The Module “Mission of the Family”

First day- Thursday, May 14, 2009:

We began the new module ‘Mission of the Family’ facilitated by Dr. Jose de Mesa, the resource person. He will be facilitating the module for three days (May 14th to 16th).

The Liturgy:

The Liturgy of the day is animated by the serenity group.

Serenity Group members (Pat, Cora, Rose, Danny and Chico)

Fr. Dong

In view of the beginning of new module ‘Mission of the Family,’ the liturgy of the day mostly focused on families in order for reflection.  The opening Eucharistic celebration highlights the realities of family life today.  It includes displacement of families due to war and violence, separation resulting to moral degradation of family values, and forced migration due to extreme poverty and unjust socio-economic and political structures.  These realities challenge us to evaluate the quality of love that we reflect on the quality of our love for others and how to concretize this love in words and deeds. The Eucharistic celebration is presided by Fr. Dong, the guest priest.

 

 

The beginning of the session:

           Flores de Mayo is a Catholic festival held in the Philippines for the month of May.  To stress this traditional celebration, the group offers flowers to Virgin Mary in her honor as a way of recognizing her role to all families during the opening prayer of the beginning session of the module.

At the start of the module Fr. Giulio introduced the resource person, Dr. Jose de Mesa.

Fr. Giulio is introducing the speaker- Dr. Jose de Mesa

Dr. Jose de Mesa

Jose M. de Mesa, Ph.D. a married Filipino Theologian, is a professor of Applied Systematic Theology at De La Salle University, Manila. He obtained his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the Catholic University, Louvain, Belgium. He is a member of the Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs and is on the advisory board of Concilium. His publications included: In Solidarity with the Culture; Studies in Theological Re-rooting; Basic Realities and Processes and Doing Christology, the Re-appropriations of a Tradition.

 

The speaker started by introducing himself as a married person which established certain veracity in speaking about family life in the perspective of a non-celibate. He also presented the preferred approach in seeing marriage, which has undergone lots of humiliation throughout the history of the Church, that is, “blessing-centered” rather than “problem-centered”. He traced back the vision of marriage from the time of the Church Fathers and the succeeding epoch as highly influenced by Hellenistic dualists’ philosophy. Such philosophy influenced a lot in the way of thinking of the church and the implementation of her practices, which has become a tradition that is carried from one century to another.

The beginning of Dr. Jose' lecture

 

 

         The Church has been living in the medieval way of thinking for which Dr. de Mesa proposed a re-visioning of the church’s view of marriage as well as our negative (subconscious) accusations of marital commitment. Dualism has become problematic and has been marginalizing a good number of the faithful. It has an enormous influence in Catholicism and the consequences of its paradigm have reflected so much in many of her doctrines, beliefs, and traditions. Missionaries and the clergy in this regard have become problem solvers and experts of marriage which they never experienced themselves.

       For centuries, the vision of marriage and everything that is related to sexuality have been looked down and considered second class or low class as it were. This made the Church hierarchical and put married couples below as inferior with emphasis on the fallenness of women and weakness of children.

          The proposed approach, that is, the “blessing-centered” or “creation-centered” approach makes missionaries and the church hierarchy as human witness who are able to listen to the threshold of marital life. This was made possible in the implementation of the double thrust of Second Vatican Council which is aggiornamento in her doctrine and ad fontes as regards our traditions. This basically is not innovative but rather a process reclaiming the lost piece of the original Christianity as Jesus envisioned.

             Marriage, which majority of the world population is engaged with, sparks a certain interest that demands a particular response from the church that neglects its importance for a long time. By the lecture on the mission of the family in the church, new paradigm has been opened for further reflection. As an epilogue for the lecture on this day, Dr. de Mesa showed us a movie about a married couple which serves as a prologue for tomorrow’s session.