family - Jubilee

“Do not Be Afraid of Life”

On October 14-15, the World Meeting with Families was held in Rome. “Be certain of this, Christian spouses: the sacrament of Matrimony assures you of the necessary grace to persevere in the mutual love that your children need as much as bread”

BY MARINA RICCI*

I look at them sweating under the Saturday sun and shivering in the Sunday rain. Grandparents, fathers, mothers, and children. Reports number them at 250,000, well organized in the roped-off areas in St. Peter’s Square or piled up along Via della Conciliazione and in the little streets of the ancient area called the Borgo. I look at them and ask myself, as a mother and a journalist, where they find the energy and the will, despite all the labors of everyday life and the crowded agenda of appointments and the hordes of pilgrims that have marked the past nine months of this Jubilee Year. At first glance, the scene is no different from so many others already seen in St. Peter’s Square or around the world wherever John Paul II was in that moment. Nor is the theme a new one: the Pope has talked about the family many times, and the World Meeting with Families has, as always, songs and testimony on its program for Saturday afternoon. When John Paul II’s white jeep began its way up Via della Conciliazione to the area in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, Anderson was recounting his story. The giant screens in the square showed the images of the live TV coverage and the crowd began to get excited, but no one had the courage to tell the speaker that the Pope was about to arrive. Nothing is more important than the story of a child who never knew his father and who lost his mother at the age of 9, who lived in the streets of Rio de Janeiro like so many other menhinos de rua, who sold drugs and saw his friends die, who knows what the word “hell” means. Now Anderson is 21 years old, and he can relate what he went through because a friend gave him the address of a center that would take him in. That was his family, his father and mother. In that family he grew up, and there he stayed to work out of gratitude to the God who loved him, to help other menhinos de rua to come out of hell. In the square at that point, it was as though only the two of them were there: the Pope on his way and the boy telling the story of his childhood. Anderson’s words had the astounding effect of dissolving the scene, of canceling out the elements of a big religious fair, and of breaking up the indistinct blur of the crowd, erasing its anonymity and giving it back as the sum of faces and histories, all more or less easy ones. The simplest witness came from Belgium: a father, mother, and two daughters.

Capacity for forgiveness

They are an average family from the Europe that is so rich in past history and now so sterile in hopes and dreams. They climb the steps in front of the Basilica, intimidated, with eyes open wide and tentative, as though unable to explain why they were there. “Our family,” they say, “has no special merits. We’re no different from all the others. Each of us has his or her own character, and it is not always easy to live together. The only difference, maybe, is that when we argue we then try to forgive.” Here it is: the word “forgive,” banal yet decisive, a word that has been banished from our age. A word that acquires meaning only when it is part of an awareness of one’s own poverty and when it bonds people together in pity for each other. Perhaps it is this capacity for forgiveness to which John Paul II alludes when he says, “Be certain of this, Christian spouses: the sacrament of Matrimony assures you of the necessary grace to persevere in the mutual love that your children need as much as bread.” And he is referring to pity for each other when he adds, “As for the many broken families, the Church feels called not to express a harsh, detached judgment, but rather to shed the light of God’s word, accompanied by the witness of his mercy, on the depths of so many human tragedies. This is the spirit in which the pastoral care of the family must also address the situation of divorced and remarried believers. They are not excluded from the community; they are invited, instead, to share in its life, undertaking a journey of growth in the spirit of what the Gospel requires. The Church, while not concealing from them the truth about the objective moral disorder of their situation and the resulting consequences for sacramental practice, wishes to show them all her maternal closeness.” Now try to explain (in this case my concern was not as a mother, but a purely professional one) that what the Pope said cannot easily fit into the standard parameters of the Church’s open or closed position with regard to divorced people. That there are other parameters, and precisely for this reason, in his address, mercy and understanding for those who have lived through an unfortunate experience do not ignore the very real damage caused by the inability to love and to forgive: “Are children not already too heavily penalized by the scourge of divorce? How sad it is for a child to have to divide his love between parents in conflict! So many children will always bear the psychological scar of the suffering that their parents’ separation caused them.”

Without a father and mother

Right, children. They are the inspiration of the theme of the Jubilee of Families: “Children, Springtime of the Family and Society.” It is not an ideal choice of title, as it brings to mind Fascism’s encouragement of large families, but you repent immediately for having these negative thoughts when you realize that this title is full of compassion and concern for those children who no longer have either a father or a mother. The Jubilee of Families is filled with the absence of the family–not an abstract absence, but the lack of hands and arms that can protect and take care of them. Whether caused by war or poverty, death or voluntary abandonment, the desperate loneliness of those who are undefended is the same.
The words of Gabriel, a lay missionary, evoke the enchanted beaches of Sri Lanka, “the goal of the perverted tourism of men searching for young victims at a low price.” They evoke this image with all the anger and horror of someone who sees an outrage being perpetrated and the pained amazement of someone who realizes that, as he attempts to be of help, he has the same facial features as these European tourists and thus is suspected by the children. “In our era,” John Paul II notes, “the recognition of children’s rights has made undeniable progress, but the practical denial of these rights, as seen in the many terrible assaults on their dignity, remains a cause of distress. We must be on guard so that the good of the child is always given priority: beginning with the moment that a child is desired. The tendency to use morally unacceptable reproductive practices reveals the absurd mentality of a ‘right to a child,’ which has replaced the due recognition of the ‘right of a child’ to be born and later to grow in a fully human way. How different and worthy of encouragement, on the other hand, is the practice of adoption! A true act of charity, which looks to the welfare of children before the demands of parents.”

The choice to adopt

Adoption is an act against poverty, one might want to say. But maybe this is not really the case. Because the question of adoption involves also those who have not had problems conceiving their children. It calls into play the meaning–hardly a foregone conclusion–of being a parent, which is arrived at only partly by instinct but perhaps even more by a personal confrontation, at times even pitiless, with one’s own weakness and insecurity, with hard work and patience, with sadness and joy. How a child perceives what it means to be a parent was recounted on September 5th by a young girl who participated in the meeting in Rome of families who have adopted children through Mother Teresa’s order of the Missionaries of Charity. Her words flooded back into my mind when John Paul II talked about the choice to adopt. “Wouldn’t you like to meet your real mother? This is the question I have always been asked. But who is my mother and who are my brothers and sisters? Isn’t my mother the woman who has dreamed of me since she was in school, who sings me lullabies before I sleep, who teaches me to pray, who tries desperately to make me chew with my mouth closed, who counts my every breath… and isn’t my father the man who has held me in his arms all night long, walking up and down the hall, reciting the Hail Mary so he wouldn’t fall asleep, who stopped smoking because I have asthma, who puts on the invisible scratch on my finger the biggest Band-Aid he can find, who dreams great things for me, who always takes me late to school.… It is not only flesh and blood that make a man a father and a woman a mother; generation in the flesh is not enough, you also need generation in the spirit.… I love you, Mother Teresa, because like Jesus you said to me, ‘These are your parents,’ and to them you said, ‘This is your daughter.’” Who, father or mother, adoptive or biological, does not recognize in these words the greatest belonging and at the same time the absence of every right, of every possible ownership? As evening falls on St. Peter’s Square, it is the Pope’s turn to be moved, he who had just said, “In many regions, and paradoxically right in the more prosperous countries, bringing children into the world has become a decision made with great hesitation, well beyond that prudence which is necessarily required for responsible procreation. It could be said that at times children are seen as more of a threat than a gift.… You are here this evening to bear witness to your conviction, based on trust in God, that this trend can be reversed.” But when “the trend being reversed” takes the face of three handicapped children adopted by an Italian family, John Paul II cannot hide his emotion as he kisses them. The Pope caressing a little girl with Down’s syndrome is the image that concludes this afternoon in St. Peter’s Square.

Torrential rain

Waking up the next morning was like a cold shower. Under the pouring rain, armed with umbrellas, cardboard, hats improvised out of plastic bags, thousands of families ran into each other in the streets around the Vatican. But they did not give up. By ten o’clock the square was full again. Out of solidarity with his soaked pilgrims, John Paul II refused an umbrella and was wet by the rain as he walked the short distance that separates the basilica atrium from the covered platform set up in front of the church. The rain may have been a good omen for the eight couples who came from five continents to be married by the Pope, but the reporter’s eye was still perplexed looking at the downpour flooding this Jubilee. Nothing, however, could dampen the love in the eyes of the sixteen candidates for marriage. They only had eyes for each other as they swore eternal love, almost forgetting the presence of John Paul II. In the blessed unawareness of that moment, rings wouldn’t slip onto fingers and voices trembled, as happens at every wedding. And even the most skeptical reporter had to smile at the very clear picture of the human desire that love would last forever, just like the first day. It is to this desire, the Pope explained, that Jesus Christ answers. John Paul II quoted Genesis, “It is not right that man should be alone. I shall make him a helper.… This is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes attached to his wife, and they become one flesh.… One flesh! How can we not see the power of this expression? The biblical term ‘flesh’ calls to mind not only man’s bodily nature, but his overall identity as body and spirit. What the spouses achieve is not only a joining of bodies, but a true union of their persons. A union which is so deep that it in some way makes them a reflection of the ‘We’ of the three divine Persons in history. Thus we can understand how much is at stake in Jesus’ discussion with the Pharisees in Mark’s Gospel.... Those who were speaking with Jesus considered this a problem of interpretation of the Mosaic law, which permitted a man to put his wife away, leading to debates on the reasons that could justify it. Jesus rises totally above this legalistic view, going to the heart of God’s plan. In the law of Moses he sees a concession to their ‘skelerokardia,’ their ‘hardness of heart.’ But it is to this hardness that Jesus is not resigned. And how could he be, having come precisely to dispel it and to offer to man, with Redemption, the strength to overcome the resistance due to sin?” Jesus does not resign Himself, but men and women often do, and John Paul II knows this too. The Church “does not hide the difficulties and tragedies which concrete historical experience records in the life of families. But she also knows that God’s will, wholeheartedly accepted and fulfilled, is not a chain that enslaves, but the condition for a true freedom which achieves its fullness in love.” Can it really be like this? How can the frailty of what we are coexist with the fullness of what is promised? The Jubilee of Families came to an end. The families filed out of St. Peter’s Square and preparations began for the next ones: missionaries, the world of sports, pizza makers…

*Vatican TV correspondent, TG5

From John Paul II’s address to families

on Saturday evening, October 14, 2000


I recently had the joy of going as a pilgrim to Nazareth, the place where the Word became flesh.

It is precisely the spiritual atmosphere of the House at Nazareth that we want to relive this evening.

In looking at the Holy Family, you, Christian spouses, are prompted to ask yourselves about the tasks that Christ
assigns to you in your wonderful and demanding vocation.

Children are the hope that continually blossoms, a project that starts ever anew, the future that opens without ceasing. They represent the flowering of married love, which is found and strengthened in them. In need of everything as they are, especially in the first stage of life, they naturally appeal to our solidarity.

The situation of children is really a challenge for society as a whole, a challenge posed directly to families.
No one knows as you do, dear parents, how essential it is for children to be able to count on you, on both of you–fathers and mothers–in the complementarity of your gifts. No, it is not a step forward for civilized society to support trends that obscure this elementary truth and even demand to be legally recognized.

From the Homily of John Paul II

during Mass on Sunday, October 15


“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” (Gen 2:18) So it is that in the Book of Genesis the sacred author describes the fundamental requirement on which the marital union of man and woman and, with it, the life of the family that flows from it, is based. It is a requirement of communion. Human beings were not made for solitude; they bear within themselves a relational vocation, rooted in their spiritual nature. Because of this vocation, they grow to the extent that they enter into relationships with others, fully discovering themselves only in “a sincere giving of self.” (Gaudium et spes, n. 24)

Certainly, there are difficulties. But Jesus provided married couples with sufficient means of grace to overcome them. By his will marriage has acquired, in the baptized, the value and power of a sacramental sign, which strengthens its characteristics and prerogatives. For in sacramental marriage the spouses commit themselves to expressing to each other and to bearing witness before the world to the powerful and indissoluble love with which Christ loves the Church. It is a “great mystery,” as the Apostle Paul calls it. (cf. Eph 5:32)

God’s blessing is at the origin not only of marital communion, but also of a responsible and generous openness to life. Children really are the “springtime of the family and society,” as the motto of your Jubilee says. It is in children that marriage blossoms: they crown that total partnership of life (“totius vitae consortium,” CIC, can. 1055, 1), which makes husband and wife “one flesh;” this is true both of the children born from the natural relationship of the spouses and those desired through adoption. Children are not an “accessory” to the project of married life. They are not an “option,” but a “supreme gift” (Gaudium et spes, n. 50), inscribed in the very structure of the conjugal union.
“The ‘we’ of the parents, of husband and wife, develops into the ‘we’ of the family, which is grafted on to earlier generations and is open to gradual expansion.” (Letter to Families, n. 16) The family cannot be closed in on itself. (From the L’Osservatore Romano, October 16-17, 2000)

It was necessary that the daily
become heroic
and that the heroic
become daily

John Paul II