Making the family ‘good news’

Before we reflect on how the family becomes "good news" to the world, there is real great news for us Filipinos: Manila has been busy preparing for the Fourth World Meeting of Families that is to take place come January 23-26, 2003. Today, Feast of the Holy Family of Nazareth, is just the right time to reflect on the significance of the event not only for us in the Philippines but also for the whole world.

Traditionally, the Filipino family is well knit, following age-old customs which date back even before the advent of Christianity in our country. When our first Spanish missionaries came with the conquistadores, they found families bound together organized into barangays which were the basic structures independent of each other. These families, Christianized, even became solid units of society living family values like respect and obedience to elders, family prayers together, the custom of parents blessing their children at Angelus, home presence and meals together in the evening. With the onset of Western influences especially from America, there was a shift to modern culture which did away with the principle that "the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world". Parents became career-oriented, the father and the mother both at work and children left to the care of yayas and teeners going to their independent ways. The old rules of Filipino-type "Maria Clara" decency became a thing of the past, and anyone who did not follow the modern fad became targets of ridicule. At present the move is towards reform and renewal of old family values together with the preservation of the old values of courtship and marriage.

The care of the families deserves priority of place among many pastoral activities. There is a basic norm that wherever the family is threatened, life, the dignity of the human community and the future of the society and the Church are also threatened. Inspired by the human mystery of family created by the Creator and Redeemer must protect the fundamental values of life, love and solidarity and launch among humanity the confidence that is born of Christian faith.

One of the serious threats to family and life is the way in which international as well as local media and political bodies present other ways of living together that do not entail any commitment of love, of fidelity, or of life as equivalent to the family. Society does not realize that in doing that it is undermining the very source of its own being. Another trend is the misuse of terms like freedom, interruption of pregnancy for an anti-life, anti-love culture that aims at deceiving women’s consciences by using what seems to be neutral terminology to conceal the horrors of abortion and infanticide. We Christians are called not just to present their teaching but also to take positions that are culturally and politically involved, affirming their conscientious objection to the downward trend in respect for marriage, family and life.

We are invited to avail of this tremendous grace and blessing by attending the pastoral-theological conferences, by joining the evening family witnessing and the public Eucharistic celebration which will climax this blessed event.

Feast of the Holy Family, Luke 2:22-40.