"In a world where choices are always only temporary, the family is the place where strong relationships deeply affect, for better or for worse, the lives of its individual members. In the family, the other person loses his/her connotation of the instability now common in most social circles, and not just in digital ones: it’s enough to go to another channel, friendship, party…" With these words in his keynote address, on February 28, at the opening ceremony of the judicial year of the Regional Ecclesiastical Court of Puglia (Bari), the President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, emphasized one of the family’s most positive connatural aspects. The family, precisely with its characteristic of strongly uniting people, can find a way to successfully meet the challenges posed by modernity.
The lecture, entitled "The Need for the Family in a Changing World," focused on the analysis of the problems and wounds that today deeply mark the fundamental cell of society, considered to be the heart of human development. In order to avoid stopping this motor, Msgr. Paglia called for a renewed alliance between the Church and the family as well as between the families themselves. Basically, this means promoting "a new springtime of Christian families," for those who are healthy as well as those who are wounded. They should be helped and made able to joyfully leave every type of self-isolation, so that they may put themselves—one could say—in a "state of mission," and do so with openness to share their family assets, under the sign of faith. The bond of families with the church community, although it is too fragile—as I have already said—, is decisive. In today’s human fragmentation, a new impetus is given to the dimension of the Church. Only lively and energetic communities and families preserve the "great mystery," of which the Apostle Paul (Eph 5, 32) spoke with respect to "Christ and the Church". The horizon is getting wider: we need a new family ministry, or better yet, "the Church’s whole life should be inspired with a family sense," so that She may become more and more the "Family of God" and the ferment that helps humanity to be a "family of nations."
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