{"id":291554,"date":"2008-01-06T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-06T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/a-great-plan-lies-behind-the-family\/"},"modified":"2024-05-13T20:39:41","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T18:39:41","slug":"a-great-plan-lies-behind-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/a-great-plan-lies-behind-the-family\/","title":{"rendered":"A great plan lies behind the family"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>When God created human kind he formed a family.<\/strong> When the  Sacred writers wished to demonstrate the ardour and the fidelity of God\u2019s love  for his chosen people, they used symbols and analogies related to the family.  When Jesus became incarnate, he gathered around him a family, and when he began  his mission at Cana, he was celebrating the start of a new family.  <strong>These simple ideas reveal just how important and precious the family  is in the mind of God. <\/strong>Not only did he give it great dignity, he wanted  it to be \u201cin his image\u201d, intermingling it with the mystery of his own life,  which is both Unity and Trinity of Love.  <strong>A great plan therefore  lies behind the family<\/strong>, following on the path of the Holy Family of  Nazareth. The family, a place where love is given and received, a place of  communion, of fertility and tenderness, is a sign, a symbol and a model for  every other kind of human association.  <strong>It is not mere rhetoric to affirm that the family is the prime social  good. <\/strong>Through the daily, freely given love, that gives meaning and  value to its task of generation and education, the family brings to the fabric  of society the irreplaceable good of human capital, thus becoming an effective  resource for humanity. Furthermore, it opens its home and heart to the problems  of society, and brings the warmth of the family to places where structures and  institutions, in spite of all their good will, cannot reach.  <strong>This is a great plan, and the commitment to follow it must be great  too<\/strong>. Today more than ever, the family appears to the world in its  fragility. Spouses faced with the first difficulties of married life begin to  doubt their love for one another. Children deprived of a close relationship with  united parents, find it difficult to undertake future commitments.\u00a0 And older  people, separated from their immediate families, find themselves without rights  or identity.  <strong>More than ever the family must be loved, protected,  and supported. <\/strong>We must always go back to its original plan, where in  lasting unity, it is consolidated and fulfilled. We have to fill the meaning  family of life with a spirituality of communion, making it more itself, a little  community of love. And public opinion must support family values and sensible  family policies.  I place this, my wish for the family, in the hands of Mary Most Holy, seat of  wisdom and mother at home, for the good of the family today and for the  fulfilment of the whole human family.  <em>Chiara Lubich<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chiara Lubich&#8217;s message for the Family celebration in Madrid, 30 december 2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}