(This is an extract from the article authored by Dr. Beena Manoj)
By C V Joseph –
It is a great joy to live as a Catholic family with the assurance of the Holy Father: “Those who accept His offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ, joy is constantly born anew”! (Evangelii Gauium 1)
The Catholic understanding of marriage and family has undergone a radical change over the last 50 years. In the early part of the last century marriage was understood largely in terms of its purposes. The primary purpose was the procreation and education of children. The secondary purpose was mutual help and as a remedy for sexual desire. Prior to Vatican II, there were some efforts to broaden the Church’s understanding of marriage that laid the foundation for the changes enumerated below that officially came with the Second Vatican Council.
The many current issues and questions concerning marriage and family life are receiving serious attention as the Church continues to meet Pope John’s challenge to read and respond to “the signs of the times.”
The “future of evangelization”, insisted St. John Paul II, the pre-eminent champion of marriage and family life, “depends in great part on the Church of the home” (Familiaris Consortio 52)
He believed the family would play a vital role in the new springtime of evangelization and would be much more than a mere bystander in the Church’s evangelizing mission.
As Pope Benedict sees it, “The new evangelization 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 crises of the family are linked, so the new evangelization is inseparable from the Christian family”.
(Pope Benedict XVI – Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Family).
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis presents “some guidelines to encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelization, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality” (17). What does the exhortation speak to the family? It devotes only one paragraph to the family. Nevertheless, in this one paragraph (66), the Holy Father powerfully reaffirms the Church’s teachings on the true nature of marriage. He describes a “profound cultural crisis” facing the family. Parents are to passing along the faith to their children. Marriage is defined more by emotional satisfaction and the “feelings and momentary needs of the couple” than it is by “obligations assumed by spouses who accept to enter a total communion of life”. Individualism weakens relationships within the family and “distorts family bonds”.
We may however make a broader reading of Evangelii Gaudium in the light of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: “The family is, so to speak, the domestic Church” (Lumen Gentium 11). What the Holy Father speaks to the Church, then, he speaks to the family. In other words, Evangelii Gaudium can be seen as a call to families to “embark upon a new chapter of evangelization” marked by the joy of the Gospel (1). The following are some of the challenges put forward in this Apostolic Exhortation that may be construed as a call to become missionary families.
- To find the source and inspiration of all our efforts at evangelization by an encounter – or renewed encounter – with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, whereby we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. “For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?” (8)
- To be people who “remember”, for “the joy of evangelizing always arises from grateful remembrance: it is a grace which we constantly need to implore. The Apostles never forgot the moment when Jesus touched their hearts: “It was about four o’ clock in the afternoon” (Jn 1:39). (13).
- To “live life on a higher plane”, to enjoy life, by taking up “the task of evangelization”, leaving “Security on the shore” and becoming “Excited by the mission of communicating life to other”. For “here we discover a profound law of reality: that life is attained and matures in the measure that it is offered up in order to give life to others. This is certainly what mission means.” (10)
- To go forth from our own comfort zones in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel (20).
- To have homes with “doors always wide open” (47); homes that are “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets”, rather than ‘unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security’.
- To “pray insistently for vocation and courageously propose to young people the path of special consecration”. (107)
- To be “missionary disciples” (120) “nourished by the light and strength of the Holy Spirit”. (50)
While the family finds itself in the midst of an eroding cultural crisis, facing militant attempts to redefine marriage contrary to reason and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, St. John Paul II redirects our gaze to the truth of Christian marriage as a fruit of the redemption of Christ. HE saw the family in its full potential in the order of grace – that if lived according to this potential in Christ, it could change the culture and the world. For St. John Paul II, the family is an active and vital agent in establishing a civilization o love and the renewal of Christian culture. Let us pray to St. John Paul II, that the “Joy of the Gospel” may help families “recover the original freshness of the Gospel” and be “permanently in a state of mission”, finding “new avenues” and “new paths of creativity” in order to “bring Christ’s love to others”. (EG 11,25)