Families in Dublin: From Meeting to Accompaniment

“We hope that thanks to the Meeting, families will be able to acquire a more intense awareness of their vocation, which is to bear witness of joy before the world in spite of all the difficulties that they inevitably meet along the way.”

These are the words spoken by the Prefect Kevin Farrell during an interview with SIR, the press agency of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, on the eve of the now imminent Dublin World Meeting of Families.

Much is expected of the event, the cardinal explains, “but the basic objective is mainly the development of the family pastoral care, extensively designed by the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. We are living in a context of exasperated individualism that risks obscuring the beauty of marriage and the family; pastoral patterns and methods of the past no longer seem to be functional in the face of profound social changes; yet, in this radically new and often destabilizing situation, we feel the duty to prepare and accompany couples to marriage in a more demanding and constant way, like a true ‘catechumenate,’ according to Pope Francis’ happy formulation.”

This means more than “simply organizing premarital courses: the question—he concludes—is much deeper and concerns accompanying men and women, who decide to be part of God’s project, during the first years of marriage.”