Family love – a call and a path to holiness
By Ben Smith, Director of the Office of Life, Marriage and Family
The 10th World Meeting of Families will be held in Rome later this month from 22-26 June. For the first time the event will also be celebrated in local dioceses across the globe due to limitations arising from COVID crowd capacity restrictions in Rome.
The theme for the event is “Family love: A vocation and a path to holiness”. The event will seek to highlight family love as a vocation and as a way of holiness, to understand and share the profound meaning of family relationships in daily life.
The parents of one special Australian family, the Abdallah family, have been invited to speak at the Rome event about how their faith helped them to come to terms with a tragic road accident that occurred in February 2020. Three of their children, as well as a niece, were on their way to buy some ice cream in the sweltering heat of western Sydney when a drunk driver ran them over and ended their lives. The tragedy struck a chord with the community who gathered around the family to support them in their grief. In response to this terrible tragedy, the Abdallah family did not resort to revenge but started a foundation called i4give to promote the power of forgiveness. Their response is a powerful witness of how a family tragedy can be a source of grace and holiness.
The event in Rome will be livestreamed from the official website: www.romefamily2022.com. The website has some excellent resources for families including seven preparatory catecheses, videos featuring testimonies on family life, an official hymn (We Believe in Love), a prayer for families and an icon painted by a world-famous Jesuit artist featuring Jesus at the Wedding at Cana.
Two Tasmanian events (in Hobart and Launceston) will be held on Saturday, 25 June to allow families across Tasmania to join together to enjoy each other’s company, to participate in workshops exploring the theme and sub-themes of the event and to pray and support each other in the journey of family life. These events will break open resources that have been customised for Australia by the Life, Marriage and Family Network – Australia that are featured on the National Centre for Evangelisation website.
Let us heed the words of Pope Francis’ by participating in this event: “This is a wonderful opportunity to devote ourselves with enthusiasm to family ministry with spouses, families and pastors together.”
Photo: CNS/Gregory A. Shemitz