Pope Francis’ Prayer intention for March: For families in crisis
Let us pray that broken families might discover the cure for their wounds through forgiveness, rediscovering each other’s gifts, even in their differences
Pope Francis prayer for broken families speaks to us all. We have all known and felt for people whose family life has been marked by division and unhappiness. They may be our own. Some families will have separated; others remain together in name.
When we try to define a broken family, however, we soon recognise how complex families are. Once the majority of parents in families were married. Divorce and remarriage were exceptional. Now a significant proportion of parents are not married, many families have a single parent, and by the age of 17 many children are not living with their birth parents. There are many kinds of families, some of which to all evidence are happy, others unhappy. It would certainly be unfair to describe as broken families with unmarried parents or with changed partners as broken.
In Australia, too, we have become aware of the extent of physical and sexual violence in the home. Almost a quarter of female children and a large number of males have experienced it at the hands of a family member. It clearly occurs in many families that are to all appearances stable and united.
All this evidence of stress in families of different shapes reminds us of the Christian insight that we are all to some extent broken and that integrity or wholeness is something for which we pray. Families are places both where our brokenness and our desire for wholeness are played out, and where we hope to foster and grow to wholeness.
For that reason we can pray Pope Francis’ prayer for all our families. His prayer is focused however, on families whose members are unhappy, perhaps scattered, perhaps still living together, whose relationships with one another are marked by mistrust, resentment and coldness. Broken families are those with open wounds which, if unhealed, will become infected and perhaps pass on the infection to others.
In all family relationships we must learn and mean the key words: Please, Sorry and Thank you. They build the expectation that in our family we shall generally receive what we ask for, be assured of forgiveness when we apologise, and be grateful for the gift that others are to us. We learn to trust those words through the small hurts, needs and joys of family life, and so bring them into the less intimate relationships of our lives.
To live generously is difficult when our unhealed hurts and coldness have become habitual. For that reason, Pope Francis urges us to pray for families trapped in resentment and bitterness, where ‘sorry’, ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ are words that gather dust on the shelf. There the cycle must be broken by forgiveness. It can enable us to recognise the goodness of people and to accept one another. When we are trapped in resentment, however, we need unwearying encouragement and prayer from people who care for us.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
