This group was founded in 2015 with the particular aim of helping young couples to find time to be together.
We are helped to understand the importance of this group by the words of His Excellency Mgr Anfossi
The human sciences teach us that a child who does not live in contact with other men and women does not become humanised, does not learn to speak, cannot come to know and be aware that he is a human being: this awareness is born only if my “I” has intense relationships with many “you”.
Although by analogy, the same may be said of every new family. Today a man and a woman who marry can rely only in part on the models of relationship offered by their parents, and so, if they are serious people, they go looking for models to understand what it means today to be husband and wife, to be a family.
These models are not usually found in conversation with office colleagues, since the talk is mostly trivial (it is hard to speak of serious things), still less in the programmes or the reading offered by the mass media
The young couple is rather like the child I spoke of at the beginning: short of models and points of reference, struggling to find an identity of their own.
Couples too need to meet other couples, some perhaps older, others of the same age, because only by comparing themselves with others can they find themselves again and discover how one can be a married couple in today's world.
What the Church teaches about marriage is important, but it remains theory unless it takes flesh in a lived experience capable of giving the couple an awareness of themselves; it is therefore very important that couples meet other couples, in a Church setting, so as to enjoy the richness that comes from the priesthood, from fatherhood and motherhood, from fraternity and from the Word of God.
The Family Group is not only a way of doing something useful for others, but a way of giving the couple help in being a couple, here and now, because there are not many other opportunities to do so.
The experience gained in a group is unique; it is something which, if taken in, shared and lived, makes it possible to improve the couple's relationship.
When you come home from a family group meeting you find you can say things you would never have said had you not shared in the life of the group.
Indeed, being a group does not mean meeting to tell one another “how good we are”, but to walk a journey of faith; those who take part need not all be far advanced in religious practice — what matters is that they are all willing to make the journey.
This journey should help us understand better what it means to be spouses, to be parents, to be Christian families, to receive the tradition and teaching of the Church, and to make our own those passages of Scripture that speak to us of the relationship of the couple, beginning with God's relationship with his people and that of Jesus with his Church, and ending with all the couples, exemplary and otherwise, that the Bible sets before us.
