In recent months Vietnam has shown itself very dynamic in the field of pastoral ministry, and in particular with regard to the family.
First of all, in fact, at the very beginning of the Year of Faith, the Vietnamese bishops urged the faithful to “rediscover the joy of faith” and to “engage with more passion in the new evangelization, by proclaiming the Gospel to the 93% of the Vietnamese people who do not yet know the Lord, by introducing the spirit of the Gospel in all areas of life, and by helping to build a healthy society with the values of the Gospel and of the Vietnamese cultural tradition.” An exhortation in a pastoral letter published at the end of their fall session in Thanh Hoa. In the document, the bishops also noted that, if the majority of Catholics in Vietnam still regularly attends Sunday Mass and the family continues to be the privileged place in which the Christian faith is transmitted, in some cases it has become a habit, without resulting in “personal conviction that animates the important decisions of our lives.” The letter, finally, then directly called into question the parents, reminding that the family has always been “the cradle of the transmission of the Christian faith, the school where the first catechism is taught to the younger generation.” The second text from Vietnam was prepared by the Federation of Asian Bishops‘ Conferences (FABC) in view of its X Plenary Assembly, entitled “FABC at 40 years: Responding to the challenges of Asia” and organized from 10 to 16 December in Xuan Loc The Working Paper of the Assembly, in paragraph number 8, extensively talks about the family, considered to be essential in evangelization:
“The evangelization and renewal Asians consider the family as the focal point. The Asian family is the receptor cell of everything that affects Asian societies for better or for worse. A renewed Asian family is a family that strives to renew itself in the sense an integral culture of life even though it is in the midst of deadly forces. To this end, it is necessary to modernize the holy Pastoral Care of the family within the local church, a ministry that develops a spirituality of the family that advocates for a culture of integral life. The spirituality of the family must be built on a spirituality of communion, the communion between husband and wife. Communion in the family is rooted in the communion of the endless love between God the Father, the Son and the Spirit, a communion that flows relentlessly toward children born from the love between husband and wife, and that streams in solidarity towards others, regardless of their religion or culture. "