It is our honour to present to you a message from Cardinal Antonelli, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family. The Cardinal wishes to encourage our work of Spiritual Adoption, and to show how our association fits into the wider concern of the Church for issues of life.
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Feast of the Apostolate "Youth for Life"
Dear members of the Association "Aposolate Youth for Life", on the day in which the Chrcuh celebrates the Annunciation of the birth of Chrsit to the Virgin Mary from the Archangel Gabriel. I send you a brief message to accompany your moment of prayer.
The Church throughout history has put forward every effort to understand the spread of evil among men and has tried to fight it with the weapons of prayer and of apostolatic work. She has made this comitment in different ways: through education, through understanding social problems, the condition of women, of children, of infants and of human rights. Today those actions that harm human life, which violate, manipulate, not defend and sometimes murder, are being called pseudo-rights. Such actions force the family of the faithful, the Church, to concentrate her activity towards this direction.
While we feast joyfully for the Annunciateion of the birth of Our Saviour Jesus, our thought goes today to all children who are going to be born and to those who are already in the womb of their mothers and waiting for birth.
The social drama of abortion, that became a normal pratice, tolerated in the general indifference, and revenged as a right, forces us to lift insistently to our Lord prayers so that He will illumine consciences of each women to respect the life of their babies, and also to illumine society to give a great help to maternity.
Adoption is a great act of charity, when it is the fruit of spouses who have problems conceiving, and also when it is also the fruit of a man and a woman to do the good for children.
The idea of spiritual adoption, that your association is promoting, is also an act of love and an answer to the significant and grave emergency that society today is facing, the impediment given to unwilled and unwelcomed children, not to live and to be born,
I hope that this intuition of the Spirutal Adoption will be more and mroe known, appreciated and spread, as a prayerful contribution of the faithful as a way to sustain the culture of life.
May Mary, Queen of the Family, obtain the blessing of God to those who, with study, prayer and action, promote and defend human life and family, the unchangeble place where man may learn to love.
Vatican City, 8th March 2010
Ennio Card. Antonelli
President of the Pontifical Council for the Family