The Family of God and the Family of Man

July 12, 2012 / MariaNews.com 

The Family of God and the Family of Man

By Deacon Antonio Sandoval

In my last assignment as a deacon, I taught the pre-baptismal classes for Godparents and parents of children to be baptized.  In one part of the class the parents and Godparents made a list of the differences between the Catholic Church and Christian denominations.  One difference that always appeared on their list was that Catholics have devotion to the Mother of Jesus and members of the Christian denominations do not.

Parents often brought their children to the classes.  If five or six year-old children were present, I always invited one of them to “help me”.  I told them that children knew the answers to very profound questions.  After learning the child’s name I asked the child, “Would you like to live in a family with brothers and sisters and a father, but no mother, or would you like to live in a family with a mother and a father and brothers and sisters?”  The child would always choose the family with mother and father and brothers and sisters.  I would thank the child for helping me and asked the adults to give the child a round of applause.  Then I told the parents that by Baptism we become the adopted children of our heavenly Father, and the brothers and sisters of Jesus, but that many people do not realize that we also become the adopted spiritual sons and daughters of the Mother of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The Family of God is not a one-parent family.

Mary is the Mother of the Family of God.  St. Louis de Montfort says that if Jesus is the head of the Mystical Body of Christ, then we who are members of Christ’s Body are also born spiritually of Mary because a mother does not give birth to a head without a body or a body without a head (True Devotion to Mary #32).  He also says that “Just as in natural and corporal generation of children there are a father and a mother, so also in the supernatural and spiritual generation there are a Father, who is God and a Mother who is Mary.  All the true children of God, the predestinate, have God for their Father and Mary for their Mother.  He who has not Mary for his Mother, has not God for his Father (True Devotion to Mary #30).

The human family, like the Family of God, also needs a mother and a father.  I worked for several years as a case manager for students with academic, behavior, and attendance problems.  In my work I found that almost all the students with serious problems came from single parent families, most resulting from divorce of the parents. This is not to say that children from families with both a father and a mother don’t have problems, they do have problems, but often the problems are less numerous and less serious. There are also single parent families who do an excellent job of rearing their children. Still, we cannot deny that the model of the Family of God is also the best model for the family of man.

The following is a quote from the Heritage Foundation on Understanding Illegitimacy (April 12, 2010):  “The disappearance of marriage in the low-income communities is the predominant cause of child poverty in the U.S. today.  If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two thirds of them would not be poor. The absence of husbands and fathers from the home is also a strong contributing factor to failure in school, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbances and a host of other social problems.”

Let us rise in defense of both the Family of God and the family of man.  For a better tomorrow for God and country, let us build both the City of God and the City of Man.

Read more by Deacon Antonio here

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Antonio is a retired deacon in the Archdiocese of Denver. Last September his wife, Maud, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. They were told that she didn’t have long to live. Since she is 83 years old, they decided to refuse the chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Last October they were sent to Hospice. They have now been there for 8 months. Antonio’s wife is not experiencing the symptoms of multiple myeloma other than the fact that she cannot move and has to stay in bed all the time. She is also in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease. You prayers will be appreciated. Antonio spends the entire day with his wife.

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