The Urgent Need to Evangelize

At the invitation of the National Director, Don Paolo Gentili, the Dicastery Undersecretary, Linda Ghisoni attended the Meeting in Assisi which the National Office for Family Pastoral Care of the Episcopal Conference of Italy organizes every two years for the heads of the Family Pastoral Care units of the Italian dioceses.

More than 500 participants, mostly married couples, coming from various Italian dioceses; at this edition there were also representatives of the lay associations, movements and aggregations which dedicate special attention, in their apostolate, to family pastoral care. Several nuns were present as well as priests responsible for family pastoral care at diocesan level and some bishops who had followed the three-day programme during which Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, President of the Episcopal Conference of Italy also intervened.

Intense and very moving the moments of meditation, listening, sharing and prayer, in which the children of the married couples present were also involved, interacting through their prayers, questions and activities in line with the theme of these three days and prepared under the guidance of the family Équipe Animatema, bon within the National Office itself.  

In her intervention, which envisaged a lectio in the framework of the opening prayer of the three day event, Linda Ghisoni affirmed, among other things, that "even the best pastoral programmes that take into account an ecclesiology of communion, pedagogical criteria prepared and studied in depth, have their wellspring, not in being ‘over busy’, against which Pope Francis recently warned us, but in the invitation of Our Lord to abide in him, to build a house on the rock, to go forth and announce the Gospel to all.  From our baptism the right and duty to evangelize gushes forth in us, understood not as an effort, but as an urgent need, a haste marked by the joy experienced: like Mary of Magdala who runs to the Apostles to announce to them that she has seen the Lord, her,  an Apostle to the Apostles".

And she concluded: "In letting ourselves meet the Lord, personally and as a married couple, in living marriage and family life by founding them on the rock that is Our Lord, inspiring ourselves by his love which is patient kind, does not envy or boast…… takes no account of the evil done to it, does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth …(see. 1 Cor 13 and Amoris laetitia, IV), we are a living Gospel, good news, credible witnesses of marital love, a sign of Christ’s love for the Church,  even if we know that we stutter the great deeds that the Lord has done for us".