Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Mexico is presently hosting the 6th World Meeting for Families, which reminds the Church and the world of the unique centrality of this natural, creatural institution, which Jesus Christ raised to the dignity of sacrament. The family, a life long communion between a man and a woman, open to the gift of children is determinant and indispensable not only for the development and survival of society itself, but also for the handing on of the faith. In this sense, activity to support the family through different ways and means, is profoundly and directly missionary.
Above all, with regard to the educative process necessary for every generation, the family has a role which no other institution can play; education, in times of “educative emergency”, as the Holy Father, Benedict XVI has often said and again very recently, comes about firstly and fundamentally in the family. The family with its “affective load” is the natural place for trust and “credit” granted, thanks only to confidence, precisely, to the steps to make to be introduced and to introduce oneself progressively into reality, increasingly today in a tendentially total manner.
To support the family means then, supporting humanity's main “education agency”, supporting the very possibility for a civilisation to educate the young generations and, therefore, to survive. Without education for the young generations, there can be no future.
Since faith is an encounter, which includes walking with the One encountered, it follows that the family is the primary place for handing on the faith. Besides all the many values, so forgotten and so necessary, for living in a human manner, in the family and through the family there is the first handing on of faith which allows the perception of the Event of an Encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ, when it occurs or re-occurs (because it always happens again and again in our earthly life), to be familiar, rather than foreign to our personal existence.
In this sense, supporting, with the best of energies, the family and its task of education, is profoundly missionary work: it means supporting the very possibility of handing on the faith from one generation to the next. Well aware of this, the family's detractors and enemies who attempt with every means, cultural and legal, to destroy and de-legitimise the “nucleus of resistance to oppression” under all powers and in all times.
It is part of the Church's mission to protect man from reductionism, even unconscious, of human dignity which has in creation its roots and in natural law its guarantee. To defend the family then, is to defend humanity, humanity which became the place of the Incarnation and for whom the Son of man gave his life. The Church is by nature missionary, and therefore by nature she defends the family, and so doing, defends the handing on of the Catholic faith. (Agenzia Fides 15/1/2009; righe 37, parole 486)
