PONTIFICIO ISTITUTO GIOVANNI PAOLO II
PER STUDI SU MATRIMONIO E FAMIGLIA
presso la Pontificia Università Lateranense
Convegno Internazionale
Giovanni Paolo II: Il Papa della Famiglia
Roma, 20 -21 marzo 2014
John Paul II, Pope of the Family: Person and Ministry
Prof. CARL A. ANDERSON
In Evangelii Gaudium,1 Pope Francis presents a comprehensive context for the New
Evangelization—one which he describes as “a new chapter” of the Church’s evangelization
“marked” by the joy of the Gospel. (1) This “new chapter” the pope tells us is founded upon “a
renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ.” (3)
At the outset of the apostolic exhortation, the pope warns us against the temptation that is
omnipresent in secular society, that is, the temptation to reduce Christianity to merely an ethical
system or a lifestyle. He writes: “I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict XVI which
take us to the very heart of the Gospel: ‘Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or
a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon’.”(7)
Pope Francis has observed that the tendency of secular society to reduce Christianity to
merely an ethical system with unpopular moral rules has too often resulted in a situation in which
the Gospel message is hidden from public view. Blessed John Paul II had raised a similar issue
in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae when he wrote: “The Gospel of Life is not simply a
reflection, however new and profound, on human life. Nor is it merely a commandment aimed at
raising awareness and bringing about significant changes in society. Still less is it an illusory
promise of a better future. The Gospel of Life is something concrete and personal, for it consists
in the proclamation of the very person of Jesus.” (29) Moreover, Blessed John Paul II continues,
“In Christ, the Gospel of Life is definitively proclaimed and fully given.” (29)
Thus, we need to avoid the trap which secularism places in the Church’s path of
evangelization—which is to portray Christians as those seeking to “impose new obligations” on
those around them rather than to “appear as a people who wish to share their joy.” (15) Again,
1
Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (Nov. 24, 2013).
1
quoting Pope-emeritus Benedict, the Holy Father writes, “It is not by proselytizing that the Church
grows, but ‘by attraction’.” (18)
Such a need for evangelization is especially important regarding the profound beauty of
the family revealed in the person of Christ and through the Church. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope
Francis observes that “The family is experiencing a profound cultural crisis.” (66) Although this
crisis is complex as it is experienced in each culture and as it is affected by globalization, there is
one aspect in Western societies, which I think is especially appropriate to consider in the context
of the Holy Father’s call for Catholics to proclaim “the joy of the Gospel.”
This aspect is the legacy of the culture suspicion, which attacks not only religion in
general, but also the Church’s specific teaching, including its teaching on the family.
On other occasions I have discussed Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of suspicion as applied
to Christianity and the way in which the theories of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, although
appearing mutually exclusive, nonetheless have combined to influence Western culture in a way
decidedly contrary to Christianity. Ricoeur described Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as “Masters of
Suspicion” for the way each of them was able to cast doubt on Christianity.
In his Wednesday Catechesis on Human Love, Blessed John Paul II discussed one
important influence of the “Masters of Suspicion.” He assessed these “masters” in terms of the
Johannine language of the threefold concupiscence. He writes:
“In Nietzschean hermeneutics, the judgment and the accusation of the human heart
correspond in some way to what biblical language calls ‘pride of life’; in Marxist hermeneutics
to what it calls ‘concupiscence of the eyes’; in Freudian hermeneutics, by contrast, to what it
calls ‘concupiscence of the flesh.’ The convergence of these conceptions with the hermeneutics
of man based on the Bible consists in the fact that when we uncovered the threefold
concupiscence in the human heart, we too could have limited ourselves to putting this heart in a
state of continual suspicion.”
But — as he continues to point out — we are not allowed to cast the human heart into “a
state of continual suspicion.” Instead, the human heart is called to be open to the mystery of
redemption.2
Today, we find a new cultural paradigm dramatically influenced by this threefold
concupiscence. We may describe it as a culture of materialism, of radical individualism, of
2
General Audience of Oct. 29, 1980 (Insegnamenti, 3, no. 2 [1980]: 1011-16) reprinted in, John Paul II, Man and
Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. M. Waldstein, Boston: 2006, p. 309.
2
consumerism, of hedonism, of selfishness or as a combination of one or more of these. But the
effect is the same: a culture in which hearts are in a state of continual suspicion while at the same
time hungry for authentic love.
Whether we consider Christianity to be the opium of the people (Marx), a delusion
(Freud) or a slave religion (Nietzsche) we see in the work of each a view of Christianity contrary
to the good of the person, his freedom and his happiness.
In other words, within the
“hermeneutic of suspicion” it is impossible to see Christians as a people whose hearts and lives
are, as Pope Francis suggests, to be “filled with joy” or to be “an evangelizing community …
filled with joy.” (24) Instead, secular critiques of Christianity are more likely to see “Christians
whose lives seem like Lent without Easter.” (6)
Another aspect of this cultural crisis is the emergence of a post-Christian culture in the West.
This culture not only rejects the influence of Christianity but it now influences the ways in which
Christians think about their own religion—in these societies there is a process of what we might
consider a reverse evangelization.
This “reverse evangelization” is distinctly different from what Jacques Maritain observed
in 1949, when he spoke of what he called the “evangelical inspiration” of secular consciousness.
He said, “Under the inspiration of the Gospel, the secular consciousness has understood the
dignity of the human person and has understood that the person, while being a part of the State,
yet transcends the State, because of the inviolable mystery of his spiritual freedom.”3
Today, we might consider that the contrary phenomenon is occurring: the Christian
vision of the human person and his dignity is being undermined by secular concepts.
Pope Francis observed this as well in Evangelii Gaudium, writing: “New cultures are
constantly being born in these vast new expanses where Christians are no longer the customary
interpreters or generators of meaning. Instead, they themselves take from these cultures new
languages, symbols, messages and paradigms which propose new approaches to life, approaches
often in contrast with the Gospel.” (73)
Moreover, the pope continues, “In some places, a spiritual ‘desertification’ has evidently
come about as a result of attempts by some societies to build without God or to eliminate their
Christian roots.” (86)
3
Jacques Maritain, Address to the American Political Science Association, Dec. 29, 1949.
3
It is important to also be aware of those instances where the poetic language of spiritual
writings, aimed at expressing fervor, are now open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation
due to a modern lack of context.
For example, St. Ignatius of Loyola concludes his Spiritual Exercises with a series of
“Rules for Thinking with the Church.” Number 13 states, “We should always be ready to accept
this principle: I will believe that the white that I see is black, if the hierarchical Church so
defines it.”4 Thankfully, the hierarchical Church does not ask this of us. But, we might do well
to consider that this is precisely what secular society believes that the Church requires: that what
secular society promotes as “good” in regard to freedom of choice in marriage or the
transmission of human life the Church teaches to be evil. This too is part of the cultural context
in which the Church must confront the challenge of evangelization of marriage and family life:
faithful Catholics must dedicate their lives to moral values which many of their neighbors not
only see as irrational, but as contrary to the good of the person and of society.
In this cultural context, the writings and personal witness of Blessed John Paul is both
inspirational and instructive.
But it should be remembered that his belief in the beauty of the family did not come from
some blindness to the times but a profoundly deep experience of the challenges of modernity,
and experienced deeply the beautiful and powerful truth about man and the family as revealed by
Christ. In Familiaris Consortio, Blessed John Paul II recognizes this fundamental divergence
between secular culture and Christian family culture when he spoke of the “anthropological and
moral” difference in the Church’s integral vision of the person (32). From this vision arises a
positive and life affirming message in response to the fear and anxiety so often present in
contemporary society.
He writes in Familiaris Consortio:
“Against the pessimism and
selfishness which cast a shadow over the world, the Church stands for life: in each human life
she sees the splendor of that ‘Yes,’ that ‘Amen,’ who is Christ Himself. To the ‘No’ which
assails and afflicts the world, she replies with this living ‘Yes,’ thus defending the human person
and the world from all who plot against and harm life” (30).
More than two decades before Familiaris Consortio, Karol Wojtyła presented reflections
upon marriage published recently in Italian under the title, Bellezza e Spiritualita dell’Amore
Coniugale. In those reflections he warned that society was approaching a “dead-end” regarding
4
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (A. Mottola trans.) New York: Image Books (1964), p. 141.
4
marriage and family.5 Years before he became pope, Karol Wojtyła understood that the Church
would only be capable of successfully defending the family if it was able theologically and
pastorally to support families by showing the beauty of family life and of demonstrating the
possibility of actually living in this way.
It was this pastoral attitude—reflected in the pages of Bellezza e Spiritualita dell’Amore
Coniugale—which would later also guide the approach of Familiaris Consortio. As Blessed John
Paul II notes in Familiaris Consortio, at a time when “the modern Christian family is often
tempted to be discouraged and is distressed at the growth of its difficulties, it is an eminent form
of love to give it back its reasons for confidence in itself, in the riches that it possesses by nature
and grace, and in the mission that God has entrusted to it.”6
But how are we to approach the “riches” that the Christian family “possesses” by grace?
How are we to approach the “mission that God has entrusted to it” and at the same time restore
“confidence” that such a way of life is possible? How are we to approach the richness of
sacramental marriage, as a gift received expressly through the Bride of Christ and an
unparalleled elevation of spouses’ gift of themselves to one another? How can we—as
individuals and as a Church of many vocations—experience it more deeply, communicate it
more joyfully, and awaken a deeper desire for its profound beauty?
In Bellezza e Spiritualita dell’Amore Coniugale, Wojtyła notes that the Church must
move beyond the impression that its view of the family is essentially legalistic.
“It will not succeed,” he writes, “if right from the start it supports a negative norm, that is
a certain ‘one must not’.” He also recognizes that in the past, a negative view of the sacrament
of marriage has prevailed in which marriage was viewed as a “thing of the flesh” in opposition to
the things of the spirit.
The negative, or “glass half-empty” view of marriage, he suggests, probably comes from
one of several tendencies. One tendency is that the sinfulness of spouses overwhelms our sense
of the beauty of marriage. In this view, marriage is still viewed as a path of salvation for the
spouses—but in a profoundly negative sense since the spouses are fundamentally a “cross” for
one another to bear in this vale of tears.
John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), Bellezza e Spiritualita dell’Amore Coniugale, Ed. Ludmiła Grygiel,
Stanisław Gryiel, and Przemysław Kwiatkowski. (Siena, Italy: Editrice Cantagalli, 2009). Section “Necessità di
uscire dal vicolo cieco” (“Need to get out of the dead end”).
5
6
John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio (1981) 86.
5
Another tendency, he suggests, is this: “Probably there is a certain prejudice against the
body within us, a trace of Manichaeism such that we fail to imagine the achievement of
perfection (spiritual and supernatural) in a state of life in which body issues are presented as a
factor so important and essential of the life of two people.”
This tendency also leads to a way of looking at marriage that is essentially negative. He writes
that “the suggestion that marriage should be treated from ‘the sin point of view’ is so strong and
overpowering that very few people consider it ‘in a dimension of perfection.’”
But if we are to defend marriage and family, we must first ask: “What concept of
marriage and family are we defending?” Are we capable of defending an institution which is
perceived by both its defenders and its critics in essentially a legalistic, “negative” way? Are we
capable of defending the institution of marriage today from “the sin point of view?”
If the task seems daunting, one should remember that Pope John Paul undertook this task
with enthusiasm long before became pope, as a parish priest. During the 1958-1959 academic
year Karol Wojtyla delivered a series of lectures on Catholic sexual morality at the Catholic
University of Lublin. A year later they were published under the title, Love and Responsibility.7
In his introduction to the first edition, Wojtyla presents the challenge confronting the
spiritual advisor to Catholic married couples as “an incessant confrontation of doctrine and life.”
In order to help these married couples he maintains that the advisor’s “task is not only to
command or forbid but to justify, to interpret, to explain … to put the norms of Catholic sexual
morality on a firm basis.”8
Wojtyla sees the issue as “a problem which can be described as that of ‘introducing love
into love’” and more specifically of the “problem of changing the second type of love (sexual
love) into the first, the love of which the New Testament speaks.”9 According to Wojtyla, this
problem of “introducing love into love” presents the fundamental question of “integration”—
meaning the “incorporation” of love “in the value of the person, or indeed its subordination to
the value of the person.”10
7
Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, (London:1981).
Id., pp. 15-16.
9
Id., p. 17.
10
Id., p. 123.
8
6
What is required is “the integration of love ‘within’ the person and ‘between’ persons.”11
Obviously, what Wojtyla describes as the “education of love” is not something that happens
automatically. It is the subject of a careful and determined pastoral ministry.
This pastoral challenge of “introducing love into love” in its positive dimension remained
a central theme of the entire pastoral approach to marriage and family of Karol Wojtyla as
Archbishop of Krakow and it continued to inform his pastoral ministry of the universal Church
throughout his pontificate. And it is essential to understand that this pastoral approach arose out
of the concrete practical experiences and concerns of the young married couples with whom
Father and then Bishop Wojtyla interacted during the 1950s and 1960s as well as from his
philosophical and theological reflections.
In the development of pastoral approaches to marriage and family, one can be heartened
as well about the benefits of the Christian view of marriage and family, beyond the vocation to
holiness, especially regarding poverty. Indeed, Evangelii Gaudium calls for a heightened
awareness of the social dimension of evangelization. It reminds us that “The need to resolve the
structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed” (202) and that while “structural transformations”
are necessary “Changing structures without generating new convictions and attitudes will only
ensure that those same structures will become, sooner or later, corrupt, oppressive and
ineffectual.” (189) While this challenge has many dimensions in both law and the economy, it
has enormous consequences in regard to family policies and the “corruption” of marriage and
family structures which today has become a major structural cause of poverty in Western affluent
societies.
The United States is a case in point. According to a 2010 study of the United States
Census Bureau, the percentage of married couple families living below the poverty level was 6.2
percent. For single mother households, the poverty rate was 31.6 percent.12 Children raised in
married couple families are 82 percent less likely to be poor than those living with single parent
and this disparity remains even among those of the same race and educational level.
Approximately 75 percent of welfare assistance going to families with children in the United
States goes to single parent families. In 2011, government assistance provided approximately
11
12
Id., p. 140.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf.
7
$330 billion in cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to poor single parent
families.13
Today in the United States, seven out of ten poor families with children are those headed
by a single parent—the vast majority of which are headed by single mothers. The economic
realities faced by these families are often devastating.
But the emotional, psychological and spiritual pathologies can be even more devastating.
Compared to children living in intact married families, the children of single parents “are more
likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use
drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior, have poor school
performance; and drop out of high school.”14
At the same time, the religious element must not be lost or seen as subordinate to socalled “practical” solutions. Evangelii Gaudium reminds us that “Our preferential option for the
poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care.” (200) In this regard,
priority must be given to a renewal of catechesis of marriage and family as well as a new
awareness among those in government that not all family “structures” equally serve the
emotional, developmental and financial interests of women and children.
A significant contribution to the Church’s understanding of these issues occurred during
our 2008 international conference “Oil on the Wounds: A Contemporary Examination of the
Effects of Divorce and Abortion on Children and Their Families.”15 Our meeting brought
together for the first time in the Vatican international experts on both these topics to provide not
only a diagnostic examination of these issues, but also the implications for the development of
adequate pastoral responses. The spirit of our work was beautifully summarized by these words
of Pope Benedict XVI in his address to our congress: “The Church’s first duty is to approach
these people with love and consideration, which caring and motherly attention, to proclaim the
merciful closeness of God in Jesus Christ. Indeed, as the Fathers teach, it is he who is the true
Good Samaritan, who has made himself close to us, who pours oil and wine on our wounds and
takes us into the inn, the Church, where he has us treated, entrusting us to her ministers and
personally paying in advance for our recovery. Yes, the Gospel of love and life is also always
the Gospel of mercy.16
13
http://www.heritage.org/childpoverty.
Id.
15
Oil on the Wounds, L. Melina & C. Anderson eds. New York: 2011.
16
Id., p. xii. Pope Benedict XVI, Address of April 5, 2008.
14
8
Perhaps in no other aspect of family ministry is the necessity of the Gospel of mercy
more urgent than in the pastoral care and sacramental healing of women who have undergone
abortion. In the United States, the Knights of Columbus has been privileged to support for more
than 25 years the work of Project Rachel and its efforts to bring post-abortion reconciliation and
healing to hundreds of thousands of women as well as those efforts of the Sisters of Life and the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops Pro-Life Secretariat. Moreover, as a result of this more
than a quarter-century of experience, we are now engaged in bringing the pastoral ministry of
Project Rachel to countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe. These efforts compliment the
more than 40 years of financial and volunteer support to thousands of pro-life crisis pregnancy
centers, the financing of national telephone hotlines to connect pregnant women with counseling
services, the promotion of adoption as an option for these women and recently the provision of
more than 400 ultra-sound machines valued at more than $20 million to pro-life counseling
centers. In these ways and others we have taken up the challenge of Pope Francis that more must
be done “to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations, where abortion appears as
a quick solution to their profound anguish.” (214)
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis sees “fraternal love” (92) and “fraternal
communion” (89) as central to the Church’s mission of evangelization. For more than four
decades Catholics in the pro-life movement have provided countless examples of just such
fraternal love and communion.
Moreover, as families are torn apart, such fraternal love and communion, always
grounded in and inspired by the truth about love expressed by the Church, is greatly needed, as
well as attention to strengthening families to withstand the anti-witness of culture.
Trends such as divorce, abortion and the raising of children outside of marriage as
cultural norms when taken together confront Christians with a cultural content and pressures that
are profoundly antithetical to Christian family life. Throughout Northern Europe these trends
have been evident through much of the second half of the twentieth century but as Mary
Eberstadt recently observed, even the more “traditional” Catholic countries such as Italy and
Spain have recently experienced a rapid disintegration of family culture. She notes that “the past
ten years have seen a soaring of marital breakups; according to the research institute Eures”
while between 1995 and 2005 the number of non-marital births doubled. In Spain, during the
9
same period the rise in non-marital births was similar and that country today has the highest
divorce rate in Europe.17
The effects of this are immense. As Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns observe, we are
experiencing “the greatest demographic change in human history”—a virtual “demographic tidal
wave” as Europe and America are rapidly moving toward an aging and declining population.18
The situation will be especially acute in Europe which will decline from a population of 727.3
million in 2000 to 603.3 million in 2050. One of the leaders in this rapid demographic decline
will be Italy which is estimated to decline in population from 57.5 million in 2000 to 43 million
in 2050 and in that year more than 42 percent of all Italians will be 60 years of age or older.19
None of these trends show any real signs of abating, nor does there appear to be any
meaningful national discussion regarding the fundamental assumptions that have encouraged
these trends. To the contrary, in many of these societies existing policies contributing to the
disintegration of marriage and family life are being re-enforced or extended.
At this time of an aging population, how timely Pope Francis’ letter to families is,
reminding of the unifying nature of Christ. Speaking of the presentation of Christ in the presence
of Simeon and Ann, he notes: “It is a beautiful image: two young parents and two elderly people,
brought together by Jesus. He is the one who brings together and unites generations! He is the
inexhaustible font of that love which overcomes every occasion of self-absorption, solitude, and
sadness.”20
Today, the prophetic voice of the Church is needed more urgently then in 2003 when
Blessed John Paul II wrote in his apostolic exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa, “The entire Church
in Europe ought to feel that the Lord's command and call is addressed to her: examine yourself,
be converted, “awake, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death” (Rev 3:2).21
17
Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press (2013), pp. 170-71.
Laurence Kotlikoff & Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 1.
19
Ibid., p. 37.
20
Francis, “Letter to Families”, February 2, 2014.
21
John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa (June 28, 2003), no. 26.
18
10
According to Ecclesia in Europa, this task of “strengthening what remains” is to be
accomplished in large measure through the realization that “Serving the Gospel of hope by
means of a charity which evangelizes is the commitment and the responsibility of everyone”
(33). And that Catholics are called to “foster a climate of fraternal charity, lived with Gospel
radicalism in the name of Jesus and in his love; they should create cordial relationships,
communication, shared responsibility and participation, missionary consciousness, concern and
readiness to serve.” (28)
In the final section of this paper I would like to offer several reflections on the work of
the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian
Faith in which I was privileged to participate as an auditor.
When, in a 1983 address to the Latin American Bishops, Blessed John Paul II called for
an evangelization “new in its ardor, methods, and expression,”22 he identified with remarkable
insight the crisis of our age.
At the same time, he pointed us to that which alone can respond to it: a radical
proclamation of Jesus Christ who reveals to us the true face of God and of man.
Our age is experiencing to an unprecedented degree what the prophet Amos called “not a
famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:1), and is
suffering the consequences in what the English writer C. S. Lewis calls “the abolition of man.”
Such a situation begs much more of the Church and of Christians than cordial dialogue coupled
with humanitarian works, or a fleshless and therefore unconvincing instruction in the doctrinal
contents of the faith. The men and women of today are in extremis. They are made for the
Absolute. They hunger for beauty, communion, and joy. And when the Absolute himself is
lacking to a people they are mortally wounded.
In the words of the Lineamenta for the Synod, the new evangelization is the Church
becoming “what she is by her nature.”23
It is a proclamation of the name of the living God, not simply in her words, but in her
worship and in the radiance of the lives of her members – which alone make words true and
credible. It is the proclamation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who, as Blessed John Paul II said,
“is not a solitude…because there is within himself paternity, filiation, and…love.”24
22
John Paul II, Discourse to the 19th General Assembly of the Latin American Bishops (CELAM), March 9, 1983,
3.
23
24
Lineamenta, 2.
Homily, Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico, January 28, 1979.
11
If the new evangelization can be such an incarnate proclamation of the beauty of God,
who is communion, it will also be a proclamation of the true name of man.
The family is certainly the object of evangelization, in need of encountering ever more
deeply Christ, the font of love and the one who reveals man to himself. We can see as well how
the family is also the subject of evangelization, especially in the face of a type of
“disinformation” about the beauty of the family. Most of all, it is now apparent how vital the
family is to evangelization as an agent of evangelization—a living entity entrusted with the
Gospel, in a special way through the sacramental union of marriage, entrusted with
communicating the Gospel in its life and love. For this reason, in his homily at Puebla in 1979,
Blessed John Paul II remarked that “in the future, evangelization will depend largely on the
domestic church.”25
As the Instrumentum Laboris of the Synod pointed out, the family is “the model-place for
witnessing to faith because of its prophetic capacity for living the core values of the Christian
experience.”26 Moreover, the family bears “responsibility in the formation and transmission of
the Christian faith from the very beginnings of human life.”27 These statements touch on
irreplaceable ways in which the family founded on the sacrament of marriage participates in the
Church’s task of evangelization.
But there is an even more fundamental reason why the family is at the heart of the new
evangelization. Our faith teaches us that God is a unity in communion, a Trinity, that he is love.
This love made an irrevocable gift of himself to us.
God opened his life to us in his Son Jesus Christ. And because man is made in the image
of God, he “is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless” if he does not encounter this
love.28
The world we live in, in which millions of people have yet to encounter this love in any
meaningful way, needs the family to be an icon of the God who is communion. It needs to see
the God revealed by Jesus Christ saving man in all his relationships. This world which is starved
for meaning needs to see all the elements of human life – as Pope Benedict identifies these in
Porta Fidei, “the joy of love…the drama of suffering and pain, the power of forgiveness in the
25
John Paul II, Discourse to the Third General Assembly of the Latin American Bishops (CELAM), January 28,
1979.
26
Instrumentum Laboris, 110.
27
Ibid., 111
28
Cf. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 10.
12
face of an offence received and the victory of life over the emptiness of death” – visibly finding
“fulfillment in the mystery of [Christ]…becoming man.”29 It needs to see families that are true
communities of life, love, and forgiveness.
Such families are truly human communities, which can thus point their unbelieving
brothers and sisters to the beauty of the God who is a communion of love.
For this reason, as Blessed John Paul II taught us, the family is essentially missionary.
This mission—which flows from its being--includes, yet is greater than, any external activities of
evangelization, social or political reform. These activities when undertaken by Christian families
will bear abundant fruit when they flow from the far more foundational mission that places the
family founded on sacramental marriage at the heart of the mission of the Church. In the words
of Blessed John Paul II, “the family has the mission to guard, reveal and communicate love” –
the love that is a reflection of the Trinitarian communion and that shares in “God’s love for
humanity and the love of Christ the Lord for the Church His bride.”30
In the Church’s mission of evangelization, love alone is “effective” – the love of the
Lord, which Christian spouses first receive as a divine gift and a task. No amount of worldly
influence or power, no technological instruments, and no pastoral planning can take its place. As
the Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod noted, this love, which the family has the task of living
and communicating, is the driving force of evangelization. It is what allows the proclamation of
the Gospel to “permeate and transform the whole temporal order, assuming and renewing
cultures.”31 This love alone, when it is authentically lived in families whose members convert
anew to it every day, can be at the basis of a renewal of that genuinely human culture which
Blessed John Paul II called a “civilization of love.”
Since 1981, it has been the responsibility of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for
Studies on Marriage and Family to assist scholars, teachers, pastors, bishops, religious and
married couples themselves to become ever more conscious of the pressing need to help the
29
Benedict XVI, Porta Fidei, 13.
Familiaris Consortio, 17.
31
Instrumentum Laboris, 92.
30
13
Christian family in its mission “to become what it is”:32 an icon of God’s own communion. This
is the only way for the family to be a place of healing and of humanity for the men and women of
our time. Christian families need to be encouraged to undertake a variety of tasks, such as
becoming active in parishes and ecclesial groups, in the work of charity, and in transmitting the
faith to younger generations. But above all, families need help simply in coming to an awareness
of what they are: a “saved and saving community,”33 a sacramental reality at the heart of the
Church’s mission of evangelization.
In the words of St. John Chrysostom, we need to
understand that “Marriage is a mysterious icon of the Church.”34
We can only hope to accomplish this if we can transmit in an undiminished way the
sacramental beauty of Christian marriage.
This assistance is needed not only for the sake of the family itself. Blessed John Paul II
clearly understood that in our time the great point of encounter between Christianity and culture
is the family. Our world, in which ever increasing numbers of our brothers and sisters are
deprived of God, are thus deprived of a genuine experience of communion and joy. Those who
do not believe or whose faith wavers need the family to be a living witness to the God who is
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the source of all the beauty in the world.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has remarked that the history of the world “is marked by the
confrontation between love and the inability to love.”35
Now, as in the first centuries of
Christianity, it remains the case that the greatest proof of the truth of Christianity is not our
words or our programs. All of that has its place and serves.
But that which most helps our brothers and sisters understand what it means to be human,
to be made for faith, hope, love and joy, is this exclamation on the lips of the unbelievers of
Tertullian’s day: “See how they love one another!”36
Receiving and bearing witness to this love, without which faith remains
incomprehensible and its transmission impossible, is the primary contribution the family can
make to the new evangelization. Our task is to help the family become ever more aware of this
irreplaceable mission. Because of the immeasurable legacy of Blessed John Paul II we can help
32
Cf. Familiaris Consortio, 17.
Cf. Familiaris Consortio, 49.
34
In Epis.ad Coloss. Cap. IV, Homilia XII, PG 62:387.
35
Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994) p. 179.
36
Tertullian, Apology, 39, 7.
33
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the Christian family reveal to the world the face of God, and thus to be a place where we can
catch sight of the true face of man.
15