Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 2, 2022 / 11:58 am (CNA).
Pope Francis has announced that his prayer intention for the month of June is families.
The choice is fitting, since families from around the world will gather in Rome later this month for the World Meeting of Families on June 22-26. The pope’s prayer intention in May was young people.
“Let us pray for Christian families around the world; may each and every family embody and experience unconditional love, and advance in holiness in their daily lives,” Pope Francis says in a video message released June 2.
The pope describes the family as “the place where we learn to live with one another, to live with young people and those who are older.”
While family love can provide us “a personal path of holiness,” the pope also stressed that “there is no such thing as a perfect family.”
Yet families must not feel hopeless about the struggles they face, he added.
“Let’s not forget that God is with us: In our family, in our neighborhood, in the city where we live, he is with us. And He takes care of us. He remains with us at all times in the swaying of the boat tossed by the sea: when we argue, when we suffer, and when we’re joyful,” Pope Francis says.
The video is part of a series created by the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network in collaboration with the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. You can watch the full video for the month of June below.
The network noted in a press release that “the family continues to be the main source of meaning in the lives of many people.” The network pointed to Pew Research Center survey in 2021 that asked people in 17 countries what provides the most meaning to their lives. Most ranked their family first, ahead of their career, health, or well-being.
Father Frédéric Fornos, S.J., the prayer network’s international director, observed in the press release that the pope highlights that “the family is the place where we learn to live with differences.”
“Encountering people who are different is a richness, not a threat. In today’s world it seems as if differences create confrontation when they should instead open new paths,” Fornos said.
“The family is a place to learn to love, to live with differences, learning from mistakes, being aware that the Lord is present to help and accompany us,” Fornos said. “This experience of God’s presence is born from prayer; this is why it is important to pray for this intention of the pope.”
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The Holy Family is an inspiration to families worldwide. Down the ages, families have been the backbone of communities, societies, and the Planet.
With regard to the Church family, yours truly has been thinkin’ about Pope Francis’ goal to REPLACE an alleged “pyramid” Church with what he intends as a service Church, imaged as an “inverted pyramid.” He makes a good point, but what kind of half-truth Church is that, really?
In the time of St. Augustine, common law marriages were recognized by the Church as real marriages, because the Empire did not allow marriages between members of the upper class and the lower class…But, today’s Evil Empire REDEFINES “marriage” as a value-neutral arrangement between members of the same sex….And, there are those in the Church itself who tilt in that direction, implicitly, by first winking at “irregular” situations—like remarriage absent a declaration of nullity, involving a possibly abandoned former spouse and children (Amoris Laetitia with Cardinal Kasper’s Ch. 8, fn. 351).
Today’s civil unions (really a tactical step toward now gay “marriage”) indicate a societal REVERSION back to when the Empire still had no notion of sacramental marriage, as involving a Church—because of the very nature of man (as revealed in the singular and historical event of the self-disclosing Incarnation)!
So, as we celebrate “families” this month—engulfed as we are by a radically post-Christian society—let us fully consider GIFTED NATURE and the fit between grace and nature within each family, and within the Church, too, as the sacrament of grace which also cannot be compromised or redefined.
There really is the reality of binary and fully human “marriage.” There really is the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium) of the Apostolic Succession. There really are protective and absolute moral prohibitions (Veritatis Splendor). The prohibitive Commandments are not to be blurred and marginalized, as in the family movie “Pirates of the Caribbean” (2003), where even the Pirates’ Code is set aside—
Said the pirate Jack Sparrow (Cardinal Kasper?): “the code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner!”
I would point families to Holy Communion, the source and summit of the Christian life.
Natural marriage and the family are everywhere under threat. Pretty words aren’t going to cut it.