Amoris Laetitia Family Year
On 19 March 2021, the Church celebrated the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia on the beauty and joy of love in the family.
On the same day, Pope Francis launched the “Amoris Laetitia Family Year”, which will conclude on June 26, 2022, on the occasion of the X World Meeting of Families in Rome with the Holy Father.
The “Amoris Laetitia Family Year” is an initiative of our Holy Father, which aims to reach every family around the world through several spiritual, pastoral and cultural proposals that can be implemented within parishes, dioceses, universities, ecclesial movements and family associations.
The experience of the pandemic has highlighted the central role of the family as the domestic Church and the importance of community ties between families. Such ties make the Church an authentic “family of families” (AL 87).
The family deserves a year of celebration, so that it can be given a central place in the commitment and care of every pastoral and ecclesial reality.
Goals of the Amoris Laetitia Family Year
1. Share the content of the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia more widely, to let “people experience the Gospel of the family as a joy that fills hearts and lives” (AL 200). A family that discovers and experiences both the joy of having a gift, and of being a gift to the Church and to society, “can become a light in the darkness of the world” (AL 66), and the world today certainly needs this light!
2. Proclaim that the sacrament of marriage is a gift, containing in itself the transforming power of human love. To this end, pastors and families must journey together with a sense of pastoral co-responsibility and complementarity between that the different vocations in the Church share (cf. AL 203).
3. Enable families to become active agents of the family apostolate. Here, “an effort at evangelization and catechesis inside the family” (AL 200) is required, since a family of disciples turns into a missionary family.
4. Make young people aware of the importance of formation in true love and self-gift, with initiatives directed to them specifically.
5. Broaden the vision and scope of family focus apostolates, so that the family may be encountered in all its stages, including married couples, children, young people, the elderly and situations of particular family fragility.
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