Pope to Catholic parents: Renew your faith to be authentic teachers

VATICAN CITY - The key response to today's increasingly secularized communities is for adults to renew and deepen their faith in Christ so they can be authentic examples and teachers of Christian living to future generations, Pope Benedict XVI said.

Before his planned trip to Valencia, Spain, July 8-9, to help close the Fifth World Meeting of Families, the pope underlined the importance of this year's theme of living and transmitting faith in the family. In remarks made before praying the July 2 Angelus in St. Peter's Square, the pope urged all the world's families to be "authentic communities of love and life in which the flame of faith may be handed down from generation to generation." If parents and godparents are "to be authentic" in fulfilling their mission to share their Christian faith, the child's baptism "must be preceded and accompanied by the parents' commitment to deepen their own knowledge of the faith," the pope said. This should also be accompanied by prayer and diligent practice of the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist, he said. "In so many of today's secularized communities, the first urgency for believers in Christ is precisely to renew the faith of adults so that they will be able to share (the faith) with new generations," the pope said. However, he said, it may happen that a child's interest in Christ and his or her own deepening of faith through Christian initiation could become "a useful occasion for the parents to return to the church and delve further into the beauty and truth of the Gospel." In remarks made in English after praying the Angelus, the pope prayed that families would fulfill their "God-given vocation and benefit from just governmental policies which safeguard their fundamental role in society."

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops