Vatican City, Aug 27, 2021 / 12:00 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis has released a video with an encouraging message for pregnant mothers that also asks Catholics to be open to life through adoption.
“I want to say to every woman expecting a child: you are God’s awesome instrument to welcome and offer new life to the world,” Pope Francis said in the video issued on Aug. 25.
“Every child that arrives is God’s gift. Every baby, in every case, and in whatever situation is to be welcomed,” the pope said.
Pope Francis said that to adopt and give someone a family is an act of love by which a man and a woman become mediators of God’s love.
“Adoption is a Christian choice,” the pope said.
The video features an Italian family with seven children who serve as missionaries in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
“When we were first married, after two miscarriages, and two gynecological surgeries, the doctors told us that I was sterile,” Francesca, the mother featured in the video, said.
“Thanks to those seven years of terrible suffering, in which we felt sustained by the Church by the Neocatechumenal community and our catechists, we felt God was calling us to be fruitful, to open ourselves to life, to his plan for us. And so, we adopted our first son, Emmanuele, in Russia.”
“What happened after is pure grace,” Francesca said. “A few months after the adoption, I became pregnant and Giosuè was born, then Miriam, Benedetto, Israel, Simon, Pietro, and Natanaele, along with five others I miscarried. They are … waiting for us in heaven.”
The video, produced by the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, is the sixth in a video series published this year aimed at deepening the Church’s pastoral accompaniment of families, as outlined in Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia (“The Joy of Love”).
The Amoris Laetitia Family Year began on March 19, the Solemnity of St. Joseph, and will end on June 26, 2022, with the 10th edition of the World Meeting of Families, which will be held in Rome.
The Vatican plans to publish a total of 10 videos to help people rediscover the value and beauty of the family.
“Love always gives life,” Pope Francis said.
“Spousal love is not completely consumed by the couple alone, but generates a family. Parents’ love is the means by which God shows His love. He awaits the birth of every baby. He accepts and welcomes each child as they are.”
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I am not sure I can agree with him that every child who arrives is a gift from God. I was raised Catholic by my adopted parents but am the illegitimate daughter of a Lutheran and a Baptist. The Baptist raped the Lutheran and that is how I was conceived. This is the truth as I have known it for the last 24 years of my life. By the statement about children all being gifts from God, it would seem that God felt my bio mother received me as a gift for being raped? That is how it comes across no matter how someone is going to try and tell me to interpret it. I don’t think I can get behind that kind of thinking. Pregnancies are not always a gift. And before someone comments that I should be grateful that I wasn’t aborted or that my bio-mom chose adoption over abortion, y’all should know that she did go for an abortion but happened to be farther along than she thought – which is the only reason an adoption happened. I am not trying to inflame or upset anyone but the truth of some situations does need to be acknowledged.
Jessica,
Thank you for your comment and your vulnerable honesty.
My wife and I are parents of three children, all adopted; there is a lot of pain and bad “stuff” involved in their background. For example, one of our children was, at the age of 18 months, simply dropped off at the Human Services office; the birth mother was done. (We had two other adoptions that did not come to fruition, for reasons difficult to explain or discuss.) We adopted him when he was two years old.
What I can say, as a father, is that I am thankful that each of our children were born and found their way into our family. It’s not easy; not even close. Secondly, as a Catholic, I believe and know that all life is a gift from God, even when the those involved try to thwart it—or never intended it in the first place. The value of the gift is not rooted in those intentions, but in the simple truth that life is good and is from God.
I recognize that in a perfect world there would be no adoption. And so adoption would seem, in a real way, to be a sign of failure or a lack of love. But adoption is (or should be) the response of love to a situation that can appear hopeless, damaged beyond repair, impossible to handle. In that way, adoption reflects in some small but real way the love of God, who became man so that we can, by His grace, “become God” (CCC 460). You are a true child of your adoptive parents.
(For a bit more of my thoughts on this, see my essay “Abortion and Adoption: Some Personal Reflections”.)
I’ve admired your writing and contributions to Catholic witness for years, not I admire you more as a man. I’ve performed some counseling over the years, but never committed to adoption. My late wife was physically very weak. Nonetheless we should all take solace from these words of the late Henry Hyde:
“When the time comes, as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God — and a terror will rip your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there’ll be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world — and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him, because he loved us!”
Life is the gift, not the assault.
While these words do not heal, it is still very good to know absolutely that each human soul is infused directly by a creative God, and not biologically by the physical parents nor by others under other (damnable) circumstances.
The full meaning of personal Redemption is that, ultimately, God is the Lord and in charge of everything (or else there is no God…). Moment-by-moment He starts here and now in our fallen world with ever new beginnings. Each of us, without exception, is from the start a totally new beginning, nothing less. And then to be drawn forward, not dragging an anchor from behind.
This might be the biblical meaning of David in the Old Testament, who still was chosen by God–despite the fact that he had stolen the wife of another and then had the husband, Uriah, abandoned and killed on the battlefield.
On the larger scale (if there is a larger scale), Pope Benedict gives us at least a clue when he teaches broadly that “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution [or of…?]. Each [!]of us is the result of a thought of God.”
God will not be mocked (Galatians 6:7) by His own creation(s)…