When he welcomed the participants at the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Family at the Clementine Hall, on Thursday 1 December 2011, Pope Benedict XVI told them: “The new evangelisation depends largely on the domestic Church. In our time, as in times past, the eclipse of God, the spread of ideologies contrary to the family and the degradation of sexual ethics are intertwined. And just as the eclipse of God and the crisis of the family are linked, so the new evangelisation is inseparable from the Christian family.”
In other words, evangelisation is not the privileged mission of some high-ranking Church officials. Not even the exclusive ministry of priests and nuns. But rather the universal mission of those who make up the Church, the baptised.
Deeply immersed as they are in the world affairs yet with their hearts focused on “the new heavens and the new earth” (Isa 66, 22) Christian families are divinely called to mince society with the powerful leaven of the Gospel. In Blessed John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation on the Christian family in the modern world, Familiaris Consortio, the Christian family, “far from being closed in on itself, [it] is by nature and vocation open to other families and to society, and undertakes its social role” (§ 42). On the other hand, as the same exhortation justly recalls, the Second Vatican Council states that “families will share their spiritual riches generously with other families too. Thus the Christian family, which springs from marriage as a reflection of the loving covenant uniting Christ with the Church, and as a participation in that covenant will manifest to all people the Saviour’s living presence in the world, and the genuine nature of the Church. This the family will do by the mutual love of the spouses, by their generous fruitfulness, their solidarity and faithfulness, and by the loving way in which all the members of the family work together” (§ 50).
Moreover, Familiaris Consortio emphasises Pope Paul VI’s appeal that if the family embraces the Gospel and allows itself to be shaped by it, it naturally becomes an evangelising community. “The family, like the Church, ought to be a place where the Gospel is transmitted and from which the Gospel radiates. In a family which is conscious of this mission, all the members evangelise and are evangelised. The parents not only communicate the Gospel to their children, but from their children they can themselves receive the same Gospel as deeply lived by them. And such a family becomes the evangeliser of many other families, and of the neighbourhood of which it forms part” (§ 52).
Jennifer and Greg Willits book, The Catholics Next Door: Adventures in Imperfect Living, tries to address the question on how to live as a Catholic family in today’s world. The Catholics Next Door, is not only aimed at parents and grandparents but practically to every Catholic believer. The greatest positive message it conveys is that through the difficulties persistently present within human weakness one grows and matures in his/her faith living.
Evangelising Catholic families is vital in our current post-modern culture. This can be done in two simple and relevant ways. First, by comparing one’s belief with one’s living of it. Second, by opening oneself to a sound instruction of the Catholic faith. In Jennifer’s view, the consequent result of the latter way would be that “once you know it and can appreciate the magnitude of its saving truth, sharing it with others naturally becomes easier”.
Are our families so closely united with Christ that they love each other? Would that not be an excellent form of reaching out to other families?
■ Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Ġwann