Pope calls for more investment in families
Pope Francis has put a renewed focus on families with his declaration that the Church must invest in families to battle the rise of secularism. The pontiff also said the Church needed to “strengthen other forms of community to transmit the faith”.
“The big issue before us is to understand how to overcome the rupture that has been established in the transmission of faith,” Pope Francis told members of the Dicastery for Evangelisation. “To that end there is an urgent need to recover an effective relationship with families and formation centres.”
Developing faith in Christ “requires a meaningful experience lived in the family and in the Christian community as a life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ in order to be transmitted.”
Writing in his message to members of the dicastery during their plenary assembly, he said, “Without this real and existential encounter, one will always be subject to the temptation to make faith a theory and not a testimony of life.”
Pope Francis said the secularism of recent decades had created enormous difficulties for the Church. “From the loss of a sense of belonging to the Christian community to the indifference regarding the faith and its contents,” he said.
It is time therefore for the Church to “understand what effective response we are called to give to young generations so that they may recover the meaning of life”.
He noted that the lure of personal autonomy, “promoted as one of the pretences of secularism, cannot be thought of as independence from God because it is God himself who grants the personal freedom to act.”
Pope Francis urged members of the dicastery to develop a “spirituality of mercy” as the foundation of their work in evangelisation. People are more receptive to evangelisation when done with a “style of mercy”, he added. By communicating mercy, he added, “the heart opens more readily to conversion”.
Source CNS https://www.usccb.org/newsroom
Footnote: Majellan Media’s Dinner Table podcasts with Derek Boylen aim to help families reconnect and communicate more effectively. Listen at: https://majellan.media/the-dinner-table/
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