Reach out to families; let them know God loves them, pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Catholic Church, its ministers and its members must find new ways to reach out to and welcome families who are distant from the church and have no understanding of how much God loves them, Pope Leo XIV said.

Writing to 40 theologians and pastoral ministers participating in a seminar on evangelizing with families, the pope said the first goal of outreach is to help people longing for love and meaning to find that in Jesus.

"How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus -- God who gives himself to us -- with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life," the pope wrote in a June 2 message.

The Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life gathered the experts at its Vatican office June 2-3 to reflect on the theme, "Evangelizing with the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges." The seminar followed the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly.

Pope Leo told them, "This theme clearly expresses the church's maternal concern for Christian families throughout the world as living members of the Mystical Body of Christ and the primary nucleus of the church, to whom the Lord entrusts the transmission of faith and the Gospel, especially to the new generations."

Every human being, as St. Augustine taught, has a longing for God, the pope said. And parents have the first responsibility to respond to that longing by making their children "aware of the fatherhood of God."

And while church attendance and formal religious affiliation in many places are declining, he said, "ours is a time marked by a growing search for spirituality, particularly evident in young people, who are longing for authentic relationships and guides in life."

"Hence, it is important that the Christian community be farsighted in discerning the challenges of today's world and in nurturing the desire for faith present in the heart of every man and woman," he said.

But that, the pope said, requires paying special attention "to those families who, for various reasons, are spiritually most distant from us: those who do not feel involved, claim they are uninterested or feel excluded from the usual activities, yet would still like to be part of a community in which they can grow and journey together with others."

"How many people today simply do not hear the invitation to encounter God?" Pope Leo asked.

Another problem, he said, is "an increasingly widespread 'privatization' of faith" so focused on the individual that newcomers have no experience of "the richness and gifts of the church, a place of grace, fraternity and love."

"What drives the church in her pastoral and missionary outreach is precisely the desire to go out as a 'fisher' of humanity, in order to save it from the waters of evil and death through an encounter with Christ," the pope said.

As an example, he pointed to young people who choose cohabitation instead of Christian marriage. What they need, he said, is "someone to show them in a concrete and clear way, especially by the example of their lives, what the gift of sacramental grace is and what strength derives from it. Someone to help them understand 'the beauty and grandeur of the vocation to love and the service of life' that God gives to married couples."

When reaching out to families who are distant from the church, he said, patience and even creativity are needed.

"It is not a matter of giving hasty answers to difficult questions, but of drawing close to people, listening to them and trying to understand together with them how to face their difficulties." Pope Leo said. "And this requires a readiness to be open, when necessary, to new ways of seeing things and different ways of acting, for each generation is different and has its own challenges, dreams and questions."

The bishops have the first responsibility "to cast their nets into the sea and become 'fishers of families,'" the pope said.

But it is a duty all Catholics share since "through baptism, each one of us has been made a priest, king and prophet for our brothers and sisters, and a 'living stone' for the building up of God's house 'in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity,'" he added, quoting from the homily at the inauguration of his papacy May 18.