Owing to the limited number of people who would attend the 2022 World Meeting of Families (WMOF) to be held in Rome, the Holy Father, Pope Francis has announced that the event be celebrated for the first time in all Parishes and Dioceses of the world. Following the Pope’s directives, His Grace, Most Rev. (Dr.) Alfred Adewale Martins, Catholic Archbishop of Lagos has approved that the local version of the World Meeting of Families will be tagged “Archdiocesan Festival of Families.”
According to the Prelate, the event will be celebrated in the Parishes on July 31 to August 7, 2022, and would feature formation, prayer and fellowship activities. He said the programme would be held every three years in line with the World Meeting of Families, noting that the guidelines for the inaugural celebration would be released soon. The Parish Family and Human Life Committee is expected to drive the joyful celebration in the Parishes to be supported by the Laity and other groups. The event earlier fixed for June 2021, according to the release, was shifted to June 22 to June 26, 2022 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. The theme for this year’s World Meeting of Families is tagged: “Family Love: A vocation and a Path to Holiness.”
The World Meeting of Families began in 1994 by Pope St. John Paul II. The event, according to the organisers, is usually held every three years and said to be the largest gathering of Catholic Families in the world. The last two meetings were held in Dublin, Ireland and Philadelphia, USA, and had over one million persons from all over the world, including some Nigerian families in attendance. About two thousand families are expected to be at this year’s event with the Nigerian delegation leaving for Rome on Monday, June 20, 2022 in good time for the opening ceremony, the statement added.
The family delegates who would be accompanied by their clergy from all over the world will gather in Rome for a theological meeting that would end the Festival of Families and Mass for all families of the world on Sunday June, 26. The statement, made available to the Catholic Herald Weekly, read in part: “Pope Francis has announced that his prayer intention for the month of June is families. The Pope prays for Christians families around the world, that “each and every family may embody and experience unconditional love, and advance in holiness in their daily lives.”
The Holy Father described the family as the place where we learn to live with one another, to live with young people and those who are older. While family love can provide us “a personal path of holiness”, he added that there is no such as a perfect family and so no Christian family should feel hopeless about their struggles and trials.
