Dear Maronite and Latin priests

The commission for family pastoral care of the Catholic Church of Cyprus: the first joint commission between the two Maronite and Latin communities.

Brothers and sisters

May the Lord give you peace!

This first meeting of the Families of Cyprus is the moment of thanksgiving. With gratitude today we bring before God – as in a great offertory – all that the Holy Spirit has sown in you, dear families. You participated in moments of reflection and sharing; I imagine the wealth of experiences, resolutions, dreams, and there is also no shortage of worries and uncertainties. Now we present everything to the Lord, and ask Him to support you with strength and with His love. You are fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, uncles; you are adults, children, young people, elderly people; each with a different family experience, but all with the same hope made of prayer: may God bless and keep our families and all the families in the world.

There are many challenges: the education of children, the religious education of children. How to save our young people from the culture of relativism. And the Gospel of Saint Luke that we heard gave us a list of the challenges. And listening to this word we seem to remember the difficulties we have experienced in our families, and which continue to be the challenge of our families today. Such as for example: the misuse of alcohol, even family abandonment, separations, and even divorce. And Jesus warns us in today’s Gospel that we must “watch”, “pray”, and “listen” to the Word of God, as we did today.

We want to put God at the center, and not our self. And let’s be careful: the world, the voices of the world will tell us otherwise. Today we live in the temptation of putting our self, the self first and us after, that is, our families.

But I apologize if I am very clear, but it is important that it is clear for everyone. Brothers and sisters we are not here to mourn the past. It means that we are not here to regret the life of before, the families of the past. The priests of the past. If we want to meet the men of the past, the women of the past, the sons and daughters of the past, the families of the past, we must go and visit them in the cemetery. They are dead… we have the present, and we walk towards the future. Those of the past not all dead. When Jesus calls, even to marriage and family, he asks us to look forward, to the future. And he does not abandon us. Do you know the secret of riding a bicycle? Who knows the secret, the technique? The secret is to pedal and look forward. If he looks back he falls.

With the strength of this Word of life, I encourage you to decisively resume the path of family love, sharing the joy of this call with all family members. The Church is with you, indeed, the Church is in you! The Church, in fact, was born from a Family, that of Nazareth, and is mainly made up of families. May the Lord help us every day to remain in unity, in peace, in joy and also in perseverance in difficult moments, that faithful perseverance that makes us live better and shows everyone that God is love and communion of life. Amen