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By Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ (http://rcsocialjusticett.org) & Director, CREDI
“…in our day the Church is called to proclaim the Gospel by confronting the new and urgent pastoral needs facing the family” (Pope Francis).
CCSJ urges the faithful to attend the National Family Rally which will take place on Saturday, November 22 from 1.30 p.m. at the Grand Stand, Queen’s Park Savannah. The theme of the Rally is Save the Child, Support the Family, Sustain the Nation. The event is absolutely free.
There will be live entertainment, a Health Fair and Expo Area and other attractions. There will be motorcades departing from five areas in Trinidad, heading to the Savannah.
The event is being organised by The Faith Based Network of Trinidad and Tobago (FBNTT), in partnership with the Ministry of Gender, Youth and Child Development, to mark the 20th anniversary of the International Year of the Family. This initiative is designed “to provide holistic views for viable solutions to the issues facing the nation’s children and families”. For further information, call 289-9403 or visit www.mgycd.gov.tt
I represent the Catholic Church on FBNTT which is a not-for-profit organisation whose Mission is “to address issues relating to health and family life through collaborating with individuals, communities and organisations for improving the quality of life of persons living in Trinidad and Tobago”.
The Catholic Church continues to stand in solidarity with families and to seek solutions to the many challenges that families face. In February 2014, Pope Francis issued a letter to families in advance of the Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops which took place in October on the theme Pastoral challenges to the family in the context of evangelisation. He said: “This Extraordinary Synodal Assembly will be followed a year later by the Ordinary Assembly, which will also have the family as its theme. In that context, there will also be the World Meeting of Families due to take place in Philadelphia in September 2015. May we all, then, pray together so that through these events the Church will undertake a true journey of discernment and adopt the necessary pastoral means to help families face their present challenges with the light and strength that comes from the Gospel.”
And in his speech at the conclusion of the Synod, he mentioned the need “to find concrete solutions to so many difficulties and innumerable challenges that families must confront, to give answers to the many discouragements that surround and suffocate families.”
Each day we open our newspapers in T&T we are faced with horrendous stories about the challenges our families face, e.g. rape, murder, incest, domestic violence, poverty and social exclusion, family disintegration, poor health care, an education system that fails to meet the needs of our youth, a high level of school drop-outs, a drug and gun culture, corruption at various levels of society, a criminal justice system that is in dire need of reform, and so on.
Most recently, we read about a one-year-old girl and a man from Brasso Seco who were slaughtered and thrown off a precipice, and about a 74-year-old grandmother of Laventille who, as the media reported, “was brutally raped and strangled minutes after returning from a church service shortly after 10 a.m.”
As Pope Francis said last year, protecting children and elderly people is a “choice of civilisation… Children and the elderly represent the two poles of life and also the most vulnerable, the most often forgotten…A society that abandons children and that marginalises the elderly will sever its roots and darken its future… The family is the engine of the world and of history.”
During my recent Speaking Tour as a representative of the Greater Caribbean for Life, it was clear that some of the challenges we face in T&T are faced by our Caribbean neighbours too. We visited Antigua, Jamaica, St Lucia, Grenada, Barbados, and Nassau (Bahamas). Common themes included the need for us to strive to prevent/reduce crime by strengthening family life; work to ensure that men and women take responsibility for their children and that communities become more caring and reach out, particularly to families at risk; and develop effective National Family Policies that are translated into practice and evaluated.
We cannot build the common good unless we embrace ALL our brothers and sisters. The aphorism, A rising tide lifts all boats, is certainly not true in T&T and in much of our world today. T&T’s economy is not working for all our people. Families matter. Come to the National Family Rally and support the Family.
