Pope Francis arrives by helicopter at the Phoenix Park: MAXWELLS The office for Vatican Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life announced the theme Pope Francis has chosen for the next World Meeting of Families, which will be in Rome June 23-27, 2021– it is: ‘Family love: A vocation and a path to holiness’.
The dicastery asked that in preparation for the meeting, families and pastoral workers read both Pope Francis’ 2016 exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia, and his 2018 exhortation on the universal call to holiness, Gaudete et Exsultate.
“The aim is to emphasise family love as a vocation and a way to holiness and to understand and share the profound and redeeming significance of family relationships in daily life,” the dicastery said.
The love of a husband and wife and the love found within families, it said, show “the precious gift of a life together where communion is nourished and a culture of individualism, consumption and waste is averted”.
Significance
Married couples and families, the dicastery added, “demonstrate the great significance of human relationships in which joys and struggles are shared in the unfolding of daily life as people are led toward an encounter with God”.
The announcement comes after a small group of Catholics accused Francis of heresy this month in writing, with much of the 20-page letter focusing on the exhortation, in particular, its suggestions for a process of guided discernment that might eventually lead to a determination that a couple who is divorced and remarried only civilly could access the Sacraments.