CAN WE BUILD UP FAMILY LIFE AGAIN?

Bishop Egan is to be congratulated on his recent pastoral letter.   He points out the need to find ways to make marriages work.    Yes, I too was disappointed and said so in my post that the Synod failed to address the issue of family failure and give helpful advice.  

The trouble is that our society is anti-marriage and to live as Christ wanted us to live in this Domestic Church has become very difficult.   Yet the family is where the children learn about love by being loved and if the family is dysfunctional and that love is missing it takes a great deal of grace for a child to love him or her self.    Many parents in care never even have the love of one person for very long as staff move on ion their careers and they grow up as the most helpless of beings.   I was delighted that after the letter was read there were real prayers offered for the protection of the family rather than the glib idea that good marriages are an ideal.  Christ did not preach that marriage was an ideal.

Yet who is to blame more than others?  The answer is Christianity.  Bishops, priests, and lay people got it into their heads that as long as they gave to Cafod, Aid to the Church in Need, and other charities, and were nice to one another then that was all that was required.   At our judgement we may well have a list of how much we contributed but an unimpressed Jesus might ask us what we did for the family next door.   What did we do for all the children with one parent, divorced parents, or no parents who see themselves as worthless    We might answer that there was nothing we could  do to change the situation in society.  And perhaps humanly speaking we have a point.  What can we do as a human Church?   The answer might come as a surprise for we are not just a human organisation we are a divine one.  There are thousands of human reasons why we cannot change things but we are led by Jesus Christ the Son of God and His reply might be that we lacked faith

So where do we start.   Perhaps in Catholic Schools we could introduce a new vision of children not just being the professional people of the future, but also future mums and dads.   Perhaps we should prepare them for marriage in teaching them the value of celibacy before marriage.   Perhaps we could find a way of relating to those deprived children by holding them in esteem even when they fail to match our standards.   We will of course in many cases fail, but our sit will not be in failing  but in not trying    

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