In his Letter to Families, St. John Paul II stressed the reality that God is the source of all fatherhood and motherhood. He argued that if we want our families to flourish, we need to go to the source of it all.
He ended his letter with the following prayer that asked God to protect families from the “father of lies,” who tries to tempt families in a number of ways.
May Christ, who is the same “yesterday and today and for ever” (Heb 13:8), be with us as we bow the knee before the Father, from whom all fatherhood and motherhood and every human family is named (cf. Eph 3:14-15). In the words of the prayer to the Father which Christ himself taught us, may he once again offer testimony of that love with which he loved us “to the end”! (Jn 13:1).
May the Lord Jesus repeat these truths to us with the power and the wisdom of the Cross, so that humanity will not yield to the temptation of the “father of lies” (Jn 8:44), who constantly seeks to draw people to broad and easy ways, ways apparently smooth and pleasant, but in reality full of snares and dangers. May we always be enabled to follow the One who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).
And today we celebrate...