Rome Committee

THE CITY MISSION KNOCKS ON THE DOORS OF FAMILIES

Angelo Zema

The family is the focus of attention by the Church of Rome. It will be the key-theme of the 1997/98 pastoral year, the year of the celebration of the City Mission, the initiative established by the Pope for the dioceses of Rome in preparation for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 - on the territory. The crisis affecting «the fundamental cell of society» calls for an incisive pastoral action to re-evangelise families, to promote spirituality, to re-launch a specific catechesis, exhorting them to take on a clear and purposeful social role in line with the doctrine of the Church.

Therefore, after young people, nearly as a natural corollary, the Church of Rome places its preferential choice on the family. Specific initiatives will be addressed towards this objective over the year which has just been launched, starting with the Diocesan Feast for the Family, scheduled for Saturday 7 February 1998, in the context of the Diocesan Week of Life, planned as customary on occasion of the first Sunday of February, which will be celebrated above all in parishes to favour a more widespread sensitisation. The Feast of the Family could serve to launch the City Mission on the territory, which will be held during Lent next year. The family will be the subject and main receiver of evangelisation. «We want - Cardinal Vicar Camillo Ruini wrote in the introduction to the 1997-98 pastoral programme - the primary choice of the Mission, the visit to every family, to be accompanied by a strong renewal of the family pastoral, in the various areas in which it has been developing for some time in our Diocese».

After having recently given out the Gospel of Mark (one million two hundred thousand copies delivered all over the city by «messengers» of parishes, associations, movements and groups), missionaries will return to homes to read the word of Jesus, to pray and to listen, to hold a dialogue in a climate of fraternity and friendship. The slogan of the initiative will be: «Open the doors to Christ your Saviour». Thousands of lay people and religious have joined the original twelve thousand missionaries. They will have the task of reaching all the families for a personalised meeting. In particular, they will take care of families most in need and who are undergoing difficulties, and will attempt to promote a permanent network of attention, service and availability towards them. Qualified operators will then be able to return to homes where people are living in very serious situations.

A representative of the palace will lead the missionaries into the homes. «With the family to evangelise every home» is indeed the other chosen slogan. This solution will permit «the ice to be broken more easily», a dialogue to be started, and that wall of failed communication which characterises the areas of Rome, like all cities, to be broken. It will be the occasion to start building a network of solidarity, starting from the closer family nuclei.

«Christian families - Cardinal Ruini also wrote - are called to turn their attention, hospitality and service to other families who are in particular situations of difficulty, both on the level of faith and moral and on that of social and economic life». In substance, they will have to be the protagonists of the City Mission, both as a reference point for missionaries and to host centres to hear the Gospel which will be established during the celebration of the Mission. It will be their task to turn to the many families who are in expectation or who apparently have no expectations, immersed as they are in their own work, their own interests, diversions and passions.

Special attention will be given to engaged couples, with set training itineraries. Remote preparation to marriage will be re-launched with education for youngsters and adolescents. A diocesan aid will offer proposals to further qualify parish or inter-parish preparation courses for marriage. The Diocesan Centre for the Pastoral of the Family, headed by Monsignor Luigi Moretti (President of the Rome Committee), will promote a monthly training course for the animators of the meetings of family spirituality: within this framework there is also the initiative, which has been going on for years, of summer spiritual exercises for families and engaged couples. Meanwhile, in some parishes catechesis for the family is being carried out, an innovative proposal which is intended to make the family understand its responsibilities as the primary subject of Christian education for children also in the path of sacramental initiation.

As far as the social and civil role of family nuclei, even in Rome and Latium, following an invitation of the Bishops, the Forum of family associations was created. It is committed to the elaboration of political proposals on themes which more directly interest the family, from school to work, to the house to taxes. The deep changes currently taking place, for example, in the field of schooling, require a constant and careful commitment of presence and participation of Christian families. For this reason Rome parishes, also in view of the celebration of the City Mission (which will be held during Lent of 1999), will have to reach a collaboration accord with the schools in the territory to establish a group of Catholic parents, teachers and students to promote an efficient sensitisation to these problems.