FAMILIARIS
CONSORTIO
On November 22, 1981, Pope John Paul II published his exhortation
on the family, Familiaris Consortio. Summarizing the conversations of the Synod
of Bishops around family life in the modern world, and echoing themes of his "Theology
of the Body" that he was then presenting in the course of his Wednesday
audiences, John Paul highlighted the dignity and timeless value of the family.
According to the plan of God "in the beginning," the family is the "domestic
Church," the context where the first seeds of true Christian
living are planted and cared for in an atmosphere of love, mutual
help, forgiveness,
and
selfless giving. The family is the community that first preaches
the Gospel to the children of God, bringing them to full human
and Christian
maturity.
Like the human person, so the family reflects the image of
God: a communion of persons sharing love and creative of life, finding joy in
selfless giving and receiving the others as gift. Marriage is a common Old Testament
image for God's relationship with us. But in Christ, this foreshadowing
reaches perfection, as Paul relates in Ephesians 5, and marriage is "raised
to the dignity of a sacrament" of redeeming love. Thus Christian
marriage is marked by love that brings good out of evil, forgiveness
out of offenses,
resurrection out of death. It is the love that refuses to give
up, the love that is merciful, the love that sacrifices for the
other's
true
good.
In Familiaris Consortio, John Paul also outlined the fourfold task
of the family as it fulfills its primary mission in the world to "guard,
reveal and communicate love": to form a community of persons in their marriage
relationship and in the family circle; to serve life in nurturing children to
maturity in both the life of nature and the life of grace; to help develop society,
since the family is the most fundamental social unit; and to build up the life
of the Church. As he pointed out, it is in the family that "social justice" must
begin, since it is in this community that we learn how to live in generosity,
charity, justice, cooperation, sharing, and dialogue -- all the skills needed
in larger society. Where society threatens to depersonalize, "the family
possesses formidable energies capable of taking us out of anonymity, keeping
us conscious of personal dignity." As we commemorate the silver anniversary
of this prophetic call to esteem family life, we do well to echo the prayer with
which the Pope ended his letter: "May Christ the Lord, the King of Families,
be present in every Christian home as He was at Cana, bestowing light, joy, serenity
and strength."
1. I - FORMING A COMMUNITY OF PERSONS
Love as the Principle and Power of Communion
18. The family, which is founded and given life by love, is a community of
persons: of husband and wife, of parents and children, of relatives. Its
first task is to live with fidelity the reality of communion in a constant
effort to develop an authentic community of persons.
The inner principle of that task, its permanent power and its
final goal is love: without love the family is not a community
of persons
and, in the
same way, without love the family cannot live, grow and perfect
itself as a community of persons. What I wrote in the Encyclical
Redemptor
hominis
applies primarily and especially within the family as such: "Man cannot
live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself,
his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter
love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate
intimately in it."(45)
The love between husband and wife and, in a derivatory and broader way, the
love between members of the same family-between parents and children, brothers
and sisters and relatives and members of the household-is given life and
sustenance by an unceasing inner dynamism leading the family to ever deeper
and more intense communion, which is the foundation and soul of the community
of marriage and the family.
+ Pope John Paul II