ACI Prensa Staff, Jun 16, 2024 / 09:30 am (CNA).
The deterioration experienced in society is due to ideologies weakening the family, the institution to which God has entrusted the protection of life, says the bishop of Cúcuta in Colombia, José Libardo Garcés.
In the latest editorial of the diocesan newspaper La Verdad (The Truth), the prelate invited Christians to reflect on the family and life “to become aware of God’s call to each home to defend, protect, and safeguard human life as an essential foundation for forming a person and a society based on the virtues of the Gospel, which at the same time has its basis in the sacrament of marriage.”
“We are experiencing how society is deteriorating in many aspects,” he noted, “and this has its roots in the deterioration of family life, which is arising from different ideologies and ways of conceiving marriage and the family that have turned their backs on God.”
The bishop of Cúcuta, a diocese bordering Venezuela, noted that God’s constant call “is to build home life on the firm rock of Jesus Christ” and to receive from him the strength to face the challenges and tasks of the mission received from God to protect human life in all its stages.
Libardo said the Catholic Church’s defense of life “goes against the ideologies that present abortion, euthanasia, and other attacks against the life and dignity of the human person as the behavioral norm.”
“In the face of this we have to strengthen the family that protects life as a free gift from God,” he said.
“The Christian family becomes a solid rock on which society is built,” the prelate explained, “because in it we learn the healthy relationship between father, mother, spouses, children, and siblings, to go out into society to create healthy interpersonal relationships” based on Gospel values.
Regarding the pain and anguish that can be experienced within the home, the bishop explained that “the cross is part of human life and also of family life,” which is why he invited the faithful to learn from the Virgin Mary, “to be alongside the cross of the Lord, sometimes in pain, but standing there and with hope in Jesus, who does not disappoint.”
The bishop noted that in his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis teaches that when families follow Jesus, breakup can be avoided.
“Gradually, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, [the spouses] grow in holiness through married life, also by sharing in the mystery of Christ’s cross, which transforms difficulties and sufferings into an offering of love,” the pope’s exhortation says.
Libardo said that “this teaching of Pope Francis is very consoling, because many marriages and families break off their relationships at the first difficulty or crisis they experience, forgetting that with the grace of God received in the sacrament of marriage and renewed day by day in the Eucharist, they can persevere in the mission that they have received until the end.”
The prelate highlighted those Christian married couples who have persevered in their faithful love, “with the certainty that the Lord is always present every day until the end of their lives.”
The bishop called on families “to find a few minutes each day to join together before the Lord” and to place “personal and family life under the protection and aegis of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the glorious patriarch St. Joseph, so that together at home they can make a profession of faith proclaiming, ‘You are the Christ.’”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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We read: “The bishop noted that in his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis teaches that when families follow Jesus, breakup can be avoided.” Awakened (not woke!) this morning with an intuition about the family. Maybe worthy of a book, but mercy counsels somewhat greater brevity…
So, a sequence of seven considerations:
Consider the flip side of the doctrinal ORIGINAL SIN. Within all of creation, it fractures a deeper “original innocence” (John Paul II, “The Original Unity of Man and Woman,” 1981), but it also anchors all of us in the unity of a universal human history—or family;
Consider God partly unveiling Himself to the family of the CHOSEN PEOPLE, something He did for no other tribes in the world (Psalm 147);
Consider St. Paul allowing himself to be prodded down one of the “all roads lead to Rome,” because he knew that evangelization to the GENTILES could use those same roads that also lead everywhere;
Consider the world HISTORY of dispersal and technology–sailing ships, then canals (Panama, Suez), then railroads, then more roads (the Autobahn, and United States freeway system) connecting everywhere to everywhere else, and the “information highway,” and ubiquity of cell phones and superficial electronic neighborhoods—
Consider the erosion of ethnic neighborhoods and, within the worldwide Church, the loss of diocesan and PARISH families, “gone with the wind” just like the former municipal jurisdictions of the long-gone Roman Empire as utilized by St. Paul…
Consider, however the APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION and the singular and leavening permanence in all of the universe: the Mystical Body of Christ assembled by and around the Real Presence (CCC 1374) of each and every consecrated host—at each Mass as “the continuation and extension” (not an assembly-line imitation!) of the singular self-donation and eternal love of a TRIUNE GOD (!) at the one place and one time of Calvary, and received within the very soul of each uniquely-created created human person;
Consider, too, the continuity and solidity of each nuclear and genealogical FAMILY, however dispersed across history and geography…AND, wonder at the fly in the ointment: that part of Amoris Laetitia (!) which, some say, has opened the door an amnesiac Church (begone, “backwardists”!), to a permeable or open-family “ecumenism,” and to the equally “informal, non-ecclesial, spontaneous” pseudo-blessing of “irregular” communes in place of real families–even ersatz/alphabetical/anti-binary tribalism in place of the exclusive complementarity of one man with one woman as in the Beginning.
SUMMARY: At this late state of disparate human history, desperate synodal roundtables may have a role (a roll?), still, doesn’t there remain the human question of permanent truth versus ambulatory consensus? And, the intergenerational and apostolic family of the Magisterium? And, about the “book,” didn’t St. Paul in Rome already write the very first pages of, what, the completed New Testament?
“’Gradually, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, [the spouses] grow in holiness through married life, also by sharing in the mystery of Christ’s cross, which transforms difficulties and sufferings into an offering of love,’ the pope’s exhortation [Amoris Laetitia] says” (Bishop Garcés).
When reading Amoris Laetitia we find one the more complete, beautiful commentaries on familial love imbued with Christ and his teaching. Until we arrive at Chapter 8. Bishop Garcés does well in quoting that beautiful, orthodox portion of Amoris, like most bishops. Our dilemma is what follows, the rapidly changing understanding on marriage assuming “ideologies weakening the family” that find their source in Amoris Laetitia and the compatibility of the wide scope of “irregular relationships” given a form of positive sanction based on concrete circumstances, conscience, and mitigation. When Christ is made cheap insofar as tolerance of sin and access to the Holy Eucharist the Eucharist itself becomes cheap. I realize it’s repetitive nevertheless the anomaly in dual messaging has to be addressed because too many by nature of simply being human are prone to choose the easier option than the difficult road to salvation, especially when made to believe either path is viable.