Recently (March 19th) we celebrated the feast of St Joseph. On his recent visit to the Philippines, Pope Francis spoke about St Joseph and reflected on his role as protector of the Holy Family. He said:
“Just as the gift of the Holy Family was entrusted to St Joseph, so the gift of the family and its place in God’s plan is entrusted to us. In our time, God calls upon us to recognize the dangers threatening our own families and to protect them from harm. Let us be on guard against colonization by new ideologies. There are forms of ideological colonization that are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God has given us, the mission of the family…in our families we need to be very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say “no” to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families. We need to ask St Joseph to send us the inspiration to know when we can say “yes”, and when we have to say “no.”
The pressures on family life today are many…While all too many people live in dire poverty, others are caught up in materialism and lifestyles that are destructive of family life and the most basic demands of Christian morality. These are forms of ideological colonization. The family is also threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemera , by a lack of openness to life…”
Many of you will know by now of the attempts of our Ontario government to bring in a new sex-education curriculum which contain elements flat out opposed to our Catholic Christian ethic. This program is being imposed without adequate consultation of parents. The new sex-education program contains controversial and misleading information and age-inappropriate sex information. It will display explicit material to children of young ages. There is a building wave of parent protests against this program. I would urge you, especially parents, to write or phone your local MPP to protest the attempt to impose these changes on all schools in Ontario, even the Christian ones. For more information, you can go onto the PAFE website (Parents as First Educators).
Pope Francis concluded his speech by saying “The future of humanity, as St John Paul II often said, passes through the family. The future passes through the family. So protect your families! Protect your families! See in them your country’s greatest treasure and nourish them always by prayer and the grace of the sacraments. Be living examples of love, forgiveness, and care. Be sanctuaries of respect for life, proclaiming the sacredness of every human life from conception to natural death. What a gift this would be to society, if every Christian family lived fully its noble vocation.”