The Elderly
The Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life is busy building “a Church that challenges the throw-away culture with the overflowing joy of a new embrace between young and old!” (Pope Francis, General Audience, March 11, 2015).
For this reason, it fosters and supports the promotion of a pastoral care of the elderly that knows how to enhance their peculiar vocation in the Church, starting from the transmission of the faith to the youngest, from the preservation of their roots and from what can be considered the elderly’s very true specific mission: interceding in prayer.
In 2020, the Dicastery sponsored the 1st International Congress on the Pastoral Care of the Elderly entitled "The Richness of Many Years of Life," the proceedings of which were published in an e-book downloadable for free from this website.
Since 2021, the Dicastery has been promoting the celebration of World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly.
News
Elderly
The message of the Holy Father in audience with participants in the first international conference on the pastoral care of the elderly, “The Richness of Many Years of Life”
“When we think of the elderly and speak of them, especially in the pastoral dimension, we must learn to modify the verbs a little. There is not only the past, as if for the elderly there exists only ...
Elderly
The third and final session of the first international conference “The Richness of Many Years of Life”
Opening the third and last session of the conference on the pastoral care of the elderly, which took place at the Augustinianum, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, archivist and libraian of the Holy ...
Elderly
The second session of the first international conference, “The Richness of Many Years of Life”
“The juxtaposition of the elderly and the family is fundamental for understanding the phenomenon of aging in a population that is ever more numerous, provided that it is clarified that when we speak ...