“Our work for 25 years, continuous, often in the shadows, carried by a light structure, as Pope Francis underlined, is bearing beautiful fruits”, the President of the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE), Vincenzo Bassi, wrote in the summer newsletter that has just been released. Mr Bassi remembered the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Federation with Pope Francis in June and the events of the last six months: “More than 100 meetings throughout Europe” with “ministers, ambassadors, members of parliament, officials of the European institutions, NGOs involved in our issues, academics and entrepreneurs”. “Like families, our Federation is multi-tasking”, Mr Bassi wrote, listing the issues that FAFCE is committed to addressing: demographic challenges, work-family balance of parents, discrimination of mothers, fight against pornography, surrogacy, depopulation of rural areas, poverty of families, their loneliness, but also the protection of minors online or in their education. The most recent fruit of this work is the publication on “Parental responsibility and work: the future of Europe at stake” in cooperation with the Marco Vigorelli Foundation. The book offers various perspectives which, curator Nicola Speranza said in the introduction, seem to suggest that “the answers to Europe’s future lie primarily in the spirit of private initiative, with the civil society that is called to re-orientate along the lines of horizontal subsidiarity between intermediate associations”. A bitter question is also asked: “Will the subsidiarity of association networks and corporate contexts actually be the place from which we can overcome the lack of solidarity from the institutions?”.