By Carmen Elena Villa
ROME, MARCH 19, 2010 (Zenit.org).-
The first decade of the 21st
century has been characterized
by a "confusion of values and
loss of references," according
to the archbishop of Quebec.
And, he laments, this is greatly
affecting families.
Cardinal Marc Ouellet offered
this estimation when he
addressed the topic "The Task of
the Family in the Third
Millennium" at a two-day
conference last week held at the
Pontifical Lateran University's
John Paul II Institute for
Studies on Marriage and the
Family.
"Humanity is living today a
crisis without precedents,"
Cardinal Ouellet contended,
pointing to elements such as the
crisis of resources, the
financial collapse,
international terrorism and
moral relativism. This also
affects the crisis of faith, he
said: "In the last century it
modified the image that man had
of himself."
The present crisis, the primate
of Canada proposed, "is not only
moral and spiritual, but above
all anthropological, and calls
humanity into question."
Heart of the Church
Recalling the Second Vatican
Council and particularly the
emphasis on family in "Gaudium
et Spes," the cardinal
reiterated the importance of the
family as a domestic Church,
capable of living "according to
the grace of the Trinitarian
likeness."
He said it it necessary "to
bring back the vision of the
family to the heart of the
Church."
Cardinal Ouellet stressed how
Pope John Paul II's 1981
apostolic exhortation "Familiaris
Consortio" was a fruit of
reflection at Vatican II on the
vocation and role of the family,
above all on the need to go
deeper into the subject of man
and woman as beings created in
the image and likeness of God.
He also recalled the vocation of
the family to be a domestic
Church, on the basis of St. John
Chrysostom's phrase, "Make your
home a church." He underlined
that in this connection, today
there is much to discover, given
that the family "is not only an
image of the Church, but also an
ecclesial reality."
In marriage, the cardinal
explained, "the unity of the
'we' [is verified], not in a
symbolic but in a real way," and
the spouses "give themselves to
one another and receive Christ
also in the everyday," resulting
in "a charism of unity, fidelity
and fecundity."
"Love is the way of human
perfection in Christ," the
Quebec cardinal said, noting how
conjugal love is the union of
eros and agape. "A fully human
love, sensitive, spiritual,
faithful, exclusive until death,
which is not exhausted and which
continues to awaken new lives."
A love that, in the likeness of
the Trinity, "entails in itself
an openness to the Son and still
more profoundly: the Son and the
Spirit that give themselves to
the spouses as fruit of love," a
communion that "includes not
only openness to the Spirit and
to the Son, but also to
society."
Thus, Cardinal Ouellet proposed,
the family "participates in the
salvific mission of the Church,"
and both the spouses and
children become "focuses of
interpersonal communion
indwelled by Christ and a school
of liberty," able to "respond to
the confusion of values in the
culture of death and the culture
of possession and of the
ephemeral."
Facing the Family in the 3rd Millennium
Cardinal Ouellet Looks at Task Set Out for Domestic Churches