For four days in August Dublin will become the focal point for the Church’s proclamation of what has become known as the “Gospel of the Family”. I can think of no more beautiful presentation of the content of this proclamation than the prayer of Pope Benedict XVI in the 2006 Way of the Cross in Rome:
Lord Jesus,
the family is one of God’s dreams
entrusted to humanity;
the family is a spark from Heaven
shared with all mankind:
the family is the cradle where we were born
and are constantly reborn in love.
For four days Dublin will celebrate this “divine dream” in the 9th World Meeting of Families, centred on the theme chosen by Pope Francis: “The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World.” The first WMOF took place in Rome in 1994 during a UN “International Year of the Family” and since then it has taken place every three years in different cities. It generally consists of an international Pastoral Congress and a concluding Festival of Families in the presence of the Pope and a final Solemn Eucharistic Celebration. The event is under the auspices of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life.
The programme of events has all been finalised, including the speakers for the three day Pastoral Congress in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), the star-studded line-up for the Festival of Families event Dublin’s Croke Park Stadium on Saturday (including among other Nathan Carter, The Riverdance Troupe, Dana Masters, Daniel O’Donnell, The Begley Family, and The Priests), and the programme for the Pope’s Final Mass in the Phoenix Park the next day. The Papal itinerary during his two day visit to Ireland has also been finalised, including a meeting with President Michael D. Higgins, a visit to the Day Centre of the Capuchin Fathers in Dublin, and a visit to Knock Shrine in the West of Ireland on Sunday morning.
Tickets for the various WMOF events were made available online and were quickly snapped up: the 40,000 tickets for the Knock shrine event were gone in a few hours, and the half million tickets for Sunday’s Papal Mass being booked in a few days. All 37,000 tickets for the Pastoral Congress have also been taken.
It is quite fitting that there is already an atmosphere of joyful enthusiasm for an event – a festival – designed to celebrate the family. This joy bears out the words of Pope Francis in a letter addressed to Cardinal Farrell, as prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life for the Ninth World Meeting of Families:
One might ask: does the Gospel continue to be a joy for the world? And also: does the family continue to be good news for today’s world? I am sure the answer is yes! And this “yes” is firmly based on God’s plan. The love of God is His “yes” to all creation and at the heart of this latter is man. It is God’s “yes” to the union between man and woman, in openness and service to life in all its phases; it is God’s “yes” and His commitment to a humanity that is often wounded, mistreated and dominated by a lack of love. The family, therefore, is the “yes” of God as Love.
The truth of this affirmation: that the Gospel continues to be joy to the world, and the family continues to be good news are particular important for us Irish Catholics at the moment, deeply disturbed as we are by the increasingly paganised tenor of Irish life, not least by the recent landslide decision of the population to legalise abortion. Despite these gathering storm clouds we have not lost our hope, realising as we do that we have the Gospel and the Christian family, and with them we still have every reason not just for hope, but even for festivity. The theologian Josef Pieper once pointed out that there can be no festivity “except on the basis of faith that all is well with the world and life as a whole” (Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity); the WMOF is an affirmation that, despite everything, “all is well with the world and life as a whole”.
A great part of our cause for celebration is to have the Vicar of Christ on Irish soil once again for only the second time in history. The context for his visit is – as our media never tires of pointing out – glaringly different from that of Saint John Paul II in September 1979. And yet when one revisits the texts of his addresses and homilies one sees that the Pope was in no way starry-eyed about the condition or the future of Catholicism in Ireland. With the clear vision of a veritable prophet he pointed out to the Ireland of almost forty years ago what has become a sad reality since, not least in the area of human sexuality:
The most sacred principles, which were the sure guides for the behaviour of individuals and society, are being hollowed out by false pretences concerning freedom, the sacredness of life, the indissolubility of marriage, the true sense of human sexuality, the right attitude towards the material goods that progress has to offer. Many people now are tempted to self-indulgence and consumerism, and human identity is often defined by what one owns (Homily, Mass in the Phoenix Park, Dublin).
In his stirring homily at the Mass for the young of Ireland, celebrated in Galway, Saint John Paul II spoke of them as “the Ireland of the future”, the “technicians or teachers, nurses or secretaries, farmers or tradesmen, doctors or engineers, priests or religious” of the Ireland to come. To rapturous applause he told those young people that “Tomorrow, Ireland will depend on you”. At the same time he warned them unambiguously that the challenge facing them would come largely in the domain of sexual morality:
The lure of pleasure, to be had whenever and wherever it can be found, will be strong and it may be presented to you as part of progress towards greater autonomy and freedom from rules. The desire to be free from external restraints may manifest itself very strongly in the sexual domain, since this is an area that is so closely tied to a human personality. The moral standards that the Church and society have held up to you for so long a time, will be presented as obsolete and a hindrance to the full development of your own personality. Mass media, entertainment, and literature will present a model for living where all too often it is every man for himself, and where the unrestrained affirmation of self leaves no room for concern for others.
Sadly his words were as prophetic as they were unheeded, and the desire to be “free from external restraints” – even those of human nature itself – have wreaked havoc with Irish young people ever since. Sadly it looks as if his foreboding that Satan might “seduce Irish men and women away from Christ” and thus inflict a great blow “on the Body of Christ in the world” (Address in Limerick) has been borne out.
In his letter convoking the Dublin WMOF Pope Francis has expressed his wish that the Dublin event would offer in its pastoral preparation, “concrete signs” that “Christian families are a place of mercy and witnesses of mercy”. His own 2016 post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on love in the family Amoris Laetitia is naturally the background document for reflection on the family in the Pastoral Congress of WMOF 2018. Amoris Laetitia, for all its concern to “accompany with attention and care the weakest of her children, who show signs of a wounded and troubled love” (Amoris Laetitia, 291), clearly rejects the notion of a marriage between persons of the same sex:
In discussing the dignity and mission of the family, the Synod Fathers observed that, “as for proposals to place unions between homosexual persons on the same level as marriage, there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (Amoris Laetitia, 251).
Despite this, the organisers of the WMOF have come in for criticism for intolerance towards those who are LGBT. An instance of this is an Irish Times article in which a gay marriage advocate describes the very positive reaction his own homosexual “marriage” received from a group of nuns:
Over a lot of tea and buns, all they wanted to hear about was the ceremony, the dinner and dancing and to see as many photos as possible. It was Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia in action.
However, my wedding photographs have no place at the Dublin World Meeting of Families (WMoF2018). In the last three months, the organisers of the WMoF2018 have shown a staggering zero-tolerance policy towards the LGBTI+ community.
The organisers have removed inclusive language on the family by Pope Francis and LGBTI+ pictures from their pamphlets, and deleted references to gay families by a bishop in the catechesis.
Despite these actions, the event organisers claim that the LGBTI+ community is welcome – provided of course we’re not seen or heard.(Irish Times, March 27, 2018).
What he is referring to here are two instances where same-sex unions were in fact, contrary to the teaching of Amoris Laetitia, presented in WMOF promotional material as “analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”: firstly in the WMOF explanatory booklet “Six-Session Parish Conversation” which was reprinted to replace six photos which seemed to show same-sex couples, and secondly the editing by the WMOF of a promotional video by the Irish-American bishop, David O’Connell of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, to remove a section in which he speaks of gay couples as an instance of a new and acceptable, family configuration.
The insinuations of homophobia being directed at the organisers of the WMOF from various quarters are remarkable in the light of the clear, sometimes and – as those corrections suggest – even excessive, attempts to strike a welcoming note towards LGBT persons. Certainly the organisers and churchmen have to navigate skillfully to preserve fidelity to the Church’s unpalatable teaching that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” while accepting homosexuals “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357). And yet as Pope Francis himself has pointed out that there can be no genuine love where truth is omitted:
We can and we must judge situations of sin – such as violence, corruption and exploitation – but we may not judge individuals, since only God can see into the depths of their hearts…. It is our task to admonish those who err and to denounce the evil and injustice of certain ways of acting for the sake of setting victims free and raising up those who have fallen…. Harsh and moralistic words and actions risk further alienating those whom we wish to lead to conversion and freedom, reinforcing their sense of rejection and defensiveness” (Message for World Communications Day, 2016).
Besides, the call to conversion is directed to all Catholics. Interestingly, even though often the 1979 Papal Visit to Ireland is presented as if it were a moment of Catholic triumphalism it was in fact preceded by a call to national conversion, as Saint John Paul II was happy to point out in his homily in the Phoenix Park:
It was with great joy that I received the news that the Irish Bishops had asked all the faithful to go to Confession as part of a great spiritual preparation for my visit to Ireland. You could not have given me a greater joy or a greater gift. And if today there is someone who is still hesitating, for one reason or another, please remember this: the person who knows how to acknowledge the truth of guilt, and asks Christ for forgiveness, enhances his own human dignity and manifests spiritual greatness.
Perhaps the people of Ireland should make similar spiritual preparation for the visit of Pope Francis? Certainly the WMOF, and in particular the days of the Pope’s presence here, will be a time of great grace for all the people of Ireland, and a time to renew our commitment to the “spark from heaven” which is the family.
On Pope Francis’ itinerary is Knock Shrine, also visited in 1979 by Saint John Paul II. He called Knock the “goal of my journey to Ireland”. In his homily there the saint remarked that “Every generation, with its own mentality and characteristics, is like a new continent to be won for Christ”, and of course this applies to the generation of young Irish of 2018 as much as it did in 1979. Who knows whether they might not be moved by the presence of Peter’s successor among them. Perhaps “This generation is once more a generation of decision” (John Paul II, Limerick).