With some 140 days remaining before the 7th World Meeting of Families, which will include the participation of Benedict XVI in Milan, the preparations are intensifying.
A symposium to prepare for the May 30 to June 3 meeting was held this week at the Pontifical Lateran University.
The symposium, fruit of synergy between the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Marriage and the Family and the Pontifical Pastoral Institute Redemptor Hominis of the same athenaeum, was titled “Such a Family for Such a Society.”
Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family and one of the organizers of the World Meeting, was one of the participants.
Speaking of the theme, the cardinal told ZENIT that “the cinema, art in general, information media, must be respectful of the profound dimension of the reality of the human person, in families, in work, in celebration.”
“If they don’t trivialize all this, reducing it to an object, they can be very useful to human growth and to a greater awareness of what man and life are,” Cardinal Antonelli added.
The congress opened with the greeting of Monsignor Dario Vigano, president of the Redemptor Hominis Institute, and the brief but profound intervention of Bishop Enrico Dal Covolo, rector of the university, who reflected on how the media increasingly shapes family relations, reshaping times, spaces and roles, and specifying new challenges, in the light of the present educational emergency of which the Pope has so often spoken.
The rector’s intervention was followed by that of Monsignor Livio Melina, president of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, who stressed again how the subject of the family cannot be bypassed, inasmuch as it is “central and crucial, not only for the ecclesial society but for the whole of society.”
Moreover, in regard to the collaboration between the family and the cinema, the institute’s president reflected how the family is not “immediately evident in its positivity”: in fact, the family is “a mystery, not in the sense of something dark, but of a human reality in which the revelation is guarded of the vocation of man to be a gift of himself and the revelation of God that is reflected in it.”
ROME, JAN. 13, 2012 (Zenit.org)