VI World Meeting of Families 2009 - Mexico City

Praised be Jesus and Mary!

Currently in Mexico City, the sixth annual "World Meeting of Families" is taking place. Starting today, January 14th, the conference will continue on until this Sunday the 18th. Throughout the international meeting the current worldwide crisis of the family will be discussed in hopes that families around the world will return to the fundamental Christian values and morals that need to exist in the family in order for its survival.

The theme for this year's meeting in Mexico City “The family: teacher of human and Christian values” will be the guiding force for this year's over 9,000 participants from all over the globe. All in all, "98 countries will be represented; 200 bishops and 30 cardinals will attend; 318 journalists have been accredited. At the conclusion of the encounter, Benedict XVI will join the participants at the Mass on January 18 via satellite. Hundreds of thousands are expected for the closing ceremony." (AsiaNews.it)

A recent article on AsiaNews.it further describes this momentous event.

"The family," [Cardinal Ennio Antonelli] observed, "today must confront, with creativity and a proactive spirit, the challenge of an individualist and mercantilist culture, based on production and consumption. Unfortunately, we have a mistaken concept of freedom, understood as an autonomy closed in on itself; other forms of cohabitation are privileged that obscure the value of the family, based on the marriage of one man and one woman."

"With this mistaken mentality," he continued, "very often laws are made - without widespread social consensus and under the impulse of small but active groups, strongly ideological and with extensive economic resources - that permit easy abortion, rapid divorce, and euthanasia. Responding to these challenges," he concluded, "is a difficult moral obligation."

It is not by accident, therefore, that the meeting will begin with a pastoral theological congress, to be held from January 14-16, with speeches, roundtable discussions, and statements on three topics: "Family relations and values," "Family and sexuality," "The educational vocation of the family."

These three basic themes will be followed by explorations, contributions, and research. "What are the values to be discovered and rediscovered?" is the question to which Canadian cardinal Marc Ouellet will seek to give a comprehensive answer.

Then there is the relationship between the family and the value of human life; the groups that help the family in the formation of values: parish, movements, family associations, school. Family and mass media, the family of immigrants, politics and legislation, the challenge of making laws in favor of the family and of life: these and other topics will be debated in the course of the three-day congress.

For more information about the event, check out the Official Website of the World Meeting of Families 2009.