“As Sa-Fa Family, we feel the call to walk with families”
To encourage family pastoral care to respond to the specific challenges that families pose today.
To implement the Family Pastoral Plans of the Provinces.
To cultivate the little Nazarene virtues that promote encounter:
joy, simplicity, presence, listening, service, solidarity, forgiveness, patience.
(CG Doc. Bros and Lay People).
Bearing the name “Holy Family” commits us to meeting families and accompanying each one so that they can discover the best way to overcome the difficulties they encounter on their journey.
The value that each family represents leads us to see in it:
-
The sphere of love where couple relationships develop as a vocation to reciprocal self-giving love.
-
A “domestic Church” where the aims of Christian marriage and the Christian family are realised.
-
The family is primarily responsible for the education of its children and has the freedom to choose the education it wishes to give them.
-
A place of relationship, mutual help and solidarity. It is attentive to the needs of its members and especially to those of the weakest, committed to the social realities that surround it and participates in its humanisation and evangelisation.
From our charism, which is born from the contemplation of the life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, we recognise in the Gospels of childhood a complex experience that is very close to today’s reality: the reality of teenage mothers (announcement to Mary), unwanted realities that must be assumed (announcement to Joseph), the lives threatened from birth (the slaughter of the innocents), the drama of families forced to emigrate (flight to Egypt), the misunderstandings of children (Jesus in the temple). In the experience of the Holy Family and of every human family, there is an aspect of death and of life that passes through difficulty, error and suffering.
The pastoral care of the family “must make us experience that the Gospel of the family responds to the deepest expectations of the human person: to his dignity and to the full realisation in reciprocity, communion and fertility” (Al 201).
