Going to the World Meeting of Families

By Marco Cavagnaro

The Seventh World Meeting of Families will take place in Milan from May 30 to June 3, 2012 on the theme The Family: Work and Celebration. The event is intended as a public testimony of the Christian family values, promoting,as Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan put it, a deep anthropological awakening. 
Milan is the economical capital of northern Italy, and at the same time a true post-modern secularised centre European city. Maybe this is the reason for which it has been chosen to host this great event, as a sign of hope for the future.

About the theme, Work and celebration, Pope Benedict said in his preparatory letter that the organisation of work, conceived of and implemented in terms of market competition and the greatest profit, and the conception of a holiday as an opportunity to escape and to consume commodities, contribute to dispersing the family and the community and spreading an individualistic lifestyle.

This World Meeting of Families reconciles these different aspects of human life, by putting back at their centre the family, united and open to life, thoroughly integrated in society and in the Church, a family which celebrates together the Lord as its only source of strength.

The city of Milan is busy preparing the way for the pope: more than 33,000 families are going to host the pilgrim families from all parts of the world, and thousands of youths offered their labour as volunteers. The organisation is expecting more than one million people to attend the various events.

The Pope will arrive on Friday, June 1, to address the city in the beautiful Duomo Square and assist at a concert in his honour in the prestigious La Scala opera house.

On Saturday, June 2, he will meet more than 50,000 youths preparing themselves to be confirmed; and on that same evening he will preside over the Feast of Testimonies, together with families gathered from all parts of the world. The meeting will culminate in a solemn Mass on the morning of Sunday, June 3.

South Africa will be represented in the meeting by a delegation headed by Archbishop William Slattery of Pretoria and Bishop Dabula Anthony Mpako of Queenstown.

For Archbishop Slattery this celebration will be a chance to experience the communion of the universal Church, and to be enriched by the testimony of families from all parts of the world.

The bishops will be accompanied by Toni Rowland of the Marriage and Family Ministry in Johannesburg, who also coordinates the Family Desk of the bishops conference (Southern Cross readers know her well as a monthly columnist in the newspaper).

Also in the South African delegation are two families of the Neocatechumenal Way: Dino and Roberta Furgione, responsible of the movement in Southern Africa, together with their six children; and Michael and Natalie Eckard from Belhar, Cape Town, with their six children.

Michael Eckard recalls that his last pilgrimage overseas was to Czestochowa, for the 6th World Youth Day in 1991. At the time I was an adolescent, and I would have never imagined that God would have changed my life so radically. I am especially grateful to God and to his Church for the call to be open to life. It has not been easy, but today I am touched to see myself going back to the pope together with my wife and all of my children, as a thanksgiving for all the wonders that the Lord has effected in my life.

Dino Furgione, an Italian, said: “The Neocatechumenal Way supports the family through the Christian communities which are on a path to rediscover faith. The family responds to the gift of faith which she received in the community by opening up to life with courage. In this way the family saves today’s Church and society.

The Neocatechumenal Way, the result of the rediscovery of the catechumenate by the Second Vatican Council, first opened the path in South Africa in 1986, and today has more than 20 communities in four dioceses there. It was recognised by Pope John Paul II as an itinerary of Catholic formation valid for our society and our times, and is a form of diocesan implementation of Christian initiation and permanent education in faith, as approved by the Holy See in 2008.

On the afternoon of June 3, the Furgione and Eckard families will join more than 100,000 members of the Neocatechumenal Way in meeting with Kiko Argello and Carmen Hernandez, the initiators of the Way. The meeting will be presided over by Cardinal Scola.

Kiko Arguello is going to put the words of the pope into practice by doing a vocational call to all families to follow the Lord in the New Evangelisation. Currently there are already more than 1,000 families of the Neocatechumenal Way which have answered this call to abandon the comforts of their everyday lives and go there where the Church is in need, as the Furgiones did. They are now supporting the New Evangelisation in more than 100 countries.

Mr Furgione underlines that the presence of so many families coming from different countries of the World, right here in the middle of an aging Europe which has lost its values, is a sign of great hope. Christ is revealing to man the true and full meaning of his life, and this is what moves these people to build a new society which looks forward to the future with confidence.