HOMILIE ABOUT FAMILY OF THE 1 SEPT. IN TORRECIUDAD, BY PRELATE OF OPUS DEI.

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"Share this joyful and hope-filled vision of the family"

Homily of Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz, at the 28th Marian Day of the Family held in the shrine of Torreciudad on September 1, with over 16,000 people taking part.

HOMILIES09/03/2018

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“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Responsorial Psalm: Lk 1:46-47). When repeating these words of Our Lady in the responsorial psalm, we have expressed our desire to accompany our Mother in her attitude of thanksgiving and praise to God. We have many reasons to raise our hearts to God, who wants to carry out great things in us, and through us in our families, in society and in the whole world.

Today, in celebrating this Marian Day of the Family close to Our Lady of Torreciudad, we raise our hearts to God with these words of holy Mary. Certainly, we are and we realize we are very little, greatly in need of God’s help in order to be good children of his and bring forward our families in accord with his will. But with our Mother in Heaven we can pray this prayer of thanksgiving to God: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

In the Gospel we have seen how an angel restored peace to Saint Joseph’s heart, in a complicated moment in the history of the family of Nazareth (cf. Mt 1:18-23). We are amazed to see how Mary and Joseph also encountered difficulties in bringing forward their family! The history of their home is not an idealized one. The Holy Family was without doubt the happiest family the world has ever seen or will see, but nevertheless they had to confront real setbacks and problems.

“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom 8:28). We have heard these words of Saint Paul in the second reading. Many of us will recall how Saint Josemaria summed them up in three words: omnia in bonum, everything works for the good. How often these words will have helped us to embrace God’s will, also when we don’t understand why He allows something that makes us suffer or that causes others to suffer. We can also apply them in the context of each home. Everything works for the good: a financial problem that requires a change of plans, the challenges involved in raising children, the difficulties in trying to make compatible a demanding job with the needs of the home… Everything works for the good, if we put everything in God’s hands. He will give us the strength needed to turn it into an opportunity to grow as a family, to find in these small or great challenges a way to be more united, because everyone bears them with love.

“I thank God,” says Pope Francis, “that many families, which are far from considering themselves perfect, live in love, fulfil their calling and keep moving forward, even if they fall many times along the way” (Apost. Exhort. Amoris laetitia, 57). These are hope-filled words. At the same time, they invite us to ask ourselves: are we aware of the great good that families do when they strive to be a school of communion, of forgiveness, of solidarity? Truly, families can give light and warmth to other families, to friends, neighbors, school or work colleagues. “God wants every family to be a beacon of the joy of his love in our world. What does this mean?” the Holy Father asked a few days ago in Ireland. “It means that we, who have encountered God’s saving love, try, with or without words, to express it in little acts of kindness in our daily routine and in the most hidden moments of our day” (Address, Dublin, 25 August 2018).

To attain this, there is no need to wait until everything in one’s own home is going perfectly. “Every Christian home,” Saint Josemaria said, “should be a place of peace and serenity. In spite of the small frustrations of daily life, an atmosphere of profound and sincere affection should reign there together with a deep‑rooted calm, which is the result of authentic faith that is put into practice” (Christ is Passing By, no. 22). This is how families can cooperate very directly and effectively in building up and strengthening the civilization of love that Saint John Paul II spoke about.

In the Collect prayer today we have addressed God with these words: “In your commandments the family finds its authentic and sure foundation.” This is truly the rock that gives stability to the family: the loving and wise plan of our Creator and Father for the family. Therefore we want to get to know and appreciate ever better the features of this marvelous divine plan, and spread it joyfully in every sector of society.

Let us also renew today, close to Our Lady, the resolution to live the Communion of Saints intensely. Let us pray for the Church, for the Pope, and for all the shepherds and faithful. And may we raise our prayer to Heaven today especially for all the world’s families, asking that they receive the strength of the prayer and sacrifice that accompanies each of our days.

Our Mother, Our Lady of Torreciudad, with your help we want to share this joyful and hope-filled vision of the family with those around us. We ask you to teach us to go forward together, as a family, towards the encounter with God and with other men and women. And that we not become discouraged when the path becomes hard, or when we stumble, because we know that you always accompany us.

Taken from 31 to 36 of Enciclical from Pope Franciscus, Fratteli Tutti, Oct. 2020.

 

31. In this world that races ahead, yet lacks a shared roadmap, we increasingly sense that “the gap between concern for one’s personal well-being and the prosperity of the larger human family seems to be stretching to the point of complete division between individuals and human community… It is one thing to feel forced to live together, but something entirely different to value the richness and beauty of those seeds of common life that need to be sought out and cultivated”.[29] Technology is constantly advancing, yet “how wonderful it would be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation could come with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, even as we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters who orbit around us”.[30]

PANDEMICS AND OTHER CALAMITIES IN HISTORY

32. True, a worldwide tragedy like the Covid-19 pandemic momentarily revived the sense that we are a global community, all in the same boat, where one person’s problems are the problems of all. Once more we realized that no one is saved alone; we can only be saved together. As I said in those days, “the storm has exposed our vulnerability and uncovered those false and superfluous certainties around which we constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities… Amid this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about appearances, has fallen away, revealing once more the ineluctable and blessed awareness that we are part of one another, that we are brothers and sisters of one another”.[31]

33. The world was relentlessly moving towards an economy that, thanks to technological progress, sought to reduce “human costs”; there were those who would have had us believe that freedom of the market was sufficient to keep everything secure. Yet the brutal and unforeseen blow of this uncontrolled pandemic forced us to recover our concern for human beings, for everyone, rather than for the benefit of a few. Today we can recognize that “we fed ourselves on dreams of splendour and grandeur, and ended up consuming distraction, insularity and solitude. We gorged ourselves on networking, and lost the taste of fraternity. We looked for quick and safe results, only to find ourselves overwhelmed by impatience and anxiety. Prisoners of a virtual reality, we lost the taste and flavour of the truly real”.[32] The pain, uncertainty and fear, and the realization of our own limitations, brought on by the pandemic have only made it all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the organization of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence.

34. If everything is connected, it is hard to imagine that this global disaster is unrelated to our way of approaching reality, our claim to be absolute masters of our own lives and of all that exists. I do not want to speak of divine retribution, nor would it be sufficient to say that the harm we do to nature is itself the punishment for our offences. The world is itself crying out in rebellion. We are reminded of the well-known verse of the poet Virgil that evokes the “tears of things”, the misfortunes of life and history.[33]

35. All too quickly, however, we forget the lessons of history, “the teacher of life”.[34] Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this, we will think no longer in terms of “them” and “those”, but only “us”. If only this may prove not to be just another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing. If only we might keep in mind all those elderly persons who died for lack of respirators, partly as a result of the dismantling, year after year, of healthcare systems. If only this immense sorrow may not prove useless, but enable us to take a step forward towards a new style of life. If only we might rediscover once for all that we need one another, and that in this way our human family can experience a rebirth, with all its faces, all its hands and all its voices, beyond the walls that we have erected.

36. Unless we recover the shared passion to create a community of belonging and solidarity worthy of our time, our energy and our resources, the global illusion that misled us will collapse and leave many in the grip of anguish and emptiness. Nor should we naively refuse to recognize that “obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction”.[35] The notion of “every man for himself” will rapidly degenerate into a free-for-all that would prove worse than any pandemic.