Living Catholicism: A Letter From Pope John Paul II to Families, part 2

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April 18, 2005

A Letter From Pope John Paul II to Families, part 2

Here is the second part from our late Holy Father's Letter to Families:

The Year of the Family

3. For these very reasons the Church joyfully welcomes the decision of the United Nations Organization to declare 1994 the International Year of the Family. This initiative makes it clear how fundamental the question of the family is for the member States of the United Nations. If the Church wishes to take part in this initiative, it is because she herself has been sent by Christ to "all nations" (Mt 28:19). Moreover, this is not the first time the Church has made her own an international initiative of the United Nations. We need but recall, for example, the International Year of Youth in 1985. In this way also the Church makes herself present in the world, fulfilling a desire which was dear to Pope John XXIII, and which inspired the Second Vatican Council's Constitution Gaudium et Spes.

On the Feast of the Holy Family in 1993 the whole ecclesial community began the "Year of the Family" as one of the important steps along the path of preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, which will mark the end of the second and the beginning of the third Millennium of the Birth of Jesus Christ. This Year ought to direct our thoughts and our hearts towards Nazareth, where it was officially inaugurated this past 26 December at a Solemn Eucharistic Liturgy presided over by the Papal Legate.

Throughout this Year it is important to discover anew the many signs of the Church's love and concern for the family, a love and concern expressed from the very beginning of Christianity, when the meaningful term "domestic church" was applied to the family. In our own times we have often returned to the phrase "domestic church", which the Council adopted and the sense of which we hope will always remain alive in people's minds. This desire is not lessened by an awareness of the changed conditions of families in today's world. Precisely because of this, there is a continuing relevance to the title chosen by the Council in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes in order to indicate what the Church should be doing in the present situation: "Promoting the dignity of marriage and the family". Another important reference point after the Council is the 1981 Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio. This text takes into account a vast and complex experience with regard to the family, which among different peoples and countries always and everywhere continues to be the "way of the Church". In a certain sense it becomes all the more so precisely in those places where the family is suffering from internal crises or is exposed to adverse cultural, social and economic influences which threaten its inner unity and strength, and even stand in the way of its very formation.