FOREWORD

by

H. Em. The most Rev. Cardinal

Darío Castrillón Hoyos

Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy

THE CLERGY AND PASTORAL CARE OF THE FAMILY

The future of mankind is tied to a family based on marriage and viewed as a stable union open to the life of a man and a woman. The family is the heritage of mankind, a natural institution, an essential good needed by every society and by all peoples. It is the foundation of society, the primary context for the humanisation of people and for a civilised way of life.

John Paul II wrote: “Willed by God in the very act of creation,(cfr. Gn 1-2) marriage and the family are interiorly ordained to fulfilment in Christ(cfr. Ef 5) and have need of His graces in order to be healed from the wounds of sin and restored to their "beginning,"(cfr. Mt 19,4) that is, to full understanding and the full realization of God's plan” (Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris consortio, n. 3).

At a time in history when the family is the targeted by different forces seeking to destroy it or in any case distort it, the Church, aware that the good of society and her own good are deeply associated to the good of the family (cfr. Cost. past. Gaudium et spes, n. 47), feels more deeply and with a greater urgency her mission to proclaim for everyone God’s design for marriage and the family, working for its vitality and human and Christian promotion of it and thus contributing to a rebirth of society and also of God’s people.

In this sense, all local Churches and especially all Parishes are summoned to become more deeply aware of the grace and the responsibilities they have received from the Lord in terms of promoting family pastoral care in the certainty that evangelisation, in the future, will be mainly in the hands of the domestic Church.

It is above all Parish priests that, in view of this responsibility, with the help of other members of the clergy and also of the various religious communities, associations and new ecclesial movements involved in different ways and to different degrees in pastoral care of the family, can and must constantly devote themselves to married couples, fathers and mothers and above all young people who are about to be married, so as to support them in the different phases of their development and of their human and spiritual growth.

This is the topic to be discussed at the theological level today in this 45th international video-conference on: “The clergy and pastoral care of the family”.

In their remarks, theologians, will underscore the fact that members of the clergy are called to assert that marriage and the family are not just an accidental sociological structure resulting from specific historical or economic circumstances. They will point out that parish priests are entrusted with conveying through the gift of language, and above all through homiletics and catechesis, the truth about marriage and the family, a truth that is rooted in God’s act of creation thanks to which human beings are capable of loving so that every man and woman may have a share in the divine life itself which is love: human beings become similar to God in the extent to which they become people who love, according to God’s original plan.

In this regard today’s papers will highlight, among other things, also the need for members of the clergy to provide future spouses with an immediate preparation to marriage through spiritual training. In this context, the doctrine of protecting a new human life and of the sacred value of life throughout its development until is natural end will be underlined. The Speakers will, in fact, point out that in an ageing society like the Western one, sons and daughters are required to offer dutiful and loving care to their parents and to relatives who are elderly and ill.

The Speakers will also underline the fact that a Parish’s pastoral care cannot be provided only to nearby Christian families but, by extending its horizons to include distance preparation to marriage and family life, the catechesis and care of parish priests will focus especially on families that live in difficult or irregular situations. In this regard, parish priests know that the faith of those who apply to the Church to be married can exist in different degrees and that it is their foremost duty, as legitimate guides and shepherds of the diocese entrusted to them by the Bishop, to help these couples rediscover this faith, nourish it and develop it further.

Members of the clergy, therefore, because they understand the reasons by which the Church wishes to admit to the celebration of marriage also those who are most distant from God, will reject people who are imperfectly disposed but, on the contrary, will help them become more aware of the nature of the conjugal pact and of the meaning of the sacrament of matrimony.

Parish priests are not mercenaries, they do not run away when faced with wolves and they will assert very clearly what Pope Benedict XVI has recently resolutely confirmed: “Today, the various forms of the erosion of marriage, such as free unions and "trial marriage", and even pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex, are instead an expression of anarchic freedom that are wrongly made to pass as true human liberation. This pseudo-freedom is based on a trivialization of the body, which inevitably entails the trivialization of the person. Its premise is that the human being can do to himself or herself whatever he or she likes: thus, the body becomes a secondary thing that can be manipulated, from the human point of view, and used as one likes. Licentiousness, which passes for the discovery of the body and its value, is actually a dualism that makes the body despicable, placing it, so to speak, outside the person's authentic being and dignity.”(Inaugural Address to the participants in the Ecclesial Diocesan Convention of Rome on the Christian family and community 6.6.2005).

In thanking participants, I would like to mention that they will be presenting their papers live from ten nations on the five continents. From Rome, from the See of the Congregation for the Clergy, papers will be presented by His Excellency Professor Gerhard Ludwig Müller coming from Regensburg, by Professor Antonio Miralles and by Professor Paolo Scarafoni.

There will also be speeches from New York, Professor Michael Hull, from Manila Professor José Vidamor Yu; from Taiwan Professor Louis Aldrich; from Johannesburg Professor Rodney Moss; from Bogotà Professor Silvio Cajiao; from Sydney Professor Gary Devery; from Madrid Professor Alfonso Carrasco Rouco; from Moscow Professor Ivan Kowalewsky.

I wish you all an interesting conference.