Families are the 'great resource' for evangelizing the world

In a recent address to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Marc Ouellet spoke about the “huge gap” between the moral teachings and ideals of the Catholic Church and the experience of the common person.

The two realities are so far removed from one another that it seems nearly impossible for the two worldviews to co-exist. Yet, Cardinal Ouellet believes that the Catholic family might become “the Church's great resource for the evangelization of the world.”

In addressing Pope Francis' latest apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of the Gospel), Cardinal Ouellet remarked that in order to evangelize the world of today, “we need to first find ways to love the world and to find ways to connect with its values even when they are clouded by ideologies that are opposed to Christianity.”

It may be true that ours is a society that is closed to organized religion but where the thirst for spirituality is alive and growing. The ability to see and recognize goodness is a hard-wired, God-given response that has yet to be excised from human hearts despite habitual and grave societal sin.

Parents desire what is good for their children even if their outward behaviours and actions often seem to contradict (and seemingly actively avoid) the pursuit of any recognized good. For these reasons, the faithful and joyful example of Catholic family life is needed more than ever as the prophetic sign in the world that will initiate a societal return to God, first one individual and then one family at a time.

Catholic family life is characterized not only as a place where the faith is lived and shared but it is first and foremost a “school of love,” a domestic church where self-sacrifice proves to be, over and over again, the only way to find true and lasting joy.

In the small, everyday exchanges and conversations of the Catholic family, the world must see reflected in it their own personal value as an “unrepeatable gift” to the world; someone “chosen by eternal love” (Pope John Paul II, General Audience, January 1980).

In his Letter to Families, St. John Paul II warns of the dangers of self-seeking love and the lethal lies that take root wherever it is planted. He writes of how “free love,” instead of being free, “exploits human weakness by giving them a veneer of respectability with the help of seduction and blessing of public opinion.” Free love, or the pursuit of personal pleasure, makes individuals “slaves to base human instincts” and incapable of true love. St. John Paul writes that not only is the other spouse made to pay for their partner’s exploits and selfishness, but the children are also made to pay. “The children [who are] deprived of a mother or a father, are condemned to be orphans of living parents.”

Even those of us who have not been parented well (who have indeed been orphans of living parents) will still recognize good parenting when they see it. In his book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, prophetically proclaimed that the Catholic Church must always serve to remind the world of the “basic memory of mankind;” that is, she must proclaim long-forgotten truths and thus appeal to our collective memories of security, comfort and peace; these "memories"  are integrated by means of the family. Family incarnates truths that are bigger than language. 

If people can return to the bedrock longings of their hearts, they will return to God. God can restore even the most broken, orphaned heart (seeing as orphans are God's favourites). As James 1:27 says, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

The duty of the Catholic family is this: to passionately and joyfully extol the beauty of God's plan for love and the family. God entered the world once through a family and he rejoices at the opportunity to do it again.

God's family is the place where each one of us belongs, and once we know we belong, no one will ever convince us of otherwise.