The Pontiff spoke to participants at the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe during the closing Mass of the Sixth World Meeting of Families yesterday via live television linkup and noted that the theme of the 2012 meeting will focus on, “The Family, Work and Feast.”
The Pope continued by defining the family as the “essential foundation for society and peoples, an irreplaceable benefit for children, who deserve to come into the world as the fruit of love, of the total and generous giving of the parents.” He further added that “the family occupies a primary position in the education of the individual. It is a true school of humanity and of perennial values.”
It is from others that the gift of life is received, the Holy Father said, “which then develops and matures with the truths and values we learn through relation and communion with others. ... The family founded on indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman expresses this inter-relational, filial and community dimension, as well as being the environment in which human beings can be born with dignity, and grow and develop fully."