VATICAN CITY (Zenit.org) – The Pontifical Council for the Family aims to release its new marriage preparation handbook for the 2012 World Meeting of Families.
Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, the council president, presented the plan for the marriage preparation handbook to Benedict XVI last February. In a press conference on Friday, the council leaders stated that they hope to complete the project by the 2012 world meeting, which will take place 30 May to 3 June in Milan, Italy.
The press conference was called for the presentation of a letter from the Pope written for the occasion of this 7th World Meeting of Families.
Cardinal Antonelli told journalists that this letter offers “precious” elements “to guide reflection in local Churches” on the importance of the reconciliation between family life and work.
The theme of the world gathering in Milan is The Family: Work and Celebration.
The letter, said the Cardinal, “presents the family, work and feast days as blessings and gifts of God, intimately united and necessary for human and integral development.” He added that to live and develop, man needs, on one hand, instrumental goods that are desired in view of something more, and on the other, “free goods that are desired for themselves”.Understanding of the useful and of the gratuitous, as the recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate happily stressed, is indispensable for persons, for society and for economic efficiency itself,” the prelate pointed out.
He warned that, increasingly, “the logic of the greatest output tends to increase production and consumption, in detriment of human relations and spiritual values.”
The Cardinal expressed his concern over the fact that, at times, an employee is forced to work seven days a week and that the day of rest is dedicated solely to evasion and not to activities that elevate the spirit and foster family ties. He was concerned that, in some cases, bosses consider single persons more productive, given that they do not have family responsibilities.
Cardinal Antonelli stated that many times the family “does not receive adequately the cultural, juridical, economic and political support” that it needs, and thus it is subjected to the “weighty conditioning of complex, disintegrating dynamics.”
The worker must always see his productivity within a company “not as the greatest output at any cost but as just output compatible with the exigencies of the jobs, families, the society, the protection of the environment, offering in work relations a flexibility to the measure of the family,” said the Cardinal.
He said the Pope considers married couples “gifts and blessings of God to help us to live a fully human existence.”