Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family: Essays from a Pastoral Viewpoint by Various Cardinals

Author:Various Cardinals [Cardinals, Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681496771
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-07-23T05:00:00+00:00

Witness to the Truth of the Gospel of the Family

An Urgent Pastoral Challenge for the Church to

Set Out on the Journey of the Third Millennium

Antonio Maria Cardinal Rouco Varela*

1. The convoking of two assemblies of the synod of bishops—one extraordinary, celebrated in the month of October of last year [2014], and the other ordinary, to be celebrated next October [2015]—is clear, unequivocal proof of the fact that our Holy Father, Pope Francis, judges and appreciates the seriousness of this historical moment, in which the Church of the twenty-first century finds herself faced with the challenge of proclaiming, celebrating, and serving the Gospel of the Family. This challenge can be taken up pastorally and apostolically in a fruitful way only if we realize that it is about welcoming an urgent call of the Spirit and about what he is asking of the Church today so that she can bring the love of her Lord and Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, “the Redeemer of man”,1 to mankind, which has already begun the new historical journey of the third millennium of Christianity. This welcome will be fruitful only if the Church, by her words and by her works, seriously takes into account the fact that “in a society thirsting for authentic human values and suffering from many divisions and fractures, the community of believers must be a bearer of the light of the Gospel, with the assurance that charity is, before all else, the communication of the truth.”2

2. It is possible, or even probable, that the culture of the superficial and the provisional—to use the apt expression of Pope Francis—which envelops us like an invisible, inextricable social net, reaching even into the most intimate aspects of personal life, might cause us to think that the great question about truth in everyday life—about how to know, affirm, and live it—is a minor matter that scarcely interests or concerns the younger generations. To lend pastoral credibility to this hypothesis would be a serious practical error that would reveal, moreover, a major deficiency: the lack of contact and of pastoral dealings with young people, carried out carefully with noble sincerity and with the discreet simplicity of someone who only wants their good, without ulterior or hidden motives. When this cordial communication with them is achieved, pastoral experience teaches again and again, in the most extraordinary and in the most ordinary situations in which one meets them—or they meet one another—inside or outside the ecclesial community, that the question concerning the truth about God, about man, about Jesus Christ, and about the Church affects them profoundly, not to mention when the question is asked with respect to the Church’s doctrine about sexuality, marriage, and the family. This question is existentially dense and concrete. They want to know their truth! They want to know the truth! And we must not delude ourselves: to start pastorally from the pedagogical premise that the ideas originating in “gender ideology” have triumphed completely, overwhelmingly, and irreversibly, in theory and in practice, among our young

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