A pastoral ministry close to parents and young people

“The Church can rethink the pastoral care of the family with courage and a creativity capable of making it correspond to the needs of reality. The point is to rethink the assumptions of what can constitute the family—which is something solidly founded on marriage, and not the random and uncertain result of the choice of single people who boldly embark on the family adventure, facing alone the devastating challenges of a society that discourages, in every way, their confidence in their own family project. But rather, a family is the result of a ‘yes’ to a vocation, a response to a call to happiness—both personally and as a couple.

With these words, the Undersecretary of our Dicastery, Gabriella Gambino, emphasized, in an address to the December issue of the magazine “Vita Pastorale,” the need to act effectively in the pastoral care of families in two specific areas: preparation for marriage and accompanying parents in the education of their children.

Commenting on the latest Cisf report on “The family in a post-family society,” the Undersecretary highlighted the importance of educating young people in the faith from childhood and teaching them to feel the presence of Christ; and thereby helping them to recognize the beauty of their own nuptial vocation which will lead them with love to marriage and the full joy of having children. “Marriage is a vocation,” assures Gambino, “which implies awareness of the profound relationship between one’s faith and the sacrament of marriage precisely because, as Pope Francis says in Amoris Laetitia, ‘Today, more important than the pastoral care of failures is the pastoral effort to strengthen marriages and thus to prevent their breakdown.’” (AL 307)