By Deborah Castellano Lubov
God has offered the Holy Family as a perfect model to help families in their difficulties, Pope Leo XIV suggested in his remarks on Friday in the Vatican to participants in the Jubilee Meeting organized by the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM) on the future of the family.
Recalling that the meeting has been discussing the future of the family in the context of the Jubilee of Hope, the Pope focused his discourse on the three words: jubilee, hope, and family.
Faith of our parents and grandparents
The Holy Father recalled that Jubilee, in the Old Testament, evoked “a return,” and that similarly, today, we must understand this “return” as a call to come back to God, to Jesus, the center of our lives.
Next, the Pope marveled that the Jubilee of Hope invites us to leave these peripheries and return to our roots, namely, “to the faith we received from our parents, to the persevering prayer of our grandmothers counting the beads of the rosary, to their simple, humble, and honest lives which, like leaven, sustained so many families and communities.”
We find our true joy in Jesus
In them, the Pope reaffirmed, we learned that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
“In Him,” he underscored, “we find our true joy: the jubilation of knowing we are at home, in the place where we are meant to be.”
Recalling that the Jubilee of Hope is a journey towards an encounter with that Truth, which is God Himself, Pope Leo warned against our tendency to “fall into the danger of building our lives on human securities and worldly expectations.”
He also acknowledged the real challenges facing families today, including poverty, migration, and violence, and urged both the Church and public institutions to support and protect family life.
Just as He did with St Joseph…
In this context, the Pope went on to call the family both a gift and a task.
“In every child, in every husband or wife,” he said, “God entrusts us with His Son, with His Mother, just as He did with Saint Joseph,” noting He does so “so that together with them, we may be a foundation, leaven, and witness of God’s love among humanity.”
With this sentiment, Pope Leo remembered Pope Saint Paul VI’s words in Nazareth, urging all faithful to follow the example of the Holy Family, “accompanying and supporting one another in silence, work, and prayer, so that God may fulfill in each person the plan of love He has prepared for them.”
“This,” Pope Leo noted, “is the love that becomes flesh in every life born into the faith through baptism and anointed ‘to proclaim this year of grace’ to all people.”
The Holy Family, the perfect model God offers us
Finally, Pope Leo XIV concluded by entrusting the participants’ intentions to the intercession of the Holy Family, “the perfect model God offers as a response to the desperate cry for help from families.”
“By imitating it,” he marveled, “our homes will become living torches of God’s light.” – Vatican News
