision is extraordinary, lofty, and yet livable, one which we need to work harder to help our husbands and wives, parents and children to understand and embrace, so they can taste the rich abundance of family life as envisioned by God.
The Catechism puts it very well. “The Christian family constitutes a specific revelation and realization of ecclesial communion, and for this reason, it can and should be called a domestic church. It is a community of faith, hope, and charity; it assumes a singular importance in the Church, as is evident in the New Testament. The Christian family is a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. In the procreation and education of children, it reflects the Father’s work of creation. It is called to partake of the prayer and sacrifice of Christ. Daily prayer and the reading of the Word of God strengthen it in charity. The Christian family has an evangelizing and missionary task.” (nos. 2205-2206)
The World Meeting of Families ended with a Mass in St. Peter’s Square.
Organizers pushed the start time of the celebration back because of Rome’s intense heat and humidity, so that welcome sections of shade kept most of us out of the broiling sun.
In his homily, the pope praised the family as the sacred place where each member learns to love, believe, and sacrifice for others.
He also expressed the need to defend the family, to protect it from “the toxins of selfishness, individualism, today’s culture of indifference and waste . . .”
He reflected on the family as a mission of Christian witness and service, encouraging all families to look ahead to Christ and to share the joy of family love in a way that is open and outward directed towards the suffering and the needy.
‘Inspired and encouraged’
I left Rome inspired and encouraged by all that I had seen and heard, the people I had met, the fruitful initiatives growing all over the world in the service of marriage and family.
I came home, grateful for the many families in our diocese who heroically live out their mission in this challenging moment, but also determined to ask how the Church can better serve the married couples and families who need all the support, mentoring, and help they can get.
In the face of the decline of sacramental marriages, how do we help young people embrace the beautiful vision of life, which God lays before us, even in the first pages of Genesis, when the Lord creates man and woman for Himself and each other in a communion of love, self-giving, and complementarity?
In a culture profoundly wounded by the sexual revolution, how do we help people honor the gift and intention of sexual difference, fertility, and communion? To be continued . . .