The family is the fundamental building block of society. Healthy marriages hold our communities together, and they strengthen the moral fiber of future generations. Pope Benedict said it best last December in his address to the Pontifical Council for the Family:
The family is a source of wealth for married couples, an irreplaceable good for children, an indispensable foundation of society and a vital community for the journey of the Church.The family is good for husbands, wives, children and society, Pope Benedict said, and it is also good for the Church. He goes on to say:
The new evangelization depends largely on the Domestic Church (cf. ibid., n. 65). In our time, as in times past, the eclipse of God, the spread of ideologies contrary to the family and the degradation of sexual ethics are connected. And just as the eclipse of God and the crisis of the family are linked, so the new evangelization is inseparable from the Christian family. The family is indeed the way of the Church because it is the “human space” of our encounter with Christ.The Church needs families to be witnesses to the world—to be lights to the world. The Church needs models of the Holy Family. Most of all, the Catholic Church needs the “Domestic Church” for the new evangelization, to pass the beauty of the faith on to future generations. The U.S. Bishops touch on this in their recent publication, Disciples Called to Witness: The New Evangelization:
