Pope Francis: ‘Sustain, Defend, and Safeguard the Family’
ROME — Pope Francis launched an appeal on behalf of families Sunday, calling for greater efforts to overcome selfishness to preserve family unity.
The pope commemorated the feast of the Holy Family — Joseph, Mary, and Jesus — by urging families to prevail over the difficulties that are sure to assail them.
“To protect harmony in the family, the dictatorship of the ‘I’ needs to be fought – when the ‘I’ inflates,” the pontiff said during his midday Angelus message.
“It is dangerous when, instead of listening to each other, we blame each other for mistakes; when, rather than showing care for each other, we are fixated on our own needs; when instead of dialoguing, we isolate ourselves with our mobile phones,” he declared.
“It is sad at dinner in a family when everyone is on their own cell phones without speaking to each other, everyone speaking on their own phones,” he continued, “when we mutually accuse each other, always repeating the same phrases, restaging an old scene in which each person wants to be right and that always ends in cold silence, that silence you can cut with a knife, cold, after a family discussion.”
Pope Francis appealed to Christians on Sunday to avoid gossiping about others, which he called “a plague worse than COVID.” https://t.co/63Apk61BjF
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 6, 2020
“This is horrible, really horrible!” he said, insisting that couples “in the evening, when everything is over, always make peace. Never go to bed without making peace, otherwise there will be a ‘cold war’ the next day!”
“And this is dangerous because it initiatives a series of scolding, a series of resentments,” he went on. “How many times, unfortunately, conflicts originate and grow within the domestic walls due to prolonged periods of silence and from unchecked selfishness!”
“Sometimes it even ends up in physical and moral violence,” he declared. “This lacerates harmony and kills the family.”
All these pitfalls can be overcome by conversion from selfishness to favoring the other, the pope asserted.
“And please, each day, let us pray a little bit together – if you can make the effort – to ask God for the gift of peace,” he concluded. “And let us all commit ourselves – parents, children, Church, society – to sustain, defend and safeguard the family which is our treasure!”
" Conservative News Daily does not always share or support the views and opinions expressed here; they are just those of the writer."
