Each year, the Archdiocese of New Orleans, through its Office of Marriage and Family Life, invites parishes this Sunday to celebrate Family Day. This is an opportunity to gather families together and to be encouraged to renew your life together, strengthen friendships, form new ones, and to cultivate an appreciation for the importance and goodness of family life.
As husbands and wives, grandparents, parents, and children, we are pilgrims on a journey of hope together. We are called by Christ to suffer life’s challenges with one another and to be loving, charitable, patient, and merciful with one another. If we take those small steps to foster hope anchored within the bonds of our families, we can more courageously set out on the path to our ultimate destination: life everlasting through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This Family Day, we encourage Catholic families in the archdiocese of New Orleans to “rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer.” ( Rom 12:12) By believing and loving together, authentic hope grows in the home and “Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love.” (Spes non confundit, 3.)