Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Huesca (Fides Service) - Thousands of families, more than 15,000 men, women and children gathered on Sunday 18 September at the Marian Shrine of Torreciudad, Huesca in Spain for the 16th Family Marian Day meeting presided by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples. The event began with the traditional offering of flowers and farm products to Our Lady of Torreciudad by a group families and individuals. This was followed by Mass presided by Cardinal Sepe.
In his homily the Cardinal underlined the importance of the family and the gifts it offers society and the Church. “Every citizen of every civil society comes from a family” the Cardinal said denouncing attacks “to weaken the institution of the family” because “totalitarian powers refuse to see their subjects as ‘persons’, and it is precisely the family which generates people who become what they are through the power of love”. Cardinal Sepe said “today many societies are trying to disarticulate the family inventing new models of family, alternative they say, ,promoting different forms of dissolution of marriage, such as free unions and trial marriages and even pseduo marriage between persons of the same sex and leading people systematically to close the union of spouses to the gift of life and even to suppres or manipulate unborn life”.
Speaking of the family’s mission to evangelise the Cardinal said “today Christian witness of communion and maternal, paternal, filial and fraternal love of each member individually and as a family community, is an uneqallled potential for evangelisation" and the Church needs the family to share her evangelising mission. The Cardinal then stressed the dimension of the family as a ‘domestic church’ and its important role in promoting vocations: “in the family environment of devotion it is possible to hear God’s call”. Lastly Cardinal Sepe said families deserve proper pastoral care “spiritual attention” warning that “attention only for the material wellbeing of the family may in the end destroy the family”.
Pope Benedict XVI sent a special Message for the occasion which was read out at the end of the Mass. The Pope encouraged the families gathered at the Shrine of Torreciudad “to shoulder the difficult task of promoting and strengthening laws and methods which guarantee the rights and duties of the family, community of life founded by the Creator and a permenant sign of hope for all peoples”.
During the event Henar Molinero secretary general of the organising Committee for the 5th World Meeting for Families to be held inValencia Spain in the first week of July 2006, presented the programme and encouraged families to take part. (RG) (Agenzia Fides 19/9/2005, righe 37 parole 494)
