Family, home provide fertile ground – Jul 11

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December 18, 2014

Family, home provide fertile ground – Jul 11


Family, home provide fertile ground – Jul 11 PDF Print E-mail
By Vernon Khelawan

This year our Church is celebrating the Year of the Family, a profound and most important theme, amplified by the sub-theme “Catholic Family, Become What You Are”, especially given the circumstances in which the people of our Archdiocese are now called to live.

But according to the document prepared specific to the sub theme by Msgr Robert Llanos which reads, “The extent to which the Catholic family accepts the Gospel, matures in faith and lives its vocation to love, it becomes an evangelising community.”

The family is normally led by parents, so immediately the work of the parents (parenting) takes prominence in ensuring family values, respect – virtues which can translate into evangelisation. So there is much opportunity in the home for evangelisation.

Msgr Llanos and his Family Life Commission has again taken the lead and has come up with a parenting programme in response to the many and varied challenges faced daily by parents in realising effective parenting.

The programme is meant to facilitate adult reflection on parenting styles and responsibilities as well as the methods and practices which can be utilised to create healthy homes and family living.

In a sense therefore the New Evangelisation truly begins in the home, with the family, so that when Pope John Paul II in 1984 called people to a New Evangelisation, he saw this movement as “a bountiful manifestation of collegiality and communion, an evangelical commitment to give dignity to man, to generate a great future hope…to propose the civilisation of love and as a mean, a new ‘Christian Culture’”.

And this can all start at the level of the household in which parents must play a pivotal role. Further, if one of the chief characteristics of the New Evangelisation is seriously considered, it would be seen that -:

*The New Evangelisation begins at home in the family and in the parish.

When it is recognised therefore that every child is a gift from God and a person in his/her own right from the moment of conception, worthy of reference and respect and that the sanctity of all life is upheld by parents, the seriousness of parenting is exposed.

The AFLC parenting programme comprises two modules – Parenting and Family Life and Common Sense Parenting. The first module provides a faith-based perspective that addresses local matters such as single parents, fatherhood and abuse, while module II focuses on a practical approach to enabling healthy family relations. It is very down to earth and practical.

Fertile ground in which the New Evangelisation can truly take root.

Last Updated on Friday, 16 July 2010 15:49