Families should ask themselves often “if they live based on love, for love and in love”. The Pope wrote this in the letter he addressed today to Card. Kevin Farrell, Prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, in preparation for the 9th World Meeting of Families that will take place in Dublin, Ireland, from 21 to 26 August 2018 on the theme: “The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World”. In the letter, the Pontiff explained in practice that all this “means giving oneself, forgiving, not losing patience, anticipating the other, respecting” one another.

“How much better family life would be if every day we lived according to the words, ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’”, Pope Francis stressed, adding that “every day we have the experience of fragility and weakness, and therefore we all, families and pastors, are in need of renewed humility that forms the desire to form ourselves, to educate and be educated, to help and be helped, to accompany, discern and integrate all men of good will”. “I dream of an outbound Church, not a self-referential one, a Church that does not pass by far from man’s wounds, a merciful Church that proclaims the heart of the revelation of God as Love, which is Mercy”, the Pope continued. “It is this very mercy that makes us new in love; and we know how much Christian families are a place of mercy and witnesses of mercy, and even more so after the extraordinary Jubilee. The Dublin meeting will be able to offer concrete signs of this”.