English
EspañolThe first subject, the most active agent for transmitting the faith within a family – between parents and children, between grandparents and grandchildren – is the family itself, the concrete one, yours.
Text
“The Church wishes, with humility and compassion, to reach out to families and “to help each family to discover the best way to overcome any obstacles it encounters.” It is not enough to show generic concern for the family in pastoral planning. Enabling families to take up their role as active agents of the family apostolate calls for “an effort at evangelization and catechesis inside the family.” This effort calls for missionary conversion by everyone in the Church, that is, one that is not content to proclaim a merely theoretical message without connection to people’s real problems.” (The Joy of Love, n.200 and n.201)
Commentary
It must be said with absolute clarity: the rancid “clericalized” language, which uses hackneyed “pastoral” terms, is strange to the family; it “does not fit,” and for the simple reason that the family does not speak or communicate with those linguistic codes. We need more naturalness, please, and less “pastoralisms.” For example, the father, mother, grandmother, or husband and wife are not “missionaries of the family pastoral”; they are spouses, parents, or grandparents.
It is crucial to raise awareness in families so that, from within, they foster love between spouses and among all the members of the family. This must be done by living as spouses, fathers, mothers, children, siblings, or grandparents. This objective cannot remain an abstract, generalist word. It is necessary to orient couples in the prevention of daily frictions product of living together and the ways of communicating and integrating each spouse’s different family cultures.
If not known, discussed, and respected, each spouse’s family background and experiences can cause spouses to have different visions of life, the family, and marriage itself. These differences can alienate or even antagonize them.
It is a challenge to reconcile these perspectives, learn to integrate the valuable parts of each one, avoid any scorn and humiliation, and find means and channels to prevent them from becoming arguments or conflicts, walls of non-communication. Good love helps, especially if accompanied by the intelligence and wise realism it provides, the desire to share, little stubbornness and arrogance, and simple humility between them. Not in the abstract, but concretely, shared with each of our relatives.
