The Prototype For All Families

Through God's mysterious design, it was in that family that the Son of God spent long years of a hidden life. It is therefore the prototype and example for all Christian families. It was unique in the world. Its life was passed in anonymity and silence in a little town in Palestine. It underwent trials of poverty, persecution and exile. It glorified God in an incomparably exalted and pure way. And it will not fail to help Christian families—indeed, all the families in the world—to be faithful to their day-to-day duties, to bear the cares and tribulations of life, to be open and generous to the needs of others, and to fulfill with joy the plan of God in their regard.

-Saint John Paul II

On this solemnity of the Holy Family, please join us in saying this prayer as we prepare for the eighth World Meeting of Families.

The Church’s Mission For The Family

At a moment of history in which the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it, and aware that the well-being of society and her own good are intimately tied to the good of the family, the Church perceives in a more urgent and compelling way her mission of proclaiming to all people the plan of God for marriage and the family, ensuring their full vitality and human and Christian development, and thus contributing to the renewal of society and of the People of God.

-Saint John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio

Continue to join us in praying for the Synod on the Family, which concludes this Sunday. May the Holy Spirit be present there, and may the Church be courageous and merciful in proclaiming the Gospel of the family.

Saint John Paul II, Pray for Us!

Family, Become What You Are

The family finds in the plan of God the Creator and Redeemer not only its identity, what it is, but also its mission, what it can and should do. The role that God calls the family to perform in history derives from what the family is; its role represents the dynamic and existential development of what it is. Each family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored, and that specifies both its dignity and its responsibility: family, become what you are.

-Saint John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio

In preparation for the 8^th World Meeting of Families, to be held in Philadelphia in September of 2015, the Knights of Columbus is asking that we seek the intercession of St. John Paul II, praying that "every family may generously make its own contribution to the coming of his kingdom in the world." 

Men As Husbands And Fathers

As we prepare to celebrate Father’s Day here in the United States, it is worth reflecting upon this insight of St. John Paul II’s from Familiaris Consortio:

In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family: he will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother, by a more solicitous commitment to education, a task he shares with his wife, by work which is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability, and by means of the witness he gives of an adult Christian life which effectively introduces the children into the living experience of Christ and the Church. 

St. John Paul II, please pray for all fathers, that they may live out their vocations to be good husbands and good parents. 

The Unbreakable Alliance

In a marriage a man and a woman pledge themselves to one another in an unbreakable alliance of total mutual self-giving. A total union of love. Love that is not a passing emotion or temporary infatuation, but a responsible and free decision to bind oneself completely, “in good times and in bad,” to one’s partner. It is the gift of oneself to the other. It is a love to be proclaimed before the eyes of the whole world. It is unconditional.

Blessed John Paul II preached these words during his Apostolic Journey to Great Britain in 1982. The sanctity of marriage is something that the late Holy Father often promoted and communicated, due to modern cultural attacks on the family as well as the family’s importance in society and to the Church as a whole.

In that same homily, John Paul II said that, to be capable of married love “calls for careful preparation from early childhood to wedding day. It requires the constant support of Church and society throughout its development.” When he was Archbishop of Kraków, he responded to the Polish regime’s efforts to undermine marriage and family life by organizing intensive courses on marriage preparation and family life issues and spreading them throughout the Archdiocese. These courses were for clergy members and lay people alike. Even before that, Blessed John Paul II dedicated much of his time during his years as a priest working with young people in order to prepare them for marriage and family life.

Freedom In Marital Fidelity

The preparatory document for the 2014 Synod of Bishops on the Family was released earlier this week, and it includes some beautiful guidance from our beloved Holy Father, Blessed John Paul II. This quote was taken from his Familiaris Consortio:

The only ‘place’ in which this self-giving in its whole truth is made possible is marriage, the covenant of conjugal love freely and consciously chosen, whereby man and woman accept the intimate community of life and love willed by God himself (cf. Gaudium et spes, 48) which only in this light manifests its true meaning. The institution of marriage is not an undue interference by society or authority, nor the extrinsic imposition of a form. Rather it is an interior requirement of the covenant of conjugal love which is publicly affirmed as unique and exclusive, in order to live in complete fidelity to the plan of God, the Creator. A person's freedom, far from being restricted by this fidelity, is secured against every form of subjectivism or relativism and is made a sharer in creative Wisdom.

Blessed John Paul II, please pray today for all married couples and those preparing for marriage, that they may be given grace enough to embrace the “intimate community of life and love willed by God himself.”

Jesus Reveals The Original Truth Of Marriage

One of Blessed John Paul II’s most serious concerns during his pontificate, was the place of family and marriage in this rapidly changing world. With the sexual revolution and wide moral turns in society and culture, he saw the need to respond with simple catechesis on the beauty of marriage.

His General Audiences on the Theology of the Body are perhaps his most popular, but his thought on the meaning of marriage can also be found in his 1981, Familiaris Consortio:

The communion between God and His people finds its definitive fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom who loves and gives Himself as the Savior of humanity, uniting it to Himself as His body.

He reveals the original truth of marriage, the truth of the "beginning," and, freeing man from his hardness of heart, He makes man capable of realizing this truth in its entirety.

This revelation reaches its definitive fullness in the gift of love which the Word of God makes to humanity in assuming a human nature, and in the sacrifice which Jesus Christ makes of Himself on the Cross for His bride, the Church. In this sacrifice there is entirely revealed that plan which God has imprinted on the humanity of man and woman since their creation; the marriage of baptized persons thus becomes a real symbol of that new and eternal covenant sanctioned in the blood of Christ. The Spirit which the Lord pours forth gives a new heart, and renders man and woman capable of loving one another as Christ has loved us. Conjugal love reaches that fullness to which it is interiorly ordained, conjugal charity, which is the proper and specific way in which the spouses participate in and are called to live the very charity of Christ who gave Himself on the Cross.