Minute with the Pope: June 6, 2012

Pope Benedict XVI highlighted the central message of the recent World Encounter of Families during his General Audience catechesis on June 6, 2012. He said that “there is no future for humanity without the family.”In the family, he explained, “young people to learn values that give meaning to existence. “They need to be born and grow in that community of life and love that God himself wanted for man and woman,” Benedict XVI continued. “It is in the family that one experiences for the first time how the human person was not created to live closed within himself, but in relation to others. And, it is in the family that the light of peace begins to glow our hearts so that it might illumine our world.”Turning to the World Encounter of Families held the week prior in Milan, Italy, he said the meeting was “an eloquent ‘epiphany’ of the family, shown in the variety of its expressions but also in the uniqueness of its substantial identity: that of a communion of love, founded on marriage and called to be a sanctuary of life, a little Church, cell of society.“From Milan,” concluded the pope, “a message of hope was sent out to the world, substantiated by the experiences that were lived, that it is possible to be joyful, even if it is demanding to live a faithful love, ‘forever,’ that is open to life. It is possible to participate as a family in the mission of the Church and the construction of society.”