The Catholic institution Caritas returns these days to the streets, to the parishes, and to publications, although in reality, it is with us all year round. Nearly three million people benefited, half in Spain, with almost five hundred million euros used together with Manos Unidas. It is about the reception and support of vulnerable and excluded people. And many families with great needs.
The work of many who work for Jesus Christ and contribute spiritual life and collaboration, spirituality and belonging with great spontaneity, as so many movements and associations of the faithful do, are not always perceived. Because the dioceses are mainly the people, the faithful who work in each territory: unity, but not uniformity, unity and variety, unity and communion since we are experiencing all of this in this time of synodality.
Responsible for the gift received
For all this and more, we are proud of our faith. There are already enough negative messages against the Church, priests, the doctrine of faith, and moral teachings, especially those regarding marriage and family, without offering the Gospel lived with joy and security to everyone. There is nothing wrong with being proud of our faith because it contributes a lot to peaceful coexistence and society in its structures of common good. We are aware of the gift received as a talent to make it more productive, without believing ourselves predestined but responsible.
It is not about bothering anyone and believing ourselves to be superior to others, although it is about being grateful for the faith that we have received in the Christian family rooted in diocesan life, both particular and universal. Those of us who have received the gift of shared, celebrated and lived faith know we are responsible for developing it even further. That is why the apostolate of the laity is the usual, continuous and non-noisy channel of corresponding and transmitting the legacy received. That has been precisely the message of Vatican II that is still very relevant, in particular the Decree on the apostolate of the laity. It teaches not only the need for testimony but also for the word that illuminates and moves others, taking into account the doctrinal and moral confusion evident in our society. Let’s see:
With the testimony and the word
«Lay people are presented with countless opportunities to exercise the apostolate of evangelization and sanctification. The same testimony of the Christian life and good works, carried out with a supernatural spirit, are effective in attracting men towards faith and towards God, for the Lord says: “This is how your light must shine before men, so that seeing your good works, glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5, 16).
»But this apostolate does not consist only of the testimony of life: the true apostle seeks opportunities to announce Christ with the word, now to non-believers to lead them to faith; now to the faithful to instruct them, confirm them and stimulate them to a more fervent life: “the charity of Christ urges us” (2 Cor 5, 14), and those words of the Apostle must resonate in the hearts of all: “Woe is me, if I don’t evangelize”! (1Co 9, 16).
“But as in our times new problems arise, and very serious errors multiply that seek to destroy from their foundations the entire moral order and human society itself, this Sacred Council cordially exhorts the laity, each one according to the gifts of his ingenuity and according to their knowledge, to diligently fulfill their mission, in accordance with the mind of the Church, clarifying Christian principles, defending them and applying them appropriately to current problems” (n.6).
Evangelizing families
A preferred field of evangelization continues to be the family and even more so in our time, when many do not find the meaning of marriage and the strength to develop a Christian family and not even in the natural order according to the will of God.
As a family we pray, we meet in the temple, we celebrate the holidays that bring joy every week. We are consistent with the faith and morals of the Church in our work, we do not leave this faith outside like someone who leaves their hat or umbrella at the door. We have experienced and seen this recently at WYD in Lisbon and in previous ones; in the two thousand five hundred centers of Catholic ideology that save the State more than four billion euros; in educational action with students enrolled in religion class, more than three million; in the vitality of the movements; at masses on Sundays and holidays, greatly attended by families.
The Council on the Apostolate of the Laity also refers to these Christian families: «Christian spouses are mutually, for themselves, for their children and other relatives, cooperators of grace and witnesses of the faith. They are for their children the first preachers of the faith and the first educators; they form them with their word and with their example for the Christian and apostolic life, they help them with great prudence in the choice of their vocation, and they cultivate with great care the sacred vocation that perhaps they have discovered in them” (n.11).
A Christian mother taught her teenage daughter that she had stopped going to Mass and praying, when they went out shopping and when passing by the parish she proposed to go in to pay a visit to the sacramented Jesus, just for a few minutes, and the young girl reluctantly agreed. When they left, her mother said to her with a bit of grace: Do you know why I stop by so many times to pay a visit or to pray? -So that when I die, and they bring me to the Church, Jesus Christ will not be surprised and have to say: And who is this, because I don’t know her, I haven’t seen her around here?
